Details

When:

Where: Resurrection Lutheran Church

Cost: $120.00 for 4 session(s) includes reading packet

Type: In Person

Category:

Instructor: William A. Fry a founding member of the Learning Curve faculty, taught literature and writing at a Maryland college for more than thirty years.
William A. Fry

The Rise and Fall of a Friendship

Oro Valley Session

F, Scott Fitzgerald, already a popular author in America, first met Ernest Hemingway, a promising young writer, in April, 1925, at the Dingo Bar, rue Delambre in Paris over drinks. Their friendship was a roller-coaster relationship, fraught with differing emotions of fondness, respect, admiration, intimacy but also vanity, ego-gratification, and a powerful spirit of competition which lasted throughout the years up until Fitzgerald’s early death in 1940.

Matthew J. Bruccoli, in his scholarly Fitzgerald and Hemingway: A Dangerous Friendship (1994), states: “The mortality rate of literary friendships is high. Writers tend to be bad risks as friends– probably much for the same reason they are bad matrimonial risks. They expend the best parts of themselves in their work. Moreover, literary ambition has a way of turning into literary competition.”

In Jed Kiley’s Hemingway: A Title Fight in Ten Rounds, he quotes F. Scott Fitzgerald as saying about Hemingway: “He is a great writer. If I didn’t think so I wouldn’t have tried to kill him….I was the champ and when I read his stuff I knew he had something. So I dropped a heavy glass skylight on his head at a drinking party. But you can’t kill the guy. He’s not human.”

In his A Moveable Feast (1964), Hemingway writes about Fitzgerald’s gradual decline: “I saw him rarely when he was sober, but when he was sober he was always pleasant and he still made jokes about himself. But when he was drunk he would usually come to find me and, drunk, he took almost as much pleasure interfering with my work as Zelda did interfering with his. This continued for years but, for years too, I had no more loyal friend than Scott when he was sober.”

Join Dr. Bill Fry for this literary visit with friends Scott and Ernest as viewed from their works as well as from works by major scholars.

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Register for Ernest Hemingway & F. Scott Fitzgerald – Oro Valley Session

Online registration has been closed for this class. Please call (520) 777-5817 for information.