Background

Ethnicity: His father was of Irish and English ancestry and his mother was the daughter of an Irish immigrant.

Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was born on September 24, 1896 in St. Paul, Minnesota, United States, to an upper-middle-class family; the son of Edward and Mary (McQuillan) Fitzgerald.

Education

Till the age of 12, Fitzgerald lived in Buffalo, New York where he studied first at the Holy Angels Convent before enrolling at Nardin Academy. Even at such a young age Fitzgerald showed a keen interest in literature and had an eye for details.

In the year 1908, the family went back to their native state of Minnesota after Fitzgerald’s father Edward was sacked from Procter & Gamble. He was enrolled in the St. Paul’s Academy (now St. Paul Academy and Summit School) in his home town. He wrote a highly appreciated detective story during his first year at this school.

Fitzgerald was sent to the famous Newham School located in Hackensack, New Jersey in the year 1911. It was during his time at the Newham School that he was encouraged by his teachers to look at writing as a profession due to his obvious gifts as a writer.

Scott then enrolled in the prestigious Princeton University but he could not maintain his literary pursuits along with his academic ones and thus eventually left university in 1917. At Princeton he became friends with future critics and writers Edmund Wilson (Class of 1916) and John Peale Bishop (Class of 1917), and wrote for the Princeton Triangle Club and the Princeton Tiger.

Career

Fitzgerald enrolled in the army but not before his manuscript of the novel The Romantic Egotist was rejected by a publisher. He was commissioned the Second lieutenant of 45th Infantry on November 1917 and the First lieutenant of 67th Infantry on July 1918. He also served as aide-de-camp to Brigadier General J. A. Ryan during December 1918-February 1919.

In the year 1919, Fitzgerald returned to New York City after the end of the First World War and took up a job in the advertising agency Barron Collier. His motivation to take up a job was to make sure that he earned enough to marry Zelde Sayre, a girl he had fallen in love with.

He started working on his first novel This Side of Paradise and it was in the year 1919 that the manuscript was accepted by Scribner’s. The book was published the next year and became a bestseller quickly, which also convinced his long time love interest Zelde Sayre that he was financially secure as a potential husband. This Side of Paradise expressed the moral and sexual rebellion of the younger generation and the advent of the Jazz Age.

The success of his first novel landed him writing opportunities with popular magazines like The Saturday Evening Post and Esquire, who were also known to pay their writers well. He primarily wrote short stories for them in order to supplement his income. His first volume of short stories, Flappers and Philosophers (1920), appeared at the same time. Zelda was the flapper and he was the "philosopher."

In the year 1922, Scott published his second novel titled The Beautiful and Damned, which dealt with the life and times of a couple from the toffs and described the tormented marriage of two gifted and attractive personalities on the road to ruin. At this point Fitzgerald was earning a large income for a writer; he lived expensively; he was usually in debt; and he was beginning to drink heavily. He was obliged to write potboilers and commercial short stories to maintain himself and his family.

Tales of the Jazz Age (1922) was another collection of stories which were often entertaining despite their artificiality and which immortalized the "flaming youth" of the period. The Vegetable (1923) was a poor play which led to further debts.

Fitzgerald moved to Paris in 1924, where he developed close acquaintance with a group of locals consisting expatriate Americans. Fitzgerald struck up a friendship with another giant of literature Ernest Hemingway while he was in France.

In the year 1925, while he was still in the France, Fitzgerald finished his best work The Great Gatsby, a novel that is still regarded as one of the greatest ever written in the English language. The story of the social outlaw, James Gatz, making his way up in Long Island society, obsessed by the American dream of quick and easy success, yet haunted and then destroyed by the fatal woman of his youth, was another parable of the 1920's.

All the Sad Young Men (1926) was another collection of short stories. But the theme of the volume was surrender and defeat; the tone of the stories was nostalgic or elegiac.

His fourth novel Tender Is The Night (1934) was based on his experiences in Paris. It is the fictional rendering of this European pilgrimage and is perhaps Fitzgerald's most fascinating narrative in content and his most incoherent novel in structure.

