Reading List

Authors Like F. Scott Fitzgerald

Q: What books are like The Great Gatsby?

Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited (1945), Donna Tartt's The Secret History (1992) and Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty (2004) all use its structure: an outsider narrator drawn into a rich family or set, telling the story after it has fallen apart. Amor Towles's Rules of Civility (2011) is the closest in setting and mood, and Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth (1905) is the earlier novel about the price of getting into society.

Q: Did Zelda Fitzgerald write her own novel?

Yes. Save Me the Waltz was published by Scribner's in October 1932, written while she was a patient at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. It draws on the same years of their marriage that Fitzgerald was turning into Tender Is the Night, and he objected that she had used his material. It was poorly received at the time and is now read as an important companion to his work. She began a second novel, Caesar's Things, but never finished it.

Q: Which Fitzgerald book should I read after The Great Gatsby?

Tender Is the Night (1934), his novel about a glamorous American couple on the French Riviera and the slow collapse of their marriage, is the usual next step. For something shorter, read his story “Babylon Revisited” (1931). This Side of Paradise (1920), his first novel, shows where he started; The Last Tycoon, unfinished at his death, was edited by Edmund Wilson and published in 1941.

Charles Scribner's Sons published The Great Gatsby on 10 April 1925. By October it had sold fewer than 20,000 copies, and Fitzgerald's own ledger shows he earned about $2,000 from it. Edith Wharton, T.S. Eliot and Willa Cather wrote to praise it; the public mostly did not buy it. When Fitzgerald died of a heart attack in Los Angeles in December 1940, aged 44, he believed himself a failure and his work forgotten. It is now one of the most-read American novels, and since 1 January 2021 it has been in the public domain in the United States. What readers come to him for is a particular combination: sentences that are lyrical and exact at once, a narrator standing just outside the room where the money is, and the slow discovery that what everyone wants — the girl, the house, the past — was never quite there. The writers below share that combination: wealth and longing seen from the edge of the party, in prose that makes the glamour real before it shows you the bill.

By Lisanne Swart · 10 authors · The Jazz Age · Money and class · The outsider narrator · Updated October 2026

Quick answer

If you love F. Scott Fitzgerald, start with Ernest Hemingway, his friend and rival in Paris, and Zelda Fitzgerald, whose own novel tells the marriage from the other side. For the rich before him, read Edith Wharton; for the American dream gone sour in the suburbs, Richard Yates. And for the Gatsby structure — an outsider falling for a gilded set — rewritten later, Donna Tartt and Alan Hollinghurst.

10 authors like F. Scott Fitzgerald

Friend, rival · Same generation

Ernest Hemingway

American · b. 1899 · Novelist · Nobel 1954

Hemingway and Fitzgerald met in Paris in May 1925, a few weeks after Gatsby came out, and Fitzgerald had already urged his editor Maxwell Perkins at Scribner's to sign him, calling him “the real thing”. The Sun Also Rises, Scribner's 1926, made Hemingway the voice of the expatriate generation, and he won the Nobel Prize in 1954. His memoir A Moveable Feast (1964), published after his death, contains an unkind and much-quoted portrait of both Scott and Zelda.

The other great style of the same decade, and the opposite one. Where Fitzgerald lets a sentence rise and glitter, Hemingway cuts it back to nouns and leaves the feeling underneath. The Sun Also Rises covers the same territory as Tender Is the Night — Americans in Europe, drinking against a loss they will not name — and reading the two together shows exactly what each man could do that the other could not.

— Lisanne

Every book by Ernest Hemingway →

The marriage, from her side

Zelda Fitzgerald

American · b. 1900 · Novelist

Zelda Sayre was born in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1900 and married Fitzgerald in 1920. She wrote Save Me the Waltz while a patient at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore in early 1932; Scribner's published it that October, and it was badly reviewed and sold poorly. Fitzgerald had used passages from her diary and letters in his own early novels, and objected that her book drew on material he was saving for Tender Is the Night. She died in a fire at Highland Hospital in Asheville, North Carolina, in 1948.

The single most useful companion to Tender Is the Night, because it is the same marriage told by the other person in it. Her prose is stranger and more crowded with images than his, less controlled and sometimes more surprising. Read it for the voice he borrowed from, and for the question of who got to own their shared life.

— Lisanne

The rich, one generation earlier

Edith Wharton

American · b. 1862 · Novelist · Pulitzer 1921

Wharton grew up inside the old New York society she wrote about, and The Age of Innocence made her the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, in 1921. When Fitzgerald sent her an inscribed Gatsby in 1925 she replied with an appreciative letter and invited him to tea near Paris; the visit went badly, and her diary entry for it reads only “(awful)”.

