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• Born: 24 September 1896
• Birthplace: St. Paul, Minnesota
• Died: 21 December 1940 (heart attack)
• Best Known As: The author of The Great Gatsby

Name at birth: Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald

F. Scott Fitzgerald was one of the best known American authors of the 1920s and '30s and is closely associated with the optimism and excesses of that era's "Jazz Age." Fitzgerald's stories often featured people like himself: middle-American types infatuated with the wealth and status of upper-crust society. In the mid-1920s he lived in Paris where he was friends with Ernest Hemingway and other literary expatriates. Fitzgerald was a popular celebrity of the day and he and his wife, Zelda, became famous for their extravagant lifestyle, drinking bouts and (eventually) erratic behavior. His major published novels include This Side of Paradise (1920), The Great Gatsby (1925), and Tender Is the Night (1934).

Fitzgerald was named for his distant cousin, Francis Scott Key, the composer of the American National Anthem... Other American writers of Fitzgerald's era included John Steinbeck, Langston Hughes and William Faulkner.

The American author Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald (1896-1940), a legendary figure of the 1920s, was a scrupulous artist, a graceful stylist, and an exceptional craftsman. His tragic life was an ironic analog to his romantic art.

On Sept. 24, 1896, F. Scott Fitzgerald was born in St. Paul, Minn. His family was Irish Catholic, his mother's side wealthy. The family lived for some years in Buffalo and Syracuse; but in 1908, when Scott's father lost his job, they returned to St. Paul. For the most part, Scott was privately educated; he attended Newman School in Hackensack, N.J., from 1911 to 1913.

Fitzgerald enrolled at Princeton University in 1913 and struck up enduring friendships with Edmund Wilson and John Peale Bishop. Because of ill health and low grades, he left college in 1915. He returned to Princeton in 1916 but left a year later without a degree and joined the Army with a second lieutenant's commission. Stationed in Alabama in 1918, he met Zelda Sayre, then 18 years old; he would marry her a few years later. After his Army discharge he took an advertising job briefly. Back home in St. Paul, he finished his first novel, This Side of Paradise, which was accepted by Scribner's in 1919, and that same year he had remarkable success placing nine short stories in leading commercial journals.

First Publications

Upon publication of This Side of Paradise (1920), Fitzgerald married Sayre in New York City. Of this period he later recalled riding up Fifth Avenue in a cab - young, rich, famous, and in love (he might easily have added handsome) - suddenly bursting into tears because he knew he would never be so happy again. He was right. Despite great earnings and fame, he and Zelda lived luxuriously, dissolutely, and tragically.

A daughter was born in 1921 after the couple had spent some time in Europe. When Fitzgerald's second novel, The Beautiful and the Damned (1922), and a collection of short stories, Tales of the Jazz Age (1922), sold very well, they rented a house on Long Island and ran into debt because of their extravagance. Fitzgerald attempted to recoup by writing a play, The Vegetable (1923), but it flopped quickly. The Fitzgeralds went to Europe for over 2 years. The high points of this sojourn were publication of The Great Gatsby (1925) and the beginning of Scott's friendship with Ernest Hemingway. In 1927 Scott went to Hollywood on his first movie assignment. Afterward the Fitzgeralds again went abroad several times.

Zelda's first major nervous breakdown, in 1930, and treatment in a Swiss clinic became the basis for Fitzgerald's next novel, Tender Is the Night (1934). Zelda spent the rest of her life in and out of sanitariums, and Fitzgerald's own life ran a parallel disastrous course.

Analysis of the Novels

This Side of Paradise (1920), an autobiographical novel, tells of the youth and early manhood of a Princeton undergraduate. In the climactic action his loyalties shift from football to literature, with a concomitant growth in his character. This patchy work struck a nerve in the reading public, chiefly for its new type of heroine - the "flapper," a young woman in revolt against the double standard, who smokes, drinks, dances, and is considered to be somewhat promiscuous.

