Summary:
Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was born on September 24, 1896 in Saint Paul, Minnesota. His father, Edward, was an aristocrat and his mother, Mary (Mollie) McQuillan, hailed from working-class Irish immigrants.
F.SCOTT FITZGERALD
Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was born on September 24, 1896 in Saint Paul, Minnesota. His father, Edward, was an aristocrat and his mother, Mary (Mollie) McQuillan, hailed from working-class Irish immigrants. Francis was named after a distant relative, who was the composer of "The Star-Spangled Banner." With his parents being from such different traditions and backgrounds, Fitzgerald had a confusing mix of feelings. In his own words, he would describe his mother's family as "straight 1850 potato-famine Irish." His mother's father became wealthy as a wholesale grocer in St. Paul. As a result, he saw the promise of "The American Dream" both vulgar and dazzling.
Fitzgerald's parents were Catholic, and they raised him in the church and sent him to an all boys' Catholic School on the East coast. Fitzgerald wanted to be popular in his social circle. He was very flirtatious with many different girls at the parties he went to. This is why he was sent away to prep school. He was unpopular with other students because of his "intense enthusiasms." As a young boy, Fitzgerald wanted to become a great football hero, but he was never tall enough to be selected for a team. While in prep school he wrote a poem titled Football; this poem was printed in the school magazine. He also wrote and acted in four plays. He wrote these plays when he was around 15 years old. His first play was The Girl from Lazy J, and a local theatre club produced it. The same club also produced three other plays over the next three years; they were The Captured Shadow, The Coward, and the Assorted Spirits. While in school he became part of the Triangle Club, a dramatic club whose members were from the elite of high society. He also became prominent in the literary life of the university and made lifelong friendships with Edmund Wilson and John Peale Bishop. Despite his social success, he struggled academically and flunked out of Princeton.
In November of 1917, Fitzgerald joined the Army. While stationed in Alabama he met Zelda Sayre, her father was an Alabama Supreme Court Judge. Fitzgerald and Zelda fell in love. However, Fitzgerald needed to improve his financial situation before he could marry her. Fitzgerald left for New York determined to make a fortune. Instead of making a fortune, he took an advertising job that paid a mere $90 a month. Zelda broke their engagement and Fitzgerald returned to St. Paul in Minnesota. In order to prove himself, and to win the hand of Zelda, he rewrote a novel he had started at Princeton.
In the spring of 1920, his novel This Side of Paradise was published. This first novel captured a mood of spiritual desolation in the aftermath of World War I and a growing, devil-may-care pursuit of pleasure among the American upper classes. The book was a commercial and critical success. His instant success enabled Fitzgerald and Zelda to be married a week later. Afterwards, Fitzgerald regularly contributed short stories to different periodicals like the high-tone Scribner's Magazine and the Saturday Evening Post. He wrote about cosmopolitan life in New York City during Prohibition (a ban on the sale of alcoholic drinks from 1920 to 1933) as well as the American Midwest
Of his childhood. His early short fiction was collected in Flappers and Philosophers (1920) and Tales of the Jazz Age (1922).
The Fitzgerald's loved being so well known, but it was also frightening. We know this from the ending of Fitzgerald's second novel, The Beautiful and The Damned, which was published two years later. It is a story about a handsome young man and his beautiful wife, who deteriorate into careworn middle age while they wait for the young man to inherit a large fortune. In an expected way, the couple only receives their inheritance when there is nothing left of them worth preserving. In order to escape this fate, the Fitzgerald's with their daughter Frances, move to the Riviera in 1924. They became a part of a group of wealthy American Expatriates who live in a style that was determined by Gerald and Sara Murphy. Fitzgerald described the group in his last completed novel, Tender Is The Night. The hero of the novel is modeled after Gerald Murphy.
A short time after arriving in France, Fitzgerald completed his most famous and respected novel, The Great Gatsby. The book shows how Fitzgerald had a divided nature. You see this in the hero Jay Gatsby and the narrator, Nick Carraway. Jay represents the naive Midwesterner bewitched by the American dream who amasses great wealth and uses it to pursue a spoiled, married, upper-class girl, the love of his youth. Nick, on the other, hand is a compassionate Princeton gentleman who regards the dream with suspicion. Some regard The Great Gatsby as the most profoundly American novel of its time.
A year later, Fitzgerald has a collection of short stories entitled All The Sad Young Men published. This book will mark the end of the most productive time of Fitzgerald's life. The next ten years were full of chaos and misery. Fitzgerald began to drink heavily, and Zelda began to slowly go mad. In 1930, Zelda suffered her first mental breakdown; in 1932, she had her second breakdown and never fully recovered. She spent the rest of her life as a resident or outpatient of sanitariums. While she was a patient at John Hopkins in 1932 Zelda wrote Save Me the Waltz, this was an autobiographical novel and it caused bitterness between the couple. Fitzgerald was upset by Zelda's book because he felt it pre-empted what he was working on, Tender Is the Night.
All through the 1930s, the Fitzgerald's fought to save their marriage. Fitzgerald found this to be a tough struggle. He later said that he "left his capacity for hoping on the little roads that led to Zelda's sanitarium."
It would take until 1934 for Fitzgerald to finish his novel Tender Is The Night. It was Fitzgerald's most ambitious work. The setting was in France during the 1920s. It was about a psychiatrist, Dick Diver, who marries one of his patients. Her recovery was slow, and this exhausts all of his vitality until he is "a man used up." This was the last book that Fitzgerald ever finished. Many people thought it was faulty and it was unsuccessful. Since then, it has gained a reputation as Fitzgerald's most moving book. However, the failure of the book and his despair over Zelda caused Fitzgerald to become an incurable alcoholic.
The years between 1936 and 1937 were known as "the crack-up." This title came from an essay that Fitzgerald wrote in 1936. He was ill, drunk, and in debt. He was not able to write commercial stories and he was living in hotels. In the summer of 1937, he was able to get a job as a scriptwriter in Hollywood. He signed a contract for one thousand dollars a week with MGM. He's only screen credit was for Three Comrades. He was able to renew his contract the next year for one thousand two hundred and fifty dollars a week. He made a total of ninety-one thousand dollars. This was a lot of money during the Depression years. During that time, you could buy a new car for six hundred and nineteen dollars. Fitzgerald was able to pay off most of his debts, but he was unable to save any money. He continued to make trips to see his wife while she was in the hospital, but the trips were "disastrous." While living in California, Fitzgerald met and fell in love with a movie columnist Sheilah Graham. Their relationship was able to survive even though Fitzgerald went on drunken binges often. After two years, MGM dropped Fitzgerald's contract, so he worked as a freelance scriptwriter and wrote short stories for Esquire. He also began his Hollywood novel, The Love of the Last Tycoon. By 1939, he had written about half of his book. He died of a heart attack in Graham's apartment on December 21, 1940. His wife Zelda died in the Highland hospital fire in 1948.
Fitzgerald died believing he was a failure. Many of the obituaries that were printed about him suggested that he was destined for literary obscurity. By 1960 his place as one of America's enduring writers was secured.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
A Brief Life of Fitzgerald. University of South Carolina Board of Trustees.
