FITZGERALD, F(rancis) Scott (Key)

Nationality: American. Born: St. Paul, Minnesota, 24 September 1896. Education: St. Paul Academy, 1908-11; Newman School, Hackensack, New Jersey, 1911-13; Princeton University, New Jersey, 1913-17. Military Service: Served in the U.S. Army, 1917-19: 2nd lieutenant. Family: Married Zelda Sayre in 1920; one daughter. Career: Advertising copywriter, Barron Collier Agency, New York, 1919-20; full-time writer from 1920. Lived in Europe, 1924-26, 1929-31. Screenwriter for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Hollywood, 1937-38. Died: 21 December 1940.

Publications

Collections

The Bodley Head Fitzgerald, edited by Malcolm Cowley and J. B. Priestley. 6 vols., 1958-63.

The Fitzgerald Reader, edited by Arthur Mizener. 1963.

The Short Stories, edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli. 1989.

F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Princeton Years: Selected Writings, 1914-1920, edited by Chip Deffaa. 1996.

The Selected Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald. 1996.

Short Stories

Flappers and Philosophers. 1920.

Tales of the Jazz Age. 1922.

All the Sad Young Men. 1926.

Taps at Reveille. 1935.

The Stories, edited by Malcolm Cowley. 1951.

The Mystery of the Raymond Mortgage (story). 1960.

The Pat Hobby Stories, edited by Arnold Gingrich. 1962.

The Apprentice Fiction of Fitzgerald 1909-1917, edited by JohnKuehl. 1965.

Bits of Paradise: 21 Uncollected Stories, with Zelda Fitzgerald, edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli and Scottie Fitzgerald Smith. 1973.

The Basil and Josephine Stories, edited by Jackson R. Bryer and John Kuehl. 1973.

The Price Was High: The Last Uncollected Stories of Fitzgerald, edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli. 1979.

Babylon Revisited and Other Stories. 1996.

Bernice Bobs Her Hair and Other Stories. 1996.

The Diamond as Big as the Ritz and Other Stories. 1997.

Novels

This Side of Paradise. 1920.

The Beautiful and Damned. 1922.

John Jackson's Arcady, edited by Lilian Holmes Stack. 1924.

The Great Gatsby. 1925.

Tender Is the Night: A Romance. 1934; revised edition, edited by Malcolm Cowley, 1951.

The Last Tycoon: An Unfinished Novel, Together with The Great Gatsby and Selected Writings, edited by Edmund Wilson. 1941; as The Love of the Last Tycoon: A Western. 1993.

Dearly Beloved. 1969.

Plays

Fie! Fie! Fi-Fi! (plot and lyrics only), book by Walker M. Ellis, music by D.D. Griffin, A.L. Booth, and P.B. Dickey (produced 1914). 1914.

The Evil Eye (lyrics only), book by Edmund Wilson, music by P.B. Dickey and F. Warburton Guilbert (produced 1915). 1915.

Safety First (lyrics only), book by J.F. Bohmfalk and J. Biggs, Jr., music by P.B. Dickey, F. Warburton Guilbert, and E. Harris (produced 1916). 1916.

The Vegetable; or, From President to Postman (produced 1923). 1923.

Screenplay for Three Comrades, edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli. 1978.

Screenplays:

A Yank at Oxford (uncredited), with others, 1937;Three Comrades, with Edward E. Paramore, 1938; Babylon Revisited: The Screenplay, 1993.

Radio Play:

Let's Go Out and Play, 1935.

Poetry

Poems 1911-1940, edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli. 1981.

Other

The Crack-Up, with Other Uncollected Pieces, Note-Books, and Unpublished Letters, edited by Edmund Wilson. 1945.

Afternoon of an Author: A Selection of Uncollected Stories and Essays, edited by Arthur Mizener. 1957.

The Letters of Fitzgerald, edited by Arthur Turnbull. 1963.

Thoughtbook, edited by John Kuehl. 1965.

Fitzgerald in His Own Time: A Miscellany, edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli and Jackson R. Bryer. 1971.

Dear Scott/Dear Max: The Fitzgerald-Perkins Correspondence, edited by John Kuehl and Jackson R. Bryer. 1971.

