F. Scott Fitzgerald

Born: September 24, 1896
St. Paul, Minnesota
Died: December 21, 1940
Hollywood, California
American author, novelist, and playwright

The American author F. Scott Fitzgerald, a legendary figure of the 1920s, was an extremely observant artist, a beautiful writer, and an exceptional craftsman. His tragic life was ironically similar to his romantic art.

Fitzgerald's younger years

On September 24, 1896, Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was born into an Irish Catholic family in St. Paul, Minnesota. His mother was from a wealthy family, and his father, Edward, was a furniture manufacturer. After Edward's business failed, he was employed by Proctor and Gamble, and the family transferred to Buffalo, New York. The family lived for some years in Buffalo and Syracuse; but in 1908, when Fitzgerald's father lost his job, they returned to St. Paul. For the most part, Fitzgerald was privately educated; he attended Newman School in Hackensack, New Jersey, from 1911 to 1913 and worked on the school paper.

Fitzgerald enrolled at Princeton University in 1913. There, he worked on The Princeton Tiger, a magazine published by the university. He also wrote for Princeton's Triangle Club, which was a distinguished organization that put on musicals. Because of ill health and low grades, he left the university in 1915. He returned to Princeton in 1916 but left a year later without a degree and joined the U.S. Army as a second lieutenant. Stationed in Alabama in 1918, he met Zelda Sayre, then eighteen years old; he would marry her a few years later. After he left the army he took an advertising job for a brief period. Back home in St. Paul, he finished his first novel, This Side of Paradise, which was published in 1919, and that same year he had remarkable success placing nine short stories in leading magazines.

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 grandly and lavishly—but 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 well, they rented a house on Long Island and ran into debt because of their reckless spending. Fitzgerald attempted to recover by writing a play, The Vegetable (1923), but it was unsuccessful. The Fitzgeralds went to Europe for over two years. The high points of this trip were publication of The Great Gatsby (1925) and the beginning of Scott's friendship with Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961). In 1927 Fitzgerald went to Hollywood on his first movie assignment. Afterward the Fitzgeralds again went overseas several times.

Zelda's first major nervous breakdown, in 1930, and her following 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 treatment centers, and Fitzgerald's own life ran a similar unfortunate course.

Analysis of the novels

This Side of Paradise (1920), an autobiographical (having to do with one's life story) novel, tells of the youth and early manhood of a Princeton undergraduate. The climax occurs when he shifts his devotion from football to literature, while at the same time he grows in character. This work struck a nerve in the reading public, chiefly for its new type of heroine—the "flapper," a young woman who goes against the idea that a woman must be stricter in her morals and behavior than a man. She smokes, drinks, dances, and is considered to be somewhat low in her character and conduct.

The Beautiful and the Damned (1922) deals with a couple who is concerned with only themselves. Tony Patch, grandson of a millionaire, and his beautiful wife live extravagantly on the expectations of Tony's inheritance, but the grandfather discovers Tony's alcoholism and wastefulness and disinherits him; however, after the grandfather dies, the will is broken. Ironically, the inheritance only worsens the destruction of Tony's morals. 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 contains the themes that pass through all of his fiction: the hardened indifference of wealth, the hollowness of the American success myth, and the sleaziness of the wealthy lifestyle. It is the story of Jay Gatz, a successful, vaguely disreputable man, who has a background of poverty and has altered his name to "Gatsby." He emerges as morally superior to the people who take advantage of his parties and the reckless rich whom he so hopelessly imitates. Gatsby dies unrealistically attempting to reclaim his former love, Daisy. The Great Gatsby is a major contribution to the writing work of the twentieth century.

The theme of Tender Is the Night (1934; later restructured by Malcolm Cowley) is parasitism—the health of one person gained through harm to the other—and the facts bear an unmistakable resemblance to Scott and Zelda's marriage.

The Last Tycoon (1941), published after Fitzgerald's death—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 very little critical attention.

Short stories

Many regard Fitzgerald's short stories as his best work. The titles of his collections are a representation 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." The best-known pieces in All the Sad Young Men (1926) are "Winter Dreams," a basic example 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 (stories written by different authors that are collected and published together) story.

Last years

Fitzgerald earned over four hundred thousand dollars 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 critical; by 1937 Fitzgerald owed forty thousand dollars despite continued earnings from magazine stories. Zelda had been permanently returned to medical care in 1934; and the years from 1935 to 1937 saw Fitzgerald's own decline—increasing alcoholism and physical illness—which he described with emotional openness in articles that appear in Esquire in the mid-1930s.

In 1937 Fitzgerald signed a movie contract at a weekly salary of one thousand dollars. His relationship with gossip columnist Sheilah Graham during the last three years of his life is described in her Beloved Infidel (1958). After two heart attacks Fitzgerald died on December 21, 1940. Zelda Fitzgerald died in a fire in 1947 at Highland Sanitarium, Asheville, North Carolina, leaving a novel, Save Me the Waltz (1932).

