F. Scott Fitzgerald married Zelda Sayre on April 3, 1920. [15] In 1911, Fitzgerald's parents sent him to the Newman School, a Catholic prep school in Hackensack, New Jersey. While stationed in Alabama, he met Zelda Sayre, a Southern debutante who belonged to Montgomery's exclusive country-club set. Other common themes in his work include society and class, wealth and materialism, and romantic idealism. [76] Upon reading the telegram, an ecstatic Fitzgerald ran down the streets of St. Paul and flagged down random automobiles to share the news. At one time he understood it no more than the butterfly did and he did not know when it was brushed or marred. "[272] His New York Times obituary deemed his work forever tied to an era "when gin was the national drink and sex the national obsession". They fell deeply in love, and, as soon as he could, Fitzgerald headed for New York determined to achieve instant success and to marry Zelda. [245] The realization that he was largely forgotten as an author further depressed him. [335], Although a dazzling extemporizer, Fitzgerald's short stories were criticized for lacking both thematic coherence and quality. You've read The Great Gatsby, haven't you? All of his divided nature is in this novel, the naive Midwesterner afire with the possibilities of the American Dream in its hero, Jay Gatsby, and the compassionate Yale gentleman in its narrator, Nick Carraway. "Nobody was interested in politics," Fitzgerald declared of this particular generation,[392] and, as "it was characteristic of the Jazz Age that it had no interest in politics at all",[393] Fitzgerald's fiction reflected the contemporary zeitgeist's perfunctory cynicism and aversion to political crusades in the wake of Prohibition. While writing The Beautiful and Damned, Fitzgerald inserted sentences from his wife's diary. He had never, despite the flop of his play The Vegetable in 1923, quite given up on the idea of drama. Encyclopaedia Britannica's editors oversee subject areas in which they have extensive knowledge, whether from years of experience gained by working on that content or via study for an advanced degree. [213] The cost of his opulent lifestyle and Zelda's medical bills quickly caught up, placing him in constant debt. Maybe Francis Scott Fitzgerald wasn't such an original writer after all. 5 Literary Influences. At both St. Paul Academy (190810) and Newman School (191113), he tried too hard and made himself unpopular, but at Princeton University he came close to realizing his dream of a brilliant success. [251] During his work on Winter Carnival (1939), Fitzgerald had an alcoholic relapse and sought treatment by New York psychiatrist Richard Hoffmann. [67], With dreams of a lucrative career in New York City dashed, Fitzgerald could not convince Zelda that he would be able to support her, and she broke off the engagement in June 1919. [25][26] While Fitzgerald attended Princeton, Ginevra attended Westover, a Connecticut women's school. [372][373] His later life as an expatriate in Europe and as a writer in Hollywood reinforced this lifelong sense of being an outsider. The publication of The Great Gatsby prompted poet T. S. Eliot to opine that the novel was the most significant evolution in American fiction since the works of Henry James. Some of Fitzgeralds finest short stories appeared in All the Sad Young Men (1926), particularly The Rich Boy and Absolution, but it was not until eight years later that another novel appeared. Born in St. Paul, Minnesota, his father, Edward, from Maryland, held an allegiance to the Old South and its traditional values that he passed along to his son. He wrote primarily during the 1920s, and he has brought the Jazz Age of that decade to life for an. We see. He had written all but two of the stories before 1920. The chaos of World War I left America in a state of distress, and the generation that fought the war turned to profligate living to recompense. F. Scott Fitzgerald's first novel, 1920's This Side of Paradise, was an instant hit and bestseller. Fitzgerald's mother, Mary (Mollie) McQuillan, was the daughter of an Irish immigrant . [323] Echoing this assertion, critics John V. A. Weaver and Edmund Wilson insisted that Fitzgerald imbued the Jazz Age generation with the gift of self-consciousness while simultaneously making the public aware of them as a distinct cohort. He is unconcerned about the sweating and suffering of the nether herd". [337], Commenting upon this tendency in Fitzgerald's short stories, Dos Passos remarked that "everybody who has put pen to paper during the last twenty years has been daily plagued by the difficulty of deciding whether he's to do 'good' writing that will satisfy his conscience or 'cheap' writing that will satisfy his pocketbook. A great deal of Fitzgerald's own life was made a hell by this sort of schizophrenia."