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Like his friends, Fitzgerald caroused freely. But unlike most of them he also produced novels and short stories with passion and vigor—just, he said, as "certain racehorses run for the pure joy of running." The product, Critic Rosenfeld points out, had a double quality. Its pictures of the period were brilliantly illustrative: e.g., "a boy drawing gasoline out of an automobile tank so that a girl can clean her satin shoe ... a young fellow sitting in his B.V.D.s after a bath running his hand down his naked skin in indolent satisfaction . . . two bucks from a pump-and-slipper dance throwing hash by the handful around Childs' at 6 a.m." But now the stories were increasingly marked by what Rosenfeld calls Fitzgerald's sense of "the quality of brutishness, of dull indirection and degraded sensibility running through [the] American life of the hour."
In his finest, most applauded novel, The Great Gatsby (1925), Fitzgerald succeeded superbly in portraying the hollowness of his racketeer-hero's life. But it was not until the crash had turned his New York playground into an "echoing tomb" where "cocktail parties [rang] with [cries of] 'Shoot me, for the love of God, someone shoot me!' " that his tone grew truly grim. Even so, he still had money, good looks, devoted friends, popularity. His passion for work continued ; he sold stories to the richer magazines; he went to work in Hollywood.
But as time advanced, Fitzgerald found himself less & less in tune with it. The accent on youth remained on him, but it seemed to have left everybody else. Some of his friends had died; a few had gone insane ; others had suddenly grown intensely serious and were reading Karl Marx. The literary limelight was no longer on him but on the novelist he most admired, Ernest Hemingway.
In 1934 he marked the turning point in his life with a carefully written, ambitious, disappointing novel about insanity, Tender Is the Night. By 1935, his body had begun to crack. He drank too much; he was dogged by insomnia; he drugged himself with Napoleonic dreams of military prowess and imaginary victories on the Princeton football field. He was haunted by adolescent disappointments, such as having lost the presidency of a sophomore club and not having gone over seas in the war. He described himself as a man "standing at twilight on a deserted range, with an empty rifle in [his] hands and the targets down."