The Beautiful and the Damned (1922) deals with a dissolute couple, Anthony Patch, grandson of a millionaire, and his debutante wife. They live indolently, extravagantly, and quarrelsomely on the expectations of Tony's inheritance, but the grandfather discovers Tony's alcoholism and profligacy and disinherits him; however, after the grandfather dies, the will is broken. Ironically, the inheritance reinforces Tony's spiritual disintegration. As with most of Fitzgerald's novels, the autobiographical elements are fairly obvious.

The Great Gatsby (1925) is an American classic, generally regarded as Fitzgerald's finest work. It extends and synthesizes the themes that pervade all of his fiction: the callous indifference of wealth, the hollowness of the American success myth, and the sleaziness of the contemporary scene. It is the story of Jay Gatz, a successful, vaguely disreputable man, who has a background of poverty and has pretentiously altered his name to "Gatsby." A naively vulgar parvenu, he nonetheless emerges as morally superior to the slightly covert snobs who free-load at his parties and the reckless rich whom he so hopelessly emulates. Gatsby dies quixotically attempting to reclaim his former love, Daisy.

With T. S. Eliot's poem The Waste Land and Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, The Great Gatsby is a major contribution to the creative record of the barren spirituality of the 20th century. Ironically, in Gatsby an ash heap dominates the landscape between Long Island and Manhattan; Gatsby's memorabilia include rigorous self-improvement schedules and Benjamin Franklin homilies, but he rises to success as a bootlegger; Gatsby, whose notion of elegance is his pink suit, silk shirts, cream-colored car, and large house with swimming pool, has a similarly shallow knowledge of people and never sees Daisy's superficiality; finally, the green light on his dock, a multisymbol of lush vegetation (for the Pilgrims) or riches (for contemporary Americans), is ultimately a deceit - a forlorn, romantic image ending the novel.

Fitzgerald's characters are memorable despite his spare, ideographic method of delineation: Gatsby, whose pet term of address is "Old Sport," is seen only as "a pink suit"; Daisy's husband is identified by the wad of muscle beneath his suit jacket; Daisy has "a voice like money." Nowhere is Fitzgerald's contrast with contemporary author Thomas Wolfe better illustrated: Wolfe believed in "putting in," and Fitzgerald in "taking out," in extreme selectivity and economy in his art.

In its original form Tender Is the Night (1934; later restructured by Malcolm Cowley) is structurally imperfect. Set in Europe, chiefly on the Riviera, the first half is told by a 19-year-old starlet who has a crush on the hero, Dick Diver, a young American psychiatrist. The second half is seen through the eyes of Dick and of Nicole, the wealthy American schizophrenic whom he marries, cures, and is destroyed by. Dick ultimately returns to America and becomes a small-town practitioner and an alcoholic. The theme is parasitism - the health of one person gained at the expense of another - and the facts bear an unmistakable resemblance to Scott and Zelda's marriage.

The Last Tycoon (1941), published posthumously after Edmund Wilson put it together from Fitzgerald's unfinished manuscript, is the story of a movie producer. Though Wilson calls it Fitzgerald's most mature work, it has received minimal critical attention.

Short Stories

Some of Fitzgerald's best work is in the short-story form. The titles of his collections are extraordinarily representative of the spirit of the times. Flappers and Philosophers (1921) contains "The Off-Shore Pirate" and "The Ice Palace." Tales of the Jazz Age (1922) includes "May Day" and "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz," two exquisite stories. The best-known pieces in All the Sad Young Men (1926) are "Winter Dreams," a quintessential instance of Fitzgerald's romantic vision, and "The Rich Boy." Fitzgerald's final collection, Taps at Reveille (1935), includes "Babylon Revisited," perhaps his most widely anthologized story.

Last Years

Fitzgerald earned over $400,000 between 1919 and 1934, but he and Zelda lived so expensively that they barely managed to cover their bills. When Tender Is the Night failed to excite interest, financial problems became acute; by 1937 Fitzgerald owed $40,000 despite continued earnings from magazine stories. Zelda had been permanently returned to the sanitarium in 1934; and the years 1935-1937 saw Fitzgerald's own descent - increasing alcoholism and physical illness - which he described with poignant candor in articles appearing in Esquire in the mid-1930s.

