F. Scott Fitzgerald
Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald (September 24, 1896 – December 21, 1940) was an American novelist, essayist, screenwriter, and short story writer. He was best known for his novels depicting the flamboyance and excess of the Jazz Age—a term which he popularized. During his lifetime, he published four novels, four collections of short stories, and 164 short stories. Although he temporarily achieved popular success and fortune in the 1920s, Fitzgerald only received critical acclaim after his death and is now widely regarded as one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century.
Born into a middle-class family in St. Paul, Minnesota, Fitzgerald was primarily raised in New York. He attended Princeton University, but due to a failed relationship with socialite Ginevra King and a preoccupation with writing, he dropped out in 1917 to join the United States Army. While stationed in Alabama, he romantically pursued Zelda Sayre, a Southern debutante who belonged to Montgomery’s exclusive country club set. Although she initially rejected him due to his lack of financial prospects, Zelda agreed to marry Fitzgerald after he had published the commercially successful This Side of Paradise (1920). The novel became a cultural sensation and cemented Fitzgerald’s reputation as one of the eminent writers of the decade.
His second novel, The Beautiful and Damned (1922), further propelled him into the cultural elite. To maintain his affluent lifestyle, he wrote numerous stories for popular magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post, Collier’s Weekly, and Esquire. During this period, Fitzgerald frequented Europe, where he befriended modernist writers and artists of the “Lost Generation” expatriate community, including Ernest Hemingway. 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. Despite its lackluster debut, The Great Gatsby is now widely praised, with some labeling it the “Great American Novel”. Following the deterioration of his wife’s mental health and her placement in a mental institute for schizophrenia, Fitzgerald completed his final novel, Tender Is the Night (1934).
Struggling financially due to the declining popularity of his works amid the Great Depression, Fitzgerald turned to Hollywood, writing and revising screenplays. While residing in Hollywood, he cohabited with columnist Sheilah Graham, his final companion before his death. After a long struggle with alcoholism, he finally attained sobriety only to die of a heart attack in 1940, at the age of 44. An unfinished fifth novel, The Last Tycoon (1941), was completed by his friend Edmund Wilson and published after Fitzgerald’s death.
Born on September 24, 1896, in Saint Paul, Minnesota, to a middle-class family, Fitzgerald was named after his second cousin thrice removed, Francis Scott Key, but was always known as Scott Fitzgerald.[1] Fitzgerald was also named after his deceased sister, Louise Scott Fitzgerald, one of two sisters who died shortly before his birth.[2] “Well, three months before I was born,” he wrote as an adult, “my mother lost her other two children … I think I started then to be a writer”.[3] His father, Edward Fitzgerald, descended from Irish and English ancestry,[4] and moved to St. Paul from Maryland after the American Civil War.[5] His mother was Mary “Molly” McQuillan Fitzgerald, the daughter of an Irish immigrant who had made his fortune in the wholesale grocery business.[6] Edward’s first cousin twice removed, Mary Surratt, was hanged in 1865 for conspiring to assassinate Abraham Lincoln.[7]