For More Information

Prigozy, Ruth. F. Scott Fitzgerald. Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press, 2001.

Ring, Frances Kroll. Against the Current. San Francisco, CA: D. S. Ellis, 1985.

Taylor, Kendall. Sometimes Madness Is Wisdom. New York: Ballantine Books, 2001.

Turnbull, Andrew. Scott Fitzgerald. New York: Scribner, 1962.

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).

F. Scott Fitzgerald (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 The Collected Writings (1991), ed. by M. J. Bruccoli; biography by N. Milford (1970); study by S. Mayfield (1971).

Fitzgerald, F. Scott (1896–1940), novelist and short story writer identified with the 1920s, which he named the “Jazz Age”.Born in St. Paul, Minnesota, and educated at Princeton University, F. Scott Fitzgerald served briefly in the army and achieved early success with This Side of Paradise (1920), a coming‐of‐age novel mainly set at Princeton. The Beautiful and Damned (1922), his second novel, traces the deterioration of a wealthy young couple.

Fitzgerald's most famous novel, The Great Gatsby (1925), was neither a financial success nor a recognized masterpiece in its own time. This fictional assessment of the American Dream has become the most widely read and taught twentieth‐century American novel, and Jay Gatsby is an American icon. The theme—as in all of Fitzgerald's best work—is aspiration and disillusionment: His questing heroes are invariably defeated. The emotional quality of Fitzgerald's fiction is intensified by its stylistic richness, combining wit, sensory appeal, accurate observation, and a keen sense of time and place.

The insanity of Fitzgerald's wife, Zelda—herself a 1920s celebrity—delayed his most profound novel, Tender Is the Night (1934). Set on the Riviera during the 1920s, it examines the failure of a brilliant young American psychiatrist during his marriage to a wealthy mental patient. This novel's disappointing reception, combined with financial worries and illness, contributed to Fitzgerald's breakdown, about which he wrote in a series of essays posthumously collected in The Crack‐Up (1945). Fitzgerald went to Hollywood in 1937 to write for the movies. At the time of his death from a heart attack at age forty‐four, he was writing a Hollywood novel; the work‐in‐progress appeared posthumously as The Last Tycoon (1941).

During his lifetime, Fitzgerald's reputation for extravagance and dissipation affected assessments of his writings. A reappraisal began in 1945, and by the 1960s and beyond, his work was read and studied in English and in translation throughout the world, both as literature and as documents of American social history. His 160 short stories for mass‐circulation magazines, dismissed as hack‐work, included such masterpieces as May Day, The Diamond as Big as the Ritz, The Rich Boy, The Last of the Belles, and Babylon Revisited.
See also Literature: Since World War I; Twenties, The.

Bibliography

Matthew J. Bruccoli, Scottie Fitzgerald Smith, and Joan P. Kerr, eds., The Romantic Egoists: A Pictorial Autobiography from the Scrapbooks and Albums of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, 1974.
Matthew J. Bruccoli , Some Sort of Epic Grandeur: The Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald, rev. ed., 1993.
Matthew J. Bruccoli, ed., F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Life in Letters, 1994.

Matthew J. Bruccoli

Fitzgerald, F. Scott ( Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald) (1896–1940), American novelist. His first novel, This Side of Paradise (1920), made him instantly famous; shortly after its publication he married Zelda Sayre, and together they embarked on a life of high living, big spending, and party-going. His short stories, first published in fashionable periodicals, were collected as Flappers and Philosophers (1920) and Tales of the Jazz Age (1922), the latter including his child's-eye fantasy of extravagance, ‘The Diamond as Big as the Ritz’. The Beautiful and Damned (1922), a novel about a doomed marriage, was followed by The Great Gatsby (1925), the story of shady, mysterious financier Jay Gatsby's romantic and destructive passion for Daisy Buchanan. More short stories followed (All the Sad Young Men, 1926; Taps at Reveille, 1935), but by this time Zelda was suffering from mental breakdown, Scott from the effects of their violent lives, and Tender is the Night (1934) records, through the story of American psychiatrist Dick Diver and his schizophrenic wife Nicole, his own sense of impending disaster. Fitzgerald's own ‘crack-up’ accelerated, as Zelda failed to recover: he died in Hollywood, of a heart attack, after working as a screenwriter, leaving his last novel, The Last Tycoon (1941), unfinished.

Fitzgerald, F. Scott ( Francis Scott Key) (1896–1940) US writer. He began his debut novel, This Side of Paradise (1920), while in the US Army. Along with The Beautiful and Damned (1922), this established him as a chronicler of what he christened the ‘Jazz Age’. He spent much of the 1920s in Europe, mingling with wealthy and sophisticated expatriates. Fitzgerald published his masterpiece, The Great Gatsby, in 1925. His last novels were Tender is the Night (1934) and the unfinished The Last Tycoon (1941).