F. Scott Fitzgerald

Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was born on September 24, 1896, in Saint Paul, Minnesota, and named after a distant relative, the lawyer who wrote the words to The Star-Spangled Banner ^[1]. His father, Edward Fitzgerald, came from an old Maryland family with Southern sympathies and gentle manners but little business talent. His mother, Mary McQuillan, was the daughter of a wealthy Irish immigrant grocer whose fortune kept the household afloat when Edward's ventures failed ^[2].

The family moved between Buffalo and Syracuse, New York, during Edward's years as a salesman for Procter and Gamble, then returned to Saint Paul in 1908 after he lost his job. Growing up on the edge of the city's fashionable Summit Avenue neighborhood, the young Fitzgerald absorbed a lasting sense of being an insider and outsider at once: welcome among the rich, but never quite of them. That double vision would later shape narrators like Nick Carraway ^[2].

He attended St. Paul Academy, where he published his first story in the school paper at thirteen, and then the Newman School, a Catholic preparatory school in New Jersey. There he met Father Sigourney Fay, a cultivated priest who encouraged his literary ambitions and later appeared, lightly disguised, in his first novel ^[1].

Fitzgerald entered Princeton University in 1913. Anyone asking who was F. Scott Fitzgerald before the fame finds the answer largely on that campus: an ambitious Midwesterner who threw himself into the Triangle Club musical comedies, the Princeton Tiger humor magazine, and the Nassau Literary Magazine while letting his coursework slide ^[1]. He formed friendships with the critic Edmund Wilson and the poet John Peale Bishop, both of whom sharpened his literary judgment for the rest of his life ^[3].

Poor grades and illness forced him to drop out, and though he returned, he never graduated. In 1917, with the United States entering the First World War, he accepted a commission as a second lieutenant in the army. Convinced he might die in France, he raced through a draft of a novel called The Romantic Egotist during training. The war ended before his unit shipped overseas, a fact he later counted among his regrets ^[2].

While stationed near Montgomery, Alabama, in 1918, he met Zelda Sayre, the eighteen year old daughter of an Alabama Supreme Court judge. The two became engaged, but Zelda broke it off when Fitzgerald, discharged and working for a New York advertising agency, seemed unlikely to earn enough to support her. He quit, went home to Saint Paul, and rewrote his novel in his parents' house ^[4].

Scribner's accepted the revised manuscript, now titled This Side of Paradise, in September 1919. When the novel appeared on March 26, 1920, it made its twenty three year old author famous almost overnight, selling through its first printing within days and establishing him as the voice of a restless postwar generation ^[2]. A week after publication, he and Zelda married at St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York ^[4].

The early 1920s brought a flood of work. Fitzgerald became one of the highest paid short story writers in the country, placing fiction in the Saturday Evening Post at fees that eventually reached several thousand dollars a story ^[3]. Collections such as Flappers and Philosophers (1920) and Tales of the Jazz Age (1922) followed, the latter title giving a name to the whole decade. His second novel, The Beautiful and Damned (1922), traced a glamorous couple's slide into dissipation, a theme uncomfortably close to the Fitzgeralds' own celebrated, chaotic life in New York and on Long Island ^[1].

Magazine income financed the parties, but it also interrupted the serious work. Throughout his career Fitzgerald described his commercial stories as a tax he paid so that he could afford his novels, and the tension between money and art runs through nearly every F. Scott Fitzgerald biography written since ^[3].

In 1924 the Fitzgeralds moved to France, settling on the Riviera and later in Paris, partly to live more cheaply and partly so that he could concentrate on a new novel. The Great Gatsby, published on April 10, 1925, compressed his themes of aspiration, wealth, and loss into a short, tightly built book narrated by the observer Nick Carraway ^[2]. Reviews were mixed to respectful, and sales were modest, roughly 20,000 copies in its first year, a disappointment beside his earlier successes ^[5].

T. S. Eliot, in a letter Fitzgerald treasured, called the novel the first step American fiction had taken since Henry James, but the wider recognition Fitzgerald hoped for did not arrive in his lifetime ^[3]. Among the chief F. Scott Fitzgerald achievements, Gatsby now sits first: the book is taught in schools across the English speaking world and regularly appears near the top of lists of great twentieth century novels ^[5].