[338]. [135] He continued writing his third novel, which would eventually become his magnum opus The Great Gatsby. [8] Fitzgerald spent the first decade of his childhood primarily in Buffalo with a brief interlude in Syracuse between January 1901 and September 1903. [142] Before any confrontation could occur, Jozanwho had no intention of marrying Zeldaleft the Riviera, and the Fitzgeralds never saw him again. [41] At a country club, Fitzgerald met Zelda Sayre, a 17-year-old Southern belle and the affluent granddaughter of a Confederate senator whose extended family owned the White House of the Confederacy. [249] His failure in Hollywood pushed him to return to drinking, and he drank nearly 40 beers a day in 1939. [169] A more serious rift soon occurred when Zelda belittled Fitzgerald with homophobic slurs and accused him of engaging in a homosexual relationship with Hemingway. F. Scott Fitzgerald, in full Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald, (born September 24, 1896, St. Paul, Minnesota, U.S.died December 21, 1940, Hollywood, California), American short-story writer and novelist famous for his depictions of the Jazz Age (the 1920s), his most brilliant novel being The Great Gatsby (1925). F. Scott Fitzgerald, the author of The Great Gatsby, was born in St. Paul, Minn.; he's associated with that city, as well as Paris, the Riviera and New York. This theme comes up again and again because I lived it. During this period, he became friends with writer Gertrude Stein, bookseller Sylvia Beach, novelist James Joyce, poet Ezra Pound and other members of the American expatriate community in Paris,[158] some of whom would later be identified with the Lost Generation. F. Scott Fitzgerald is regarded as one of the greatest American authors of the 20th century. [225], By that same year, Zelda's intense suicidal mania necessitated her extended confinement at the Highland Hospital in Asheville, North Carolina. Half the time he thought of himself as the heir of his fathers tradition, which included the author of The Star-Spangled Banner, Francis Scott Key, after whom he was named, and half the time as straight 1850 potato-famine Irish. As a result he had typically ambivalent American feelings about American life, which seemed to him at once vulgar and dazzlingly promising. [252], Director Billy Wilder described Fitzgerald's foray into Hollywood as like that of "a great sculptor who is hired to do a plumbing job". It was an age of miracles, it was an age of art, it was an age of excess, and it was an age of satire. Fitzgerald's body was transported to his native Maryland. 5 Life Lessons From F. Scott Fitzgerald March 26, 2019 marks the 99th anniversary of the world first becoming acquainted with one of the most unmistakable figures of the Jazz age. While every effort has been made to follow citation style rules, there may be some discrepancies. Fitzgerald portrays the American Dream in the character of Jay Gatsby. [306] With the publication of The Beautiful and Damned, editor Max Perkins and others commended the conspicuous evolution in the quality of his prose. [280] During the COVID-19 pandemic, the society organized an online reading of This Side of Paradise to mark its centenary. Fitzgerald worked on his fourth novel, Tender Is the Night (1934), sporadically for almost ten years after . [421] Fitzgerald's relationships with Sheilah Graham and Frances Kroll Ring respectively served as the basis for the films Beloved Infidel (1959) and Last Call (2002). [157] Amid World WarII, The Great Gatsby gained further popularity when the Council on Books in Wartime distributed free Armed Services Edition copies to American soldiers serving overseas. [261] When Fitzgerald's poorly embalmed corpse arrived in Bethesda, Maryland, only thirty people attended his funeral. His father's inability to earn a reliable income caused the family to move . [24] She would become his literary model for the characters of Isabelle Borg in This Side of Paradise, Daisy Buchanan in The Great Gatsby, and many others. His success, however, comes during a corrupt time. The Red Cross distributed the novel to prisoners in Japanese and German POW camps. [204] Hemingway and others argued that such criticism stemmed from superficial readings of the material and from Depression-era America's reaction to Fitzgerald's status as a symbol of Jazz Age excess. [245] After visiting several bookstores, he realized they had stopped carrying his works. [380] Consequently, Gatsby's ascent is deemed a threat not only due to his status as nouveau riche, but because he is perceived as an outsider. [f] It would take decades for the novel to gain its present acclaim and popularity. [157], By the 21st century, The Great Gatsby had sold millions of copies, and the novel is required reading in many high school and college classes. [254] Approaching the final year of life, Fitzgerald wrote regretfully to his daughter: "I wish now I'd never relaxed or looked backbut said at the end of The Great Gatsby: I've found my linefrom now on this comes first. 