Fitzgerald's Daisy and Tom are the new money's idea of what Wharton's families already were. The House of Mirth is the closer match: Lily Bart, like Gatsby, has built herself for a world that will only let her in on its own terms, and the novel watches the price come due with the same cool exactness.

— Lisanne

Every book by Edith Wharton →

The English Jazz Age

Evelyn Waugh

English · b. 1903 · Novelist

Waugh's early comic novels, Decline and Fall (1928) and Vile Bodies (1930), satirise the parties and money of London's Bright Young Things in the same years Fitzgerald was writing about Long Island. Brideshead Revisited (1945) is told by Charles Ryder, a middle-class Oxford student drawn into the aristocratic Flyte family and their great house.

Brideshead is the English Gatsby: a narrator who arrives from outside, falls in love with a family as much as with any one person in it, and tells the story years later knowing how it ended. Waugh is funnier and crueller in Vile Bodies, but the elegy for a lost house and a lost youth is the same note.

— Lisanne

Every book by Evelyn Waugh →

The dream, in the suburbs

Richard Yates

American · b. 1926 · Novelist

Revolutionary Road follows Frank and April Wheeler, a young couple in 1950s Connecticut who believe they are too good for the suburb they live in and plan an escape to Paris. It was a finalist for the National Book Award in 1962, the same year his story collection Eleven Kinds of Loneliness appeared. Yates was largely out of print by the time he died in 1992, and was revived after Blake Bailey's biography A Tragic Honesty (2003).

If the part of Gatsby that stays with you is the self-invention that does not hold, Yates is the closest writer to Fitzgerald after the war. His prose is plainer, but his subject is the same: Americans who have told themselves a story about who they are, and the cost of finding out it is not true.

— Lisanne

Every book by Richard Yates →

Money and drink, after the party

John Cheever

American · b. 1912 · Short-story writer and novelist · Pulitzer 1979

Cheever wrote mostly for The New Yorker, about the commuter towns of Westchester and Connecticut, and was often called “the Chekhov of the suburbs”. The Wapshot Chronicle won the National Book Award in 1958, and The Stories of John Cheever won the Pulitzer Prize in 1979. “The Swimmer” (1964), about a man swimming home across his neighbours' pools, is his best-known story.

Fitzgerald's stories and Cheever's sit naturally on one shelf: comfortable people, cocktails, a beautiful surface and something going wrong underneath. Read “The Swimmer” after “Babylon Revisited” and you get the same descent, told a generation apart, with the same lyrical sentences doing the damage.

— Lisanne

Self-invention, in Manhattan

Truman Capote

American · b. 1924 · Novelist and reporter

Breakfast at Tiffany's is narrated by a young writer watching Holly Golightly, a country girl remade as a New York party girl. In Cold Blood (1966), his “non-fiction novel” about a murder in Kansas, made him famous; its accuracy has been questioned by investigators and critics ever since. In 1975 Esquire ran “La Côte Basque, 1965”, a chapter of his never-finished Answered Prayers, and the society friends he had written about cut him off.

Holly Golightly is the closest thing to a female Gatsby in American fiction: a self-made identity, a name changed, a past she will not discuss, watched by a narrator who cannot quite stop admiring her. Capote's prose is lighter than Fitzgerald's, but it does the same trick of making you love the performance before showing you the loneliness behind it.

— Lisanne

Every book by Truman Capote →

The Gatsby structure, rewritten

Donna Tartt

American · b. 1963 · Novelist · Pulitzer 2014

The Secret History is narrated by Richard Papen, a scholarship student from California who joins a small, rich and secretive group of classics students at a Vermont college, and who tells us in the first pages that one of them will be murdered. The novel itself refers to Gatsby. The Goldfinch won the Pulitzer Prize in 2014.

Tartt borrows Fitzgerald's design almost exactly: a narrator from nowhere, dazzled by a gilded set he can never really belong to, telling the story after the fact. What she adds is a crime at the centre and a darker moral mood; what she keeps is the sense that the beauty was real even though it was rotten.

— Lisanne

Every book by Donna Tartt →

An outsider in a rich house

Alan Hollinghurst

English · b. 1954 · Novelist · Booker 2004

The Line of Beauty follows Nick Guest, a gay, middle-class Oxford graduate who moves into the Notting Hill home of his friend's family, the Feddens, whose father is a Conservative MP, between 1983 and 1987. It won the Booker Prize in 2004 and was adapted by the BBC in 2006. Nick is writing a doctorate on Henry James, and James runs all through the book.

Another Nick watching a rich family from inside their house, half in love with all of them. Hollinghurst's sentences are as beautiful and as exact as Fitzgerald's, and his ending works the same way: the family closes ranks, and the outsider who believed he belonged learns that he never did.

