F Scott Fitzgerald

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) (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).