'Zelda and I drank with them. [248] Both assignments went uncredited. In 1993, a new edition was published as The Love of the Last Tycoon, edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli. His friend H. L. Mencken wrote in a June 1934 diary entry that "the case of F. Scott Fitzgerald has become distressing. [256] On the night of December20, 1940, Fitzgerald and Graham attended the premiere of This Thing Called Love. [258] Lying flat on his back, he gasped and lapsed into unconsciousness. [271] Margaret Marshall in The Nation dismissed Fitzgerald as a Jazz Age scribe "who did not fulfill his early promisehis was a fair-weather talent which was not adequate to the stormy age into which it happened, ironically, to emerge. [138] For source material, Fitzgerald drew heavily on his experiences on Long Island and once again on his lifelong obsession with his first love Ginevra King. "[165] To supplement their income, Fitzgerald often wrote stories for magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post, Collier's Weekly, and Esquire. But Fitzgerald loved plays, acting (and actresses), and writing dialogue. While abroad in Europe, Fitzgerald wrote and published, In France, Fitzgerald became close friends with writers. [108], As their quarrels worsened, the couple accused each other of marital infidelities. [258] After failed efforts to revive him, Graham ran to fetch Harry Culver, the building's manager. [403] In her story, she is trapped in a loveless marriage with a wealthy man, yet still pines for Fitzgerald, a former lover from her past. [e][163][164] "I always felt a story in the [Saturday Evening] Post was tops", Zelda later recalled, "But Scott couldn't stand to write them. Asheville, a mountain town in North Carolina . [413] Nearly every novel by Fitzgerald has been adapted for the screen. [241] He repeatedly attempted sobriety, had depression, had violent outbursts, and attempted suicide. American author of novels and short stories, Born on September 24, 1896 We had most of them. [50] Dispatched back to the base near Montgomery to await discharge, he renewed his pursuit of Zelda. [285] In 1990, Hofstra University established the F. Scott Fitzgerald Society, which later became an affiliate of the American Literature Association. [408] Richard Yates, a writer often compared to Fitzgerald, hailed The Great Gatsby as showcasing Fitzgerald's miraculous talent and triumphal literary technique. [175] Fitzgerald later rewrote Rosemary Hoytone of the central characters in Tender is the Nightto mirror Moran. [45] A romance soon blossomed,[46] although he continued writing Ginevra, asking in vain if there was any chance of resuming their former relationship. The world's most glamorous have flocked to Hotel du Cap since Scott's day: his friends Gerald and Sara Murphy, the models for Dick and Nicole Diver, once rented the hotel for an entire summer,. [326] Charles Jackson, author of The Lost Weekend, wrote that Gatsby was the only flawless novel in the history of American literature. His third novel, The Great Gatsby (1925), received generally favorable reviews but was a commercial failure, selling fewer than 23,000 copies in its first year. The grave of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda Fitzgerald in St. Mary's Catholic Cemetery in Rockville, Maryland. More specifically, this novel tells the story of Nick Carraway and his experiences of living in New York's upscale town of West Egg, as he befriends his upper class neighbor, Jay Gatsby. [193] A year later, when Mencken met Zelda for the last time, he described her mental illness as immediately evident to any onlooker and her mind as "only half sane. Remember? [47] Three days after Ginevra married a wealthy Chicago businessman, Fitzgerald professed his affections for Zelda in September 1918. "There are all kinds of love in this world but never the same love twice." 