In 1937 Fitzgerald signed a movie contract at a weekly salary of $1,000. His liaison with gossip columnist Sheilah Graham during the last 3 years of his life is described in her Beloved Infidel (1958). But the heartbreak and dissolution took their toll, and after two heart attacks Fitzgerald died on Dec. 21, 1940. Zelda Fitzgerald died in a fire in 1947 at Highland Sanitarium, Asheville, N.C., leaving a novel, Save Me the Waltz (1932, American edition).

Further Reading

Fitzgerald's The Crack-up, edited by Edmund Wilson (1945), is a revealing but fragmentary autobiographical collection of essays and letters. The standard work on Fitzgerald is Andrew Turnbull, Scott Fitzgerald (1962), a full and reliable biography, though not sufficiently critical. An exciting, sometimes inaccurate biography is Arthur Mizener, The Far Side of Paradise (1951). See also Alfred Kazin, ed., F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Man and His Work (1951); Sheilah Graham, Beloved Infidel: The Education of a Woman (1958); James E. Miller, Jr., F. Scott Fitzgerald: His Art and His Technique (1964); Robert F. Sklar, F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Last Laocoön (1967), a study of Fitzgerald as an intellectual; and Nancy Milford, Zelda: A Biography (1970), a brilliant study of Fitzgerald's wife and their marriage. For literary background see Alfred Kazin, On Native Grounds: An Interpretation of Modern American Prose Literature (1942).

For more information on Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald, visit Britannica.com.

(1896-1940), novelist, chronicler of the jazz age. Born in St. Paul, Minnesota, Fitzgerald had the good fortune--and the misfortune--to be a writer who summed up an era. The son of an alcoholic failure from Maryland and an adoring, intensely ambitious mother, he grew up acutely conscious of wealth and privilege--and of his family's exclusion from the social elite. After entering Princeton in 1913, he became a close friend of Edmund Wilson and John Peale Bishop and spent most of his time writing lyrics for Triangle Club theatrical productions and analyzing how to triumph over the school's intricate social rituals.

He left Princeton without graduating and used it as the setting for his first novel, This Side of Paradise (1920). It was perfect literary timing. The twenties were beginning to roar, bathtub gin and flaming youth were on everyone's lips, and the handsome, witty Fitzgerald seemed to be the ideal spokesman for the decade. With his stunning southern wife, Zelda, he headed for Paris and a mythic career of drinking from hip flasks, dancing until dawn, and jumping into outdoor fountains to end the party. Behind this façade was a writer struggling to make enough money to match his extravagant lifestyle and still produce serious work. His second novel, The Beautiful and the Damned (1922), which recounted an artist's losing fight with dissipation, was badly flawed. His next, The Great Gatsby (1925), the story of a gangster's pursuit of an unattainable rich girl, was close to a masterpiece.

The Fitzgeralds' frenetic ascent to literary fame was soon tinged with tragedy. Scott became an alcoholic and Zelda, jealous of his fame (or in some versions, thwarted by it), collapsed into madness. They crept home in 1931 to an America in the grip of the Great Depression--a land no longer interested in flaming youth except to pillory them for their excesses. The novel with which he had grappled for years, Tender Is the Night, about a psychiatrist destroyed by his wealthy wife, was published in 1934 to lukewarm reviews and poor sales. Fitzgerald retreated to Hollywood, a defeated and more or less forgotten man. He made a precarious living as a scriptwriter and struggled to control his alcoholism. Miraculously he found the energy to begin another novel, The Last Tycoon (1941), about a complex gifted movie producer. He had finished about a third of it when he died of a heart attack. Obituaries generally dismissed him.