As Ever, Scott Fitz—: Letters Between Fitzgerald and His Literary Agent Harold Ober 1919-1940, edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli and Jennifer Atkinson. 1972.

Ledger, edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli. 1973.

The Cruise of the Rolling Junk (travel). 1976.

The Notebooks, edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli. 1978.

Correspondence, edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli and Margaret M. Duggan. 1980.

Fitzgerald on Writing, edited by Larry W. Phillips. 1985.

A Life in Letters. 1994.

F. Scott Fitzgerald on Authorship. 1996.

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Bibliography:

The Critical Reception of Fitzgerald: A Bibliographical Study by Jackson R. Bryer, 1967, supplement 1984;Fitzgerald: A Descriptive Bibliography by Matthew J. Bruccoli, 1972, supplement 1980, revised edition, 1987; The Foreign Critical Reception of Fitzgerald: An Analysis and Annotated Bibliography by Linda C. Stanley, 1980; F. Scott Fitzgerald A to Z: The Essential Reference to His Life and Work by Mary Jo Tate, 1998.

Critical Studies:

The Far Side of Paradise: A Biography of Fitzgerald by Arthur Mizener, 1951, revised edition, 1965, and Fitzgerald: A Collection of Critical Essays edited by Mizener, 1963; The Fictional Technique of Fitzgerald by James E. Miller, Jr., 1957, revised edition, as Fitzgerald: His Art and His Technique, 1964; Beloved Infidel: The Education of a Woman (with Gerold Frank), 1958, and The Real Fitzgerald: Thirty-Five Years Later, 1976, both by Sheilah Graham; Fitzgerald by Andrew Turnbull, 1962; The Composition of Tender Is the Night, 1963, Scott and Ernest: The Authority of Failure and the Authority of Success, 1978, and Some Sort of Epic Grandeur: The Life of Fitzgerald, 1981, all by Matthew J. Bruccoli, and New Essays on The Great Gatsby edited by Bruccoli, 1985; Fitzgerald by Kenneth Eble, 1963, revised edition, 1977, and Fitzgerald: A Collection of Criticism edited by Eble, 1973; Fitzgerald and His Contemporaries by William F. Goldhurst, 1963; Fitzgerald: A Critical Portrait by Henry Dan Piper, 1965; The Art of Fitzgerald by Sergio Perosa, 1965; Fitzgerald and the Craft of Fiction by Richard D. Lehan, 1966; Fitzgerald: The Last Laocoön by Robert Sklar, 1967; Fitzgerald: An Introduction and Interpretation by Milton Hindus, 1968; Zelda: A Biography by Nancy Milford, 1970, as Zelda Fitzgerald, 1970; The Illusions of a Nation: Myth and History in the Novels of Fitzgerald by John F. Callahan, 1972; Fitzgerald: The Critical Reception, 1978, and The Short Stories of Fitzgerald: New Approaches in Criticism, 1982, both edited by Jackson R. Bryer; Candles and Carnival Lights: The Catholic Sensibility of Fitzgerald by Joan M. Allen, 1978; Fitzgerald by Rose Adrienne Gallo, 1978; Fitzgerald: Crisis in an American Identity by Thomas J. Stavola, 1979; The Achieving of The Great Gatsby: Fitzgerald 1920-1925 by Robert Emmet Long, 1979; Fitzgerald and the Art of Social Fiction by Brian Way, 1980; Fitzgerald: A Biography by André Le Vot, 1983; Fool for Love: Fitzgerald by Scott Donaldson, 1983, and Critical Essays on Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby edited by Donaldson, 1984; Invented Lives: The Marriage of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald by James R. Mellow, 1984; The Novels of Fitzgerald by John B. Chambers, 1989; Fitzgerald's Craft of Short Fiction: The Collected Stories 1920-1935 by Alice Hall Petry, 1989; I'm Sorry about the Clock: Chronology, Composition, and Narrative Technique in The Great Gatsby by Thomas A. Pendleton, 1993; Fitzgerald and Hemingway: A Dangerous Friendship by Matthew Joseph Bruccoli, 1994; The Winding Road to West Egg: The Artistic Development of F. Scott Fitzgerald by Robert Roulston, 1994; Tender Is the Night: The Broken Universe by Milton R. Stern, 1994; American Dream Visions: Chaucer's Surprising Influence on F. Scott Fitzgerald by Deborah Davis Schlacks, 1994; The Great Gatsby and Modern Times by Ronald Berman, 1994; The Politics of Exile: Ideology in Henry James, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and James Baldwin by Bryan R. Washington, 1995; Enchanted Places: The Use of Setting in F. Scott Fitzgerald's Fiction by Aiping Zhang, 1997.

