Born on September 24, 1896 in St. Paul, Minnesota, Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was raised by his father following the death of his mother; the two lived off her small inheritance. A distant relative of the writer of "The Star Spangled Banner," Fitzgerald's longtime dream to attend private school in the East became a reality in 1911, followed by his enrollment at Princeton University in 1913. Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby also was a man of the Midwest who had come East, as was Jay Gatsby.
Fitzgerald's Princeton years helped considerably in focusing his writing abilities although his academics were poor, and it was here that he began drafting sections of a novel called The Romantic Egoist. Leaving Princeton in 1917 to enlist in the military, without receiving a degree and after being placed on academic probation, he continued to draft his novel during his weekends off from army drill. Never stationed overseas, it was while at a country dance in Montgomery, Alabama that F. Scott Fitzgerald met a wealthy judge's daughter, Zelda Sayre and the two fell in love. However, due to his lack of money they were not allowed to marry until he could prove himself able to support her. After being discharged from the Army he headed north to New York City to start a meager advertising job until Zelda, upset at his failure to save enough money, broke off their engagement. Fitzgerald went into a drunken depression using borrowed money from his former classmates at Princeton and returned home to complete the novel he had been working on for years. It was renamed This Side of Paradise and was a tremendous success. He and Zelda were at last married in New York City in April 1920. Similar to Gatsby's quest for Daisy, Fitzgerald had invested all of his energies into earning enough money to marry a woman he had fallen in love with while in the military.
With all of this sudden wealth and fame, the two danced wildly at parties and immersed themselves in the social scene of the Twenties. A daughter, Francis Scott, called "Scotty," was born a year later and in 1924 the family of three moved to the French Riviera, travelling often to Paris and Rome, just as Daisy and Tom Buchanan had moved to Europe after the birth of their own daughter, Pammy. It was soon after arriving in Europe that The Great Gatsby was completed although its release in 1925 was not as great a success as had been hoped for. It marked the beginning of a decline in Fitzgerald's career from which he would never quite recover.
In earlier years Zelda had functioned as his advisor and literary editor, yet signs of mental illness began to consume her followed by breakdowns in 1930 and in 1932, finally diagnosed as schizophrenia. Running out of money and Francis lacking a job, the Fitzgeralds moved back to their estate, "La Paix" located near Baltimore, Maryland in time for the stock market crash in 1929. Zelda's illness became so bad that she required hospitalization for the remainder of her life. Fitzgerald's drinking increased, like that of the characters in his novel, and he eventually suffered a mental breakdown himself from 1935 to 1936, following the unsuccessful release of his third novel, Tender is the Night. Recovering somewhat, he took a scriptwriting job in Hollywood in 1937 where he lived in relative peace with a famous Hollywood gossip columnist, Sheilah Grahm. His fourth novel, The Last Tycoon, was left incomplete after Fitzgerald's untimely death in Hollywood caused by a heart attack on December 21, 1940. He was 44 years old.
Bibliography
Cowley, Malcolm, ed. Introduction in The Stories of Scott Fitzgerald. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1951.
Erle, Kenneth. "Fitzgerald, F. Scott." Academic American Encyclopedia. 1995 ed.
Fitzgerald, Francis Scott. The Great Gatsby. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1925.
Geismar, Maxwell. "Fitzgerald, F. Scott." Colier's Encyclopedia. 1993 ed.
Twentieth Century Literary Criticism. "Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald." Vol 6, pg. 158-174.