Taps at Reveille (1935) contained other revelations of this writer's "crack-up" and was perhaps his best collection of short stories. The hero of "Babylon Revisited" (set in Paris) is haunted by the nightmares and hangovers of the 1920's; the big party was over. Like the hero of "Crazy Sunday" in the same volume, Fitzgerald had returned to Hollywood bankrupt, solitary, sick, and a wraith of the glamorous past in the new age of social realism.

Fitzgerald decided to try his hand at the movies and in 1937 he went to Hollywood looking for work. He wrote plenty of short stories for different publications, worked on movie scripts and also worked for a while for MGM.

In October 1939 he began a novel about Hollywood, The Last Tycoon (1941). The career of its hero, Monroe Stahr, is based on that of the producer Irving Thalberg. This is Fitzgerald’s final attempt to create his dream of the promises of American life and of the kind of man who could realize them. The Last Tycoon revealed the depth and perseverance of Fitzgerald’s creative talent despite all his self-destructive impulses. This last novel includes brilliant descriptions of the motion-picture industry. The hero is one of the "great" independent movie producers in the developing period of mass entertainment.

Achievements

• 

  Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was a distinguished short-story writer and novelist famous for his depictions of the Jazz Age. He authored four novels, the most brilliant of which is The Great Gatsby. He is also the author of four collections of short stories, as well as 164 short stories for magazines.
  
  In 2009, F. Scott Fitzgerald was inducted by the U. S. State of New Jersey into the New Jersey Hall of Fame.
  
  

Works

More photos

• book

  • Tender Is the Night

    (Set in the south of France in the late 1920s, Tender Is t...)

    1934
  • The Crack-Up

    (The Crack-Up tells the story of Fitzgerald's sudden desce...)

    1945
  • Winter Dreams

    (Winter Dreams first appeared in the Metropolitan magazine...)

    1922
  • Crazy Sunday

    (Joel Coles should be in the prime of his life, but the tw...)

    1932
  • The Offshore Pirate

    (The story is about a spoiled young woman named Ardita Far...)

    1920
  • The Ice Palace

    (The Ice Palace is a story of cultural conflict between Sa...)

    1920
  • The Baby Party

    (When John Andros felt old he found solace in the thought ...)

    1925
  • The Diamond as Big as the Ritz

    (The Diamond as Big as the Ritz is a classic short story b...)

    1922
  • Flappers and Philosophers 1920
  • Tales of the Jazz Age 1922
  • May Day 1920
  • The Great Gatsby 1925
  • This Side of Paradise 1920
  • The Love of the Last Tycoon 1941
  • Babylon Revisited 1931
  • The Basil and Josephine Stories 1928
  • The Beautiful and Damned 1922
  • The Curious Case of Benjamin Button 1921
  • Bernice Bobs Her Hair and Other Stories 1920
  • The Pat Hobby Stories 1940
  • The Rich Boy 1926
  • All the Sad Young Men 1926
  • Head and Shoulders 1920
  • Absolution 1963

Politics

Despite Fitzgerald's statement about "strict rational approach", his political views, as well as all his thoughts were shifting and changed from moment to moment. General ideas meant to him nothing more than an artistic background for his works.

Views

Quotations: "That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you're not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong."

"Show me a hero, and I'll write you a tragedy."

"I like people and I like them to like me, but I wear my heart where God put it, on the inside."

"Genius is the ability to put into effect what is on your mind."

"The world, as a rule, does not live on beaches and in country clubs."

"The faces of most American women over thirty are relief maps of petulant and bewildered unhappiness."

"I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer."

"The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function."

"So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."

"There are no second acts in American lives."

"I hope she'll be a fool - that's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool."

"First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you."

"Her voice is full of money."

"Writers aren’t people exactly. Or, if they’re any good, they’re a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person."

"Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat."