Not until the early fifties did interest in Fitzgerald revive, and when it did, it became a veritable scholarly industry. A closer look at his life and career reveals a writer with an acute sense of history, an intellectual pessimist who had grave doubts about Americans' ability to survive their infatuation with the bitch goddess success. At the same time he conveyed in his best novels and short stories the sense of youthful awe and hope America's promises created in many people. Few historians have matched the closing lines of The Great Gatsby, when the narrator reflects on how the land must have struck Dutch sailors' eyes three hundred years earlier: "For a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity to wonder."

Bibliography:

Matthew J. Bruccoli, Some Sort of Epic Grandeur (1981); Arthur Mizener, The Far Side of Paradise (1951; rev. ed., 1965).

Author:

Thomas Fleming

See also Expatriates and Exiles; Literature.

(Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald), 1896–1940, American novelist and short-story writer, b. St. Paul, Minn. He is ranked among the great American writers of the 20th cent. Fitzgerald is widely considered the literary spokesman of the “jazz age”—the decade of the 1920s. Part of the interest of his work derives from the fact that the mad, gin-drinking, morally and spiritually bankrupt men and women he wrote about led lives that closely resembled his own.

Born of middle-class parents, Fitzgerald attended private schools, entering Princeton in 1913. He was placed on academic probation in his junior year, and in 1917 he left Princeton to join the army. While stationed in Montgomery, Ala., he met and fell in love with Zelda Sayre, the daughter of a local judge. During this time, he also began working on his first novel, This Side of Paradise, which describes life at Princeton among the glittering, bored, and disillusioned, postwar generation. Published in 1920, the novel was an instant success and brought Fitzgerald enough money to marry Zelda that same year.

The young couple moved to New York City, where they became notorious for their madcap lifestyle. Fitzgerald made money by writing stories for various magazines. In 1922 he published his second novel, The Beautiful and Damned, about an artist and his wife who are ruined by their dissipated way of life. After the birth of their daughter, Frances Scott, in 1921 the Fitzgeralds spent much time in Paris and the French Riviera, becoming part of a celebrated circle of American expatriates.

Fitzgerald's masterpiece, The Great Gatsby, appeared in 1925. It is the story of a bootlegger, Jay Gatsby, whose obsessive dream of wealth and lost love is destroyed by a corrupt reality. Cynical yet poignant, the novel is a devastating portrait of the so-called American Dream, which measures success and love in terms of money. The author's long-awaited novel Tender is the Night (1934), a complex study of the spiritual depletion of a psychiatrist who marries a wealthy former patient, although later regarded highly, was initially coolly received.

Fitzgerald's later years were plagued by financial worries and his wife's progressive insanity. The author spent his last years as a scriptwriter in Hollywood, Calif. He died of a heart attack in 1940 at the age of 44. The Last Tycoon, a promising unfinished novel about the motion picture industry, was published in 1941. Fitzgerald also published four excellent short story collections: Flappers and Philosophers (1920), Tales of the Jazz Age (1922), All the Sad Young Men (1926), and Taps at Reveille (1935).

Bibliography

See The Crack-up (ed. by E. Wilson, 1945), a miscellaneous collection of notes, essays, and letters; Fitzgerald's letters (ed. by A. Turnbull, 1963) and J. R. Bryer and C. W. Barks, ed., Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda (2002); biographies by M. J. Bruccoli (1981), J. Mellow (1984), A. Mizener (rev. ed. 1984), and J. Meyers (1994); studies by B. Way (1980) and J. B. Chambers (1989).

Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald, 1900–1947, b. Montgomery, Ala., was also a writer. She was intermittently confined to sanatoriums after 1930 for schizophrenia, but still managed to publish short stories and a novel, Save Me the Waltz (1932, repr. 1974). Although rather incoherently plotted and written, the novel reveals a genuine, if unformed, writing talent. She was also a ballet dancer and painter.

Bibliography

See biography by N. Milford (1970); study by S. Mayfield (1971).