Paris brought him into the circle of expatriate writers around Gertrude Stein, and in 1925 he met Ernest Hemingway, then unknown, whom he championed to his own editor at Scribner's, Maxwell Perkins. The friendship, warm at first, cooled over the years into rivalry and condescension on Hemingway's side, later memorialized unflatteringly in A Moveable Feast ^[3].

The marriage of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald became one of the most documented partnerships in American letters. Their only child, Frances Scott Fitzgerald, called Scottie, was born in Saint Paul on October 26, 1921 ^[4]. Zelda was more than a muse: she wrote articles and stories of her own, and passages from her diaries and letters found their way into her husband's fiction, a borrowing she noted with public irony ^[4].

By the late 1920s both were in trouble. Fitzgerald's drinking, heavy since college, had become alcoholism that disrupted friendships and work. Zelda, pursuing a late and punishing ambition to become a professional ballet dancer, suffered a breakdown in April 1930 and was diagnosed with schizophrenia. She spent much of the rest of her life in psychiatric clinics in Europe and the United States, and her care consumed a large share of her husband's earnings ^[4].

Zelda published her own novel, Save Me the Waltz, in 1932, drawing on the same material Fitzgerald was using for his work in progress, which strained the marriage further. She outlived him, dying in a fire at Highland Hospital in Asheville, North Carolina, in 1948 ^[4].

Nine years separated Gatsby from Fitzgerald's fourth novel. Tender Is the Night (1934), the story of the psychiatrist Dick Diver and his patient wife Nicole, absorbed the wreckage of his own marriage and took shape through seventeen drafts and repeated interruptions ^[2]. Published in the depths of the Depression, when tales of rich Americans on the Riviera had gone out of fashion, it sold poorly and divided critics, though many readers now rank it close to Gatsby ^[5].

The mid 1930s were the low point. In essays published in Esquire in 1936, later collected as The Crack-Up, Fitzgerald described his own emotional bankruptcy with a frankness rare for the period ^[3]. Debt, illness, and Zelda's hospital bills pushed him in 1937 to Hollywood, where Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer hired him as a screenwriter at a large salary. He worked on many scripts but received only one screen credit, for Three Comrades (1938) ^[1].

In Hollywood he found some stability with the English born gossip columnist Sheilah Graham, cut back his drinking, and began a novel about a film producer modeled partly on Irving Thalberg. He also wrote the wry Pat Hobby stories for Esquire about a washed up screenwriter. On December 21, 1940, Fitzgerald suffered a fatal heart attack in Graham's apartment in Hollywood. He was forty four, and the producer novel, published posthumously as The Last Tycoon (1941), remained unfinished ^[2].

At his death, Fitzgerald's books were nearly out of print and his obituaries treated him as a relic of a frivolous decade. The revival began almost immediately. Edmund Wilson edited The Last Tycoon and The Crack-Up, and during the Second World War the Armed Services Editions distributed roughly 150,000 paperback copies of The Great Gatsby to American troops, introducing the novel to a mass readership ^[5]. By the 1950s critics and scholars had placed him firmly in the front rank of American novelists.

Among basic F. Scott Fitzgerald facts, the numbers tell part of the story: four completed novels, one unfinished, and more than 160 short stories, including classics such as The Diamond as Big as the Ritz, Winter Dreams, and Babylon Revisited ^[1]. Gatsby alone now sells hundreds of thousands of copies a year and has been filmed repeatedly, most recently by Baz Luhrmann in 2013 ^[5].

Fitzgerald is buried beside Zelda at St. Mary's Catholic Church in Rockville, Maryland, under a stone carved with the closing line of The Great Gatsby ^[1]. His boyhood home city of Saint Paul maintains his memory in landmarks and a theater bearing his name, and scholars continue to mine his letters, ledgers, and manuscripts, held largely at Princeton University Library, for the record of a writer who chronicled American ambition and paid closely for the knowledge ^[6].