* * *

F. Scott Fitzgerald often cursed his gift for producing short stories, disdaining them as mere "trash" demanded by the readers of slick magazines. Describing his "personal public" as "the countless flappers and college kids who think I am sort of oracle," he dismissed their callow tastes by devoting his second story collection, Tales of the Jazz Age, to "those who read as they run and run as they read." Entertaining such distracted readers was a living, Fitzgerald clearly implied, not a calling.

Fitzgerald felt his true calling was the novel. The fabulous sums his stories brought—up to $4000 each—bought him time to write his far less lucrative novels. The slick magazine market called for stories about young lovers leaping hand-in-hand over life's obstacles—the precise sort of story Fitzgerald could produce with all the trimmings: snappy dialogue, sudden plot reversals, languorous descriptions replete with inventive metaphors, and a generally sophisticated, even cynical, tone.

Adhering to that slick formula usually assured him of a sale, while departing too radically from it could mean rejection, no matter how original or clever his departure was. He described his 1925 short story "Rags Martin-Jones and the Prince of Wales" as "Fantastic Jazz, so good that [ Saturday Evening Post editor George Horace] Lorimer … refused it." He claimed his story collection All the Sad Young Men was made up of stories "so good that I had difficulty selling them." While Fitzgerald could write a bad story, as Dorothy Parker remarked, he could not write badly. His bad stories, Fitzgerald noted, came when he wrote "plots without emotion, emotions without plots."

Fitzgerald's power derives from his rhythm and imagery, and his weakness was in developing plots and characters. Emphasizing language and de-emphasizing structure is more typical of poetry than prose, and Fitzgerald's stories often resemble poems. Like poems, Fitzgerald's stories are structured to maximize moments of intensity. Nearly all of Fitzgerald's short stories are divided into Roman-numeraled sections, each containing one discrete scene. These scenes are then juxtaposed, the total effect intended to exceed the separate parts. Each new beginning and ending allows Fitzgerald another opportunity to swell his prose with a richness of rhetorical and emotional peaks.

These intense moments sometimes overreach, but Fitzgerald's most memorable prose achieves, as he put it, "some sort of epic grandeur." The early story "Head and Shoulders" (1920) shows Fitzgerald's love of language and his disdain for structure. "Al-though the plot actually doesn't start until the couple marry, nearly two-thirds of the story is taken up with their courtship," John A. Higgens points out. "In this story, as in many others, Fitzgerald seems to write the scene and not the story." His lush scene-painting often disguises some structural defect.

Fitzgerald's most memorable passages—the beginning and ending of The Great Gatsby, for example—are the emphatic points in which he concentrates his best metaphors and images. "Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me," he writes near the beginning of "The Rich Boy," a story that ends with the vivid metaphor, "I don't think he was ever really happy unless someone was in love with him, responding to him like filings to a magnet."

A metaphor that typifies Fitzgerald's sensuous poetic flourishes appears at the end of "'The Sensible Thing'," which Arthur Mizener called "vague and … ineffective" and which Matthew J. Bruccoli termed "a highly effective … story [that] closes with [the] acceptance that love is unrepeatable." Fitzgerald's lush endings strike some readers as uniformly overwritten and other readers as paragons of beauty: Bruccoli maintains that it was a "favorite Fitzgerald strategy … to end a story with a burst of eloquence or wit." Higgens argues that Fitzgerald's tendency is "to force emotion by rhetoric rather than imply it," which causes "his chronic inability to end a story effectively." The ending of "'The Sensible Thing"' obviously takes in a great range of critical opinion:

Though he search through eternity he could never recapture those lost April hours. He might press her close now till the muscles knotted on his arms—she was something desirable and rare that he had fought for and made his own—but never again an intangible whisper in the dusk, or on the breeze of night…. Well, let it pass, he thought; April is over, April is over. There are all kinds of love in the world, but never the same love twice.