(1896-1940)

1920	This Side of Paradise. Fitzgerald's first novel, about Midwesterner Amory Blaine's initiation to life at Princeton and his ill-fated love for Rosaline Connage, makes the writer from St. Paul, Minnesota, an overnight celebrity as a knowing chronicler of the postwar youth culture, which defined the Jazz Age. As Fitzgerald summarizes at the end of the novel: "Here was a new generation... dedicated more than the last to the fear of poverty and the worship of success, grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken." Fitzgerald also publishes Flappers and Philosophers, his first story collection. It contains two of his finest works: "The Ice Palace," about a Southern girl unable to adapt to life in the North, and "Bernice Bobs Her Hair," about a girl who is dared into trying the radical new hairstyle.
1922	Tales of the Jazz Age. Fitzgerald's second story collection, though it includes major work such as "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz" and the experimental novella May Day, is marred by filler and weak efforts that even Fitzgerald seems to recognize in his depreciatory annotated table of contents. Fitzgerald also publishes The Beautiful and the Damned, his second novel. It dramatizes the self-destructive marriage of the rich and glamorous Anthony and Gloria Patch, damned by their excesses, and it clearly echoes the author's own marriage and high-flying lifestyle. Although more carefully constructed than This Side of Paradise, the novel disappoints reviewers.
1923	The Vegetable; or, From Presidency to Postman. Fitzgerald's satirical comedy, which he declares "the best American comedy to date and undoubtedly the best thing I have ever written," concerns a postman who becomes president. It closes before reaching Broadway. Critics have suggested that the disappointment over this play was a factor in Fitzgerald's committing to more serious work, which would lead to his masterpiece, The Great Gatsby.
1925	The Great Gatsby. Self-made Jay Gatsby tries to recapture a romantic past with the now-married Daisy Buchanan. Fitzgerald's masterpiece, the novel is both a lyrical meditation on the American dream and a satiric portrait of the excess and fraudulence of the age. Despite its being considered one of the greatest American novels (T. S. Eliot regarded it as "the first step that American fiction has taken since Henry James"), the book would sell fewer than twenty-nine thousand copies during Fitzgerald's lifetime.
1926	All the Sad Young Men. Fitzgerald's third collection includes three of his most admired stories, "Winter Dreams," "Absolution," and "The Rich Boy."
1934	Tender Is the Night. Fitzgerald's fourth and final novel to be published during his lifetime is his most ambitious, an attempt to summarize the collapse of American values through the deterioration of expatriate psychiatrist Dick Diver, who marries his troubled patient, Nicole. Although praised by some as Fitzgerald's masterpiece, the novel mainly provokes disappointment and accusations that Fitzgerald is simply repeating himself. In 1938, convinced that the true beginning of the novel was buried in its middle, Fitzgerald would reorganize the book chronologically in a revised version, published in 1951.
1935	Taps at Reveille. The last of the author's short story collections published during his lifetime gathers work written since 1926. Reviewers find the stories more quaint than relevant, evidence that Fitzgerald has, in the words of one critic, "become the prisoner of his own past, a literary Peter Pan who refused to grow up with the feverish, glamorous youth he immortalized."
1941	The Last Tycoon. Although only half completed before Fitzgerald's death, his satirical novel about Hollywood is praised as equal in quality to The Great Gatsby, enhancing the author's posthumous reputation.
1945	The Crack-Up. Edited by Edmund Wilson, this miscellany of essays, letters, and excerpts from literary notebooks contributes to Fitzgerald's enhanced posthumous reputation as an artist and a fascinating personality.
1958	Afternoon of an Author. This volume collects Fitzgerald's nonfiction magazine work published during his last fifteen years, including "Princeton," "How to Live on $36,000 a Year," and "Author's House."
1962	The Pat Hobby Stories. Published in Esquire in 1940 and 1941, the stories collected in this volume concern a Hollywood hack writer down on his luck; it features some of Fitzgerald's bitterest portraits of the movie business.

Quotes:

"There are no second acts in American lives."

"No such thing as a man willing to be honest --that would be like a blind man willing to see."

"The intimate revelations of young men, or at least the terms in which they express them, are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions."

"Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves. Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are. They are different."

"Her voice is full of money."

"I know myself, but that is all."

See more famous quotes by F. Scott Fitzgerald

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