4. It is the story of a psychiatrist who marries one of his patients, who, as she slowly recovers, exhausts his vitality until he is, in Fitzgeralds words, un homme puis (a man used up). According to Graham, Fitzgerald "had begun drinking, as a young man, because in those days everyone drank. [232][233] Despite earning his highest annual income up to that point ($29,757.87, equivalent to $560,922 in 2021),[232] Fitzgerald spent the bulk of his income on Zelda's psychiatric treatment and his daughter Scottie's school expenses. By this time, the field of literature had greatly changed due to the onset of the Great Depression, and once popular writers such as Fitzgerald and Hemingway who wrote about upper-middle-class lifestyles were now disparaged in literary periodicals whereas so-called "proletarian novelists" enjoyed general applause. [4] His father, Edward Fitzgerald, descended from Irish and English ancestry,[5] and had moved to Minnesota from Maryland after the American Civil War to open a wicker-furniture manufacturing business. Everyone wanted to meet him. [182], The Fitzgeralds rented "Ellerslie", a mansion near Wilmington, Delaware, until 1929. His second novel The Beautiful and Damned was filmed in 1922 and 2010. John Keats and Joseph Conrad are the most . [73] Abstaining from alcohol and parties,[74] he worked day and night to revise The Romantic Egotist as This Side of Paradisean autobiographical account of his Princeton years and his romances with Ginevra, Zelda, and others. F. Scott Fitzgerald married Zelda Sayre on April 3, 1920. During his lifetime, he published four novels, four story collections, and 164 short stories. Born on September 24, 1896 in St. Paul, Minnesota, USA , United States. [c][54] Although Fitzgerald did not initially intend to marry Zelda,[55] the couple gradually viewed themselves as informally engaged, although Zelda declined to marry him until he proved financially successful. [220] In the 1930s, as his health deteriorated, Fitzgerald had told Hemingway of his fear of dying from congested lungs. [m][263] Among the attendees were his only child, Scottie, his agent Harold Ober, and his lifelong editor Maxwell Perkins. Despite being a mediocre student . [273] In retrospective reviews that followed after his death, literary critics such as Peter Quennell dismissed his magnum opus The Great Gatsby as merely a nostalgic period piece with "the sadness and the remote jauntiness of a Gershwin tune". "[106] In Fitzgerald's eyes, the era represented a morally permissive time when Americans became disillusioned with prevailing social norms and obsessed with self-gratification. The Great Gatsby is today widely considered the great American novel.. What he achieved was an advertising job at $90 a month. [297] He discarded the stodgy narrative technique of most novels and instead unspooled the plot in the form of textual fragments, letters, and poetry intermingled together. "But that was a one-time thing," she says. ELALF40SH. [128] Purportedly born in America to a German immigrant family, Gerlach had been a major in the American Expeditionary Forces during World WarI and became a gentleman bootlegger who lived like a millionaire in New York. "[181] Fitzgerald's relations with Moran further exacerbated the Fitzgeralds' marital difficulties and, after merely two months in Jazz Age Hollywood, the unhappy couple departed for Delaware in March 1927. I needed it to write.'". Fitzgerald had to climb two flights of stairs to his apartment, while Graham lived on the ground floor. [68] In the wake of Fitzgerald's rejection by Ginevra two years prior, his subsequent rejection by Zelda dispirited him. [274] "The strange thing about the articles that came out about Fitzgerald's death," Dos Passos later recalled, "was that the writers seemed to feel that they didn't need to read his books; all they needed for a license to shovel them into the ashcan was to label them as having been written in such and such a period now past. [178] Fitzgerald was 31 years old and past his prime, but the smitten Moran regarded him as a sophisticated, handsome, and gifted writer. Scott Fitzgerald in a letter to H. L. Mencken, 1934[269], At the time of his death, Fitzgerald believed his life a failure and that his work was forgotten. [73] Having returned to his hometown as a failure, Fitzgerald became a social recluse and lived on the top floor of his parents' home at 599Summit Avenue, on Cathedral Hill. Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald (September 24, 1896 - December 21, 1940) was an American novelist, essayist, and short story writer. Fitzgerald struggled with alcoholism throughout his life. "[323], Nine years after the publication of The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald completed his fourth novel Tender Is the Night in 1934. in Hollywood, Los Angeles, California, USA, This form allows you to report an error or to submit additional information about this family tree: F. Scott FITZGERALD (1896), Copyright Wikipdia authors - This article is under licence CC BY-SA 3.0. [399] When his friend Burton Rascoe asked Zelda to review the book for the New-York Tribune as a publicity stunt,[400] she wrotepartly in jestthat it "seems to me that on one page I recognized a portion of an old diary of mine which mysteriously disappeared shortly after my marriage, and also scraps of letters, which, though considerably edited, sound to me vaguely familiar. This is Fitzgeralds most moving book, though it was commercially unsuccessful. The family tree for F. Scott Fitzgerald is still in progress. Fitzgerald died four years later, just 44, his body and brain destroyed by drink, his work largely forgotten. [78] She disparaged the teenage Moran as "a breakfast food that many men identified with whatever they missed from life. "[359] Consequently, he became a vocal critic of America's leisure class and his works satirized their lives. The song was inspired by seeing the American flay over Fort McHenry in 1814. The map below shows the places where the ancestors of the famous person lived. [61] Likewise, Zelda's Episcopalian family was wary of Scott because of his Catholic background, precarious finances, and excessive drinking. Just as we ourselves have faced secret battles, we know others are doing the same. [298] This atonal blend of different fictive elements prompted cultural elites to fte the young Fitzgerald as a literary trailblazer whose work modernized a staid literature that had lagged "as far behind modern habits as behind modern history. [300], Although critics praised This Side of Paradise as highly original, they eviscerated its form and construction. He was married . [321] By eliminating the earlier defects in his writing, he had upgraded from "a brilliant improvisateur" to "a conscientious and painstaking artist. [71], In July, Fitzgerald quit his advertising job and returned to St. In the early 1920s, Scott and Zelda had the world at their feet. [332], From 1920 until his death, Fitzgerald published nearly four pieces per year in the magazine and, in 1931 alone, he earned nearly $40,000 (equivalent to $712,735 in 2021) by churning out seventeen short stories in quick succession. When I was little I got to see a huge spread of them," she notes. Born Francis Scott Key FITZGERALD. "The ability to hold two competing thoughts in one's mind and still be able to function is the mark of a superior mind". Shortly after their arrival in France, Fitzgerald completed his most brilliant novel, The Great Gatsby (1925). Get a Britannica Premium subscription and gain access to exclusive content. [203] Its structure threw off many critics who felt Fitzgerald had not lived up to their expectations. [229] The sudden death of Fitzgerald's mother and Zelda's mental deterioration led to his marriage further disintegrating. [136] Fitzgerald had been planning the novel since 1923, when he told his publisher Maxwell Perkins of his plans to embark upon a work of art that would be beautiful and intricately patterned. [383], Poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, who met Fitzgerald during his years abroad in Paris, likened him to "a stupid old woman with whom someone has left a diamond; she is extremely proud of the diamond and shows it to everyone who comes by, and everyone is surprised that such an ignorant old woman should possess so valuable a jewel". Here was a new generation, shouting the old cries, learning the old creeds, through a revery of long days and nights; destined finally to go out into that dirty gray turmoil to follow love and pride; a new generation dedicated more than the last to the fear of poverty and the worship of success; grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken. His debut novel, The Fitzgeralds' French identity card photos, 1929. Born into a middle-class family in Saint Paul, Minnesota, Fitzgerald was raised primarily in New York state. Paul. Updates? [b][44] Zelda was one of the most celebrated debutantes of Montgomery's exclusive country club set. [227] His attempts to write and sell more short stories faltered. Born in 1896 in Saint Paul, Minnesota, to an upper-middle-class family, Fitzgerald was named after his famous second cousin, three times removed, Francis Scott Key, but was referred to as "Scott." 1. [366][382], Although many contemporary critics and literary peers regarded Fitzgerald as possessing "the best narrative gift of the century.