They say that art imitates life... or that life imitates art. Both cases are a little hard to believe. A few brush strokes on a canvas, a mirror image on a camera film, or even a special combination of the 26 letters of the alphabet on a page: do they imitate life? Of course people can paint life, photograph life, and even write about life. It's a little more obvious that the concept of life imitating art is a little harder to believe. But you can learn from art, especially literary art. Books are the teachers you can become. When you make art, you put a little of yourself into it: it becomes a little of you and you become a little of it. You can read about characters, fictional or otherwise, and you want to be them. You put yourself in their shoes and learn from their mistakes and inevitably become them for a while. When art imitates life, life in turn imitates art. Art imitating life is so common; we almost never point it out. We notice some lives quite clearly through a self-portrait, a song, or even a book. Sometimes it's not as intentional as the artist wanted it to be. F. Scott Fitzgerald uses the events of his life so thoroughly in his novel, The Great Gatsby, leading us to believe that he wrote the novel as a sort of autobiography emphasizing his interesting life and his relationship with his wife. Fitzgerald was ambitious at a young age, and always seemed to know that he would have a place in the world. As described in the PBS Fitzgerald biography, Fitzgerald was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, on September 24, 1896, his father a failed wicker furniture salesman and his mother an Irish immigrant named Mary (Mollie) McQuillan with a large inheritance (PBS). In St. Paul, the family lived comfortably on Mollie's inheritance... amidst the romance and newlywed years immortalized in the pages of one of Fitzgerald's most iconic novels. Fitzgerald's unique writing style of fictionalizing real events that happened in his past gives his writing more zest and flavor than some writers. Works Cited Baughman, Judith S. "Art Imitating Life in Fitzgerald's Novels." Art imitating life in Fitzgerald's novels. The University of South Carolina Board of Trustees, December 4, 2003. Web. February 24, 2014. Bruccoli, Matthew J. “A Brief Life of Fitzgerald.” Biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald. The F. Scott Fitzgerald Society, 2009. Web. 25 February 2014. Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. New York: Scribner, 2004. Print.PBS. "F. Scott Fitzgerald and the American Dream and Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald artist, writer, dancer and wife." PBS. The public radio and television system and the web. February 23. 2014.