Personality

F. Scott Fitzgerald possessed a great talent for creativity and self expression and was known for his wit and gift for gab. He was always the life of the party, and the center of attention. He could be generous to a fault, but when hurt, he withdrew into a cloud of silence.

Interests

• Philosophers & Thinkers

  Marx, Spengler

• Music & Bands

  Jazz

Connections

On October 26, 1921, F. Scott Fitzgerald married Zelda Sayre, whose father was an Alabama Supreme Court Judge. Fitzgerald married Zelda Sayre directly after the This Side of Paradise publication. The couple had only one child, a daughter named Frances Scott Fitzgerald.

In 1930 Zelda had a mental breakdown and in 1932 another, from which she never fully recovered. His wife’s mental breakdown pushed Fitzgerald further towards chronic alcoholism. He left Zelda and in 1937, started a romantic relationship with journalist Sheila Graham. For the rest of his life—except for occasional drunken spells when he became bitter and violent—Fitzgerald lived quietly with her.

Father:

Edward Fitzgerald

Edward Fitzgerald was a wicker furniture salesman; he later joined Procter & Gamble when the business failed.

Mother:

Mary (McQuillan) Fitzgerald

Spouse:

Zelda Fitzgerald

Zelda Fitzgerald (née Sayre; July 24, 1900 – March 10, 1948) was an American socialite, novelist, painter.

Daughter:

Frances Scott Fitzgerald

Frances Scott "Scottie" Fitzgerald (October 26, 1921 – June 18, 1986) was a writer, a journalist (for The Washington Post, The New Yorker, The Northern Virginia Sun, and others), and a prominent member of the Democratic Party.

life partner:

Sheilah Graham

Sheilah Graham (born Lily Shiel; 15 September 1904 – 17 November 1988) was a British-born, nationally syndicated American gossip columnist during Hollywood's "Golden Age".

Friend:

Edmund Wilson

Edmund Wilson (May 8, 1895, Red Bank, New Jersey, U.S. - June 12, 1972, Talcottville, New York) was an American critic and essayist recognized as one of the leading literary journalists of his time.

Friend:

John Peale Bishop

John Peale Bishop (May 21, 1892, Charles Town, W.Va., U.S. - April 4, 1944, Hyannis, Mass.), American poet, novelist, and critic, a member of the “lost generation” and a close associate of the American expatriate writers in Paris in the 1920s.

References

• Paradise Lost: A Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald In this comprehensive biography, Brown reexamines Fitzgerald’s childhood, first loves, and difficult marriage to Zelda Sayre. He looks at Fitzgerald’s friendship with Hemingway, the golden years that culminated with Gatsby, and his increasing alcohol abuse and declining fortunes which coincided with Zelda’s institutionalization and the nation’s economic collapse.
  2017
• Scott Fitzgerald: A Biography This book, by the acclaimed biographer of Hemingway, is the first to analyze frankly the meaning as well as the events of Fitzgerald's life and to illuminate the recurrent patterns that reveal his inner self. Meyers emphasizes Fitzgerald's alcoholism, Zelda's illnesses and her doctors, Fitzgerald's love affairs both before and after her breakdown, and his wide-ranging friendships, from the polo star Tommy Hitchcock to the Hollywood executive Irving Thalberg.
  1994
• Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald When beautiful, reckless Southern belle Zelda Sayre meets F. Scott Fitzgerald at a country club dance in 1918, she is seventeen years old and he is a young army lieutenant stationed in Alabama. Before long, the ungettable Zelda has fallen for him despite his unsuitability, Scott isn't wealthy or prominent or even a Southerner, and keeps insisting, absurdly, that his writing will bring him both fortune and fame. Her father is deeply unimpressed. But after Scott sells his first novel, This Side of Paradise, to Scribner's, Zelda optimistically boards a train north, to marry him in the vestry of St. Patrick's Cathedral and take the rest as it comes.
  2013
• F. Scott Fitzgerald Fitzgerald scholar Ruth Prigozy provides fresh insight into the life of the novelist who, in both his work and life, captured the rise and fall of the Jazz Age.
  2000