Fitzgerald, F. Scott 1896-1940

FITZGERALD, F. SCOTT 1896-1940

Writer

Tales of the Jazz Age

Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald is the American writer most closely identified with the 1920s, which he named the Jazz Age. Early success, alcoholism, and an appetite for glamorous society rendered him the subject for enduring literary gossip. Although Fitzgerald's popular reputation has been distorted into that of a playboy who squandered his genius, he was a productive author whose best fiction occupies a permanent place among the classics of American literature.

Early Success

The only son of a respectable merchant-class Roman Catholic family—on his father's side genteel and on his mother's prosperous—Fitzgerald left Saint Paul, Minnesota, for an academically precarious but socially and artistically profitable four years at Princeton University, leaving without a degree to serve stateside in World War I in 1917. In 1920 his first novel, This Side of Paradise, brought him celebrity and critical attention. Set at Princeton it was credited with defining the values of the postwar generation. This Side of Paradise introduced two character types whom Fitzgerald developed throughout his work: the aspiring young man seeking to fulfill his ideals ("the romantic egoist") and the magnetic, independent young woman whose radiant femininity masks a ruthless self-interest. From the start Fitzgerald's style was admired for its sensory appeal and charm. One reviewer exclaimed, "How that boy Fitzgerald can write!" This Side of Paradise established Fitzgerald's permanent connection with the publishing house of Charles Scribner's Sons and its legendary editor, Maxwell Perkins.

Professional Author

After his marriage to the fearless and unpredictable Alabama belle Zelda Sayre in 1920, Fitzgerald embarked on an extravagant life that required him to combine a career as a writer of remunerative short stories for the magazine market with his career as a serious novelist. Although Fitzgerald was a literary celebrity, his four novels were not best-sellers. During his working life he was more widely recognized as a story writer than as a novelist. His 160 short stories ranged from commercial romantic entertainment to the brilliant "May Day," "The Rich Boy," "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz," and "Babylon Revisited." His peak fee of $4,000 per story from The Saturday Evening Post was reached in 1929.

The Great American Novel

Fitzgerald's third novel, The Great Gatsby (1925), was written in France—where the Fitzgeralds' escape from the distractions of New York was nullified by the distractions of expatriate society. The Great Gatshy revealed a new control over structure and narrative point of view, Fitzgerald—not yet twenty-nine—had mastered his craft. Jay Gatsby, the idealistic racketeer who believes that he can repeat the past and recreate himself in his endeavor to recover Daisy, has become an archetypal American figure. The title for this novel that Fitzgerald regretted coming up with too late was "Under the Red, White, and Blue"—emphasizing that the main subject of the novel is the American Dream of success. The extraordinary achievement of The Great Gatsby was immediately recognized by some critics and fellow writers; its popular reputation has grown steadily. It is now read and studied throughout the world.

Dissipation and Catastrophe

Work on Fitzgerald's fourth novel was interrupted by his alcoholism and suspended in 1930 by Zelda Fitzgerald's schizophrenic breakdown; her expensive treatment made it necessary for Fitzgerald to concentrate on commercial work. Written in the hospital, her novel Save Me the Waltz has become a cult work, and her compelling personality and tragic collapse, from which she had only intermittent improvement thereafter, have become the subject of study.

A Novel of Deterioration

Published in 1934, Tender Is the Night examines Richard Diver, a brilliant American psychiatrist who is ruined by his marriage to a wealthy mental patient and the distractions of luxurious expatriate life in France. Fitzgerald's second masterpiece did not sell well and received mixed reviews. As the American Depression deepened during the 1930s, Fitzgerald experienced a series of personal and professional crises that he described in "The Crack-Up" essays.

Hollywood

In debt and increasingly unable to write commercial short stories, Fitzgerald went to work as a screenwriter in 1937. He earned a screen credit for Three Comrades in 1938 but was not a success in the movie industry. At the time of his death from a heart attack at forty-four, he was writing The Love of the Last Tycoon, a Hollywood novel with a hero based on M-G-M producer Irving Thalberg. The work in progress was posthumously published in 1941 and is regarded as the most brilliant fictional treatment of Hollywood.

Restoration

F. Scott Fitzgerald died believing himself a forgotten writer, but a series of reappraisals commencing in the late 1940s and early 1950s established him firmly among America's major writers. The admiration for his work is accompanied by interest in his life, and Fitzgerald has become an exemplary American figure. As he wrote to his daughter from Hollywood: "I am not a great man, but sometimes I think the impersonal and objective quality of my talent, and the sacrifices of it, in pieces, to preserve its essential value has some sort of epic grandeur."

Sources:

Matthew J. Bruccoli, Some Sort of Epic Grandeur: The Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald, revised edition (New York: Carroll & Graf, 1993);

Bruccoli, ed., F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Life in Letters (New York Scribners, 1994);

Scottie Fitzgerald Smith, et al., eds., The Romantic Egoists: A Pictorial Autobiography from the Scrapbooks and Albums of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald (New York: Scribners, 1974).