— Lisanne

Every book by Alan Hollinghurst →

The Fitzgerald mood, now

Amor Towles

American · b. 1964 · Novelist

Towles worked in investment for twenty years before publishing his first novel. Rules of Civility is set in New York in 1938: Katey Kontent, a secretary from a Wall Street typing pool, meets a charming banker named Tinker Grey in a Greenwich Village jazz bar on New Year's Eve and is drawn into the city's upper class. A Gentleman in Moscow followed in 2016.

The contemporary novel most often recommended to Gatsby readers, and fairly: Tinker Grey is a man with an invented past and a borrowed polish, and Katey watches him with the same mix of attraction and judgement as Nick watches Gatsby. Towles is gentler and more nostalgic than Fitzgerald, but the cocktails, the money and the self-made men are all here.

— Lisanne

Every book by Amor Towles →

Where to start if you loved F. Scott Fitzgerald

If you want the Paris years, read Ernest Hemingway.

The Sun Also Rises, then A Moveable Feast for his side of the friendship.

If you want Tender Is the Night from the other side, read Zelda Fitzgerald.

Save Me the Waltz: the same marriage, in her own voice.

If you want Gatsby's outsider narrator again, read Donna Tartt.

The Secret History — a scholarship boy, a gilded set, and a death.

If you want the dream after the war, read Richard Yates.

Revolutionary Road: a couple who believed they were meant for something better.

Frequently asked questions about authors like F. Scott Fitzgerald

Who should I read if I love F. Scott Fitzgerald?

Start with Ernest Hemingway, his friend and rival from the Paris years, and Zelda Fitzgerald's Save Me the Waltz, which tells their marriage from her side. Edith Wharton wrote about American wealth a generation earlier, and Evelyn Waugh did the English version of the Jazz Age. After the war, Richard Yates and John Cheever carried his subject into the suburbs; today Donna Tartt, Alan Hollinghurst and Amor Towles write novels built on the same outsider-among-the-rich design.

What books are like The Great Gatsby?

Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited (1945), Donna Tartt's The Secret History (1992) and Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty (2004) all use its structure: an outsider narrator drawn into a rich family or set, telling the story after it has fallen apart. Amor Towles's Rules of Civility (2011) is the closest in setting and mood, and Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth (1905) is the earlier novel about the price of getting into society.

Were Hemingway and Fitzgerald friends?

Yes, for a time. They met in Paris in May 1925, and Fitzgerald had already recommended Hemingway to his editor at Scribner's, Maxwell Perkins. The friendship cooled as Hemingway's reputation rose and Fitzgerald's fell, and Hemingway's posthumous memoir A Moveable Feast (1964) includes a sharply critical portrait of both Scott and Zelda.

Did Zelda Fitzgerald write her own novel?

Yes. Save Me the Waltz was published by Scribner's in October 1932, written while she was a patient at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. It draws on the same years of their marriage that Fitzgerald was turning into Tender Is the Night, and he objected that she had used his material. It was poorly received at the time and is now read as an important companion to his work. She began a second novel, Caesar's Things, but never finished it.

Which Fitzgerald book should I read after The Great Gatsby?

Tender Is the Night (1934), his novel about a glamorous American couple on the French Riviera and the slow collapse of their marriage, is the usual next step. For something shorter, read his story “Babylon Revisited” (1931). This Side of Paradise (1920), his first novel, shows where he started; The Last Tycoon, unfinished at his death, was edited by Edmund Wilson and published in 1941.

Is The Great Gatsby in the public domain?

In the United States, yes: its copyright expired on 1 January 2021, ninety-five years after its publication in April 1925. That is why so many new editions, adaptations and retellings have appeared since. Rules differ in other countries.

What is the Lost Generation?

The name for the American writers who came of age during the First World War and spent much of the 1920s in Europe, chiefly Paris. The phrase is credited to Gertrude Stein, and Hemingway used it as an epigraph to The Sun Also Rises (1926). Fitzgerald and Hemingway are its two best-known novelists.

Footnotes

List last reviewed 15 October 2026.

Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021. Every comparison here is a judgement about method and subject, not an algorithmic match. See more on her personal bookshelf.

Authors Like F. Scott Fitzgerald

10 authors like F. Scott Fitzgerald

Ernest Hemingway

Zelda Fitzgerald

Edith Wharton

Evelyn Waugh

Richard Yates

John Cheever

Truman Capote

Donna Tartt

Alan Hollinghurst

Amor Towles

Where to start if you loved F. Scott Fitzgerald

Frequently asked questions about authors like F. Scott Fitzgerald

Who should I read if I love F. Scott Fitzgerald?

What books are like The Great Gatsby?

Were Hemingway and Fitzgerald friends?

Did Zelda Fitzgerald write her own novel?

Which Fitzgerald book should I read after The Great Gatsby?

Is The Great Gatsby in the public domain?

What is the Lost Generation?

Footnotes

Lisanne Swart

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