"'The Sensible Thing,"' like many Fitzgerald stories, has long been read for clues to his novels. The Great Gatsby cluster, for example, includes "Absolution," which Fitzgerald had considered publishing as a prologue to The Great Gatsby; "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz," a fantasy version of the theme of young love amidst monstrous wealth; "Winter Dreams," which, like Gatsby, tells the story of a poor ambitious boy's adoration of a rich and callous girl; and "Last of the Belles." Current criticism elevates Fitzgerald's stories from crude drafts of his novels to worthy achievements in their own right. Indeed, Fitzgerald's novels, with the arguable exception of The Great Gatsby, all have severe structural flaws, and he may be remembered primarily as a short story writer, which is how he was best known in his lifetime.

Fitzgerald's themes were limited, as he acknowledged. "But my God! it was my material and all I had to deal with," he bristled in 1934:

Mostly, we authors repeat ourselves—that's the truth. We have two or three great and moving experiences in our lives—experiences so great and so moving that it doesn't seem at the time that anyone else has been so caught up and pounded and dazzled and astonished and beaten and broken and rescued and illuminated and rewarded and humbled in just that way ever before. Then we learn our trade, well or less well, and we tell our two or three stories—each time in a new disguise—maybe ten times, maybe a hundred, as long as people will listen.

Fitzgerald's disguises were more various than his self-criticism implies. His stories often used sharp contrasts to offset the ethereality of his rich prose: North/South in "The Ice Palace," brains/body in "Head and Shoulders," love/money in "The Rich Boy," and success/failure in "May Day," as well as the contrasts of East/Midwest, America/Europe, and idealism/disillusionment.

In retrospect, his stories might be grouped into series. The longest series was the first, the formulaic boy-meets-girl, boy-loses-girl, boy-wins-girl-back-again stories that he wrote for The Saturday Evening Post in the early 1920s. For better or for worse, this series gave Fitzgerald his reputation, though he developed in the late 1920s a new series concerned with marital crises ("The Rough Crossing," "Magnetism," "Two Wrongs") that might be called the Tender Is the Night cluster, and a pair of series about teenagers, the "Basil" series, the adventures of a barely disguised adolescent F. Scott Fitzgerald, and the "Josephine" series, modeled after Fitzgerald's first great love.

When the bottom fell out of The Saturday Evening Post short story market in the 1930s, Fitzgerald invented a most uncharacteristic series of stories set in Medieval France about a Frankish Knight named Phillipe, whose heroic nature was patterned after Ernest Hemingway. The characters in the Phillipe stories spoke a patois that came straight out of gangster movies of the 1930s. Though a more interesting experiment than many critics have deemed it, the Phillipe series was rejected by magazine editors for years and remained partly unpublished until decades after Fitzgerald died.

Frustrated by his reputation as a relic of the 1920s, he asked an editor in the 1940s to try printing his work under a pseudonym: "it would fascinate me," he explained, "to have one of my stories stand on its own merits completely." That editor, Arnold Gingrich of Esquire, shaped the short fiction of Fitzgerald's last decade, just as Lorimer of the Post shaped Fitzgerald's first published stories. Gingrich advanced money to Fitzgerald, reducing Fitzgerald's indebtedness with every published story. Esquire 's editorial policy encouraged him to write stories quickly and at under half the length of his Post work. The Esquire stories were not only far more concise, they were sparer, clearer, and tightly plotted. "Financing Finnegan," "Three Hours Between Planes," "The Lost Decade," "The Long Way Out," and the 14-story Pat Hobby series, all published in Esquire, exemplify Fitzgerald's last short fiction: quality entertainment containing unadorned poetic insights into "the riotous excursions into the human heart."

—Steven Goldleaf

See the essays on "Babylon Revisited," "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz," and "Winter Dreams."