Babylon Revisited Study Guide

Fitzgerald was born in St. Paul, Minnesota and spent most of his childhood in Buffalo, New York. When he was fifteen, his parents sent him to school in New Jersey, where he met a teacher who encouraged him to develop his talent for writing stories. Fitzgerald went on to study at Princeton, where he pursued his passion for writing so wholeheartedly that his grades suffered, and he eventually dropped out to enlist in the army. Though the war ended before Fitzgerald was deployed, he met Zelda Sayre, whom he would later marry, while he was posted in Alabama. In 1919 he published This Side of Paradise, which became an overnight success. The couple moved to Paris in 1924, where Scott Fitzgerald supported his family primarily by selling short stories like “Babylon Revisited” to popular magazines. By 1931, Zelda had begun to suffer from mental illness. The Fitzgeralds returned to the United States, where Zelda was in and out of hospitals from 1936 onward. From 1936 until the end of his life in 1940, Scott Fitzgerald spent much of his time in Hollywood, struggling with alcoholism and trying (largely unsuccessfully) to write screenplays. He died of a heart attack.

The period from 1920-1929 is often called the “roaring twenties,” in part because it was a time of economic prosperity following the first World War. During this time, the United States emerged as the leader in world finance, prompting a wave of newly wealthy Americans to move overseas to Europe (and in particular to Paris). This period is also known as the “jazz age” because the bustling nightlife in so many Western cities centered around jazz clubs and cabarets. In 1929, however, the economic boom years came to an abrupt end when the stock market crashed, leading to a twelve-year economic depression that affected every Western industrialized country in the world. The Paris that Fitzgerald describes in “Babylon Revisited” has been radically transformed by the crash—emptied of Americans, its once teeming bars and clubs all but deserted.

F. Scott Fitzgerald lived in Paris at the same time as the American writer Ernest Hemingway, and the two became friends. Hemingway’s memoir, A Moveable Feast, though first published posthumously in 1964, describes his life in Paris in the 1920s and chronicles some of his experiences with Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. The book is a window into the Paris that Charlie Wales spends so much time reflecting on in “Babylon Revisited.” The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, while very different from “Babylon Revisited” in its style and focus, is one of the most important works of American literature to come out of the Great Depression. It tells the story of a family of tenant farmers in Oklahoma who are forced to migrate to California, and provides a valuable perspective on the impact the depression had on the lives of many Americans.