F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was born on September 24, 1896, in St. Paul, Minnesota. Though both his parents were Irish Catholics they came from very different social backgrounds. His father, Edward, was descended from a long line of cultivated if impoverished Maryland gentry. His mother, née Mollie McQuillan, was the offspring of self-made immigrants who had prospered in the wholesale grocery business. When the child was two the family moved to upstate New York, where Edward Fitzgerald worked as a salesman for Procter and Gamble. In 1908 the Fitzgeralds returned to St. Paul, and twelve-year-old Scott enrolled in St. Paul Academy; later he attended the Newman School, a Catholic prep school in Hackensack, New Jersey. Handsome and ambitious, Fitzgerald was a precocious and self-centered youth who proved unpopular with his peers. “I didn’t know till fifteen that there was anyone in the world except me, and it cost me plenty,” he recalled.
In 1913 Fitzgerald entered Princeton University. Although he never graduated, his college years were crucial to Fitzgerald’s development as a writer. He formed friendships with classmates such as John Peale Bishop, an early literary mentor, and Edmund Wilson, who became his “intellectual conscience.” He wrote lyrics for musical revues produced by the school’s famous Triangle Club and contributed plays and short stories to The Nassau Literary Magazine.
In 1917 Fitzgerald left Princeton and joined the army, receiving an infantry commission as a second lieutenant. In 1918, while stationed near Montgomery, Alabama, he met a capricious Southern belle named Zelda Sayre at a country-club dance, and the two began a stormy courtship. All the while Fitzgerald worked feverishly on a first novel called The Romantic Egotist, subsequently retitled This Side of Paradise. “I know I’ll wake some morning and find that the debutantes have made me famous overnight,” he said in a letter to Edmund Wilson, adding, “I really believe that no one else could have written so searchingly the story of the youth of our generation.”
Indeed, the appearance of This Side of Paradise in 1920 brought Fitzgerald instant success. The book established him as the prophet and golden boy of the newly dawned Jazz Age. Flappers and Philosophers (1920), a collection of short stories, immediately solidified his reputation. The same year he wed Zelda Sayre, who gave birth to a daughter, Scottie, eighteen months later. In 1922 Fitzgerald brought out another novel, The Beautiful and Damned, and a second volume of stories, Tales of the Jazz Age. The couple settled for a time on Long Island, and in 1924 they journeyed to France, where Fitzgerald wrote The Great Gatsby (1925). The Fitzgeralds quickly made friends with a number of expatriate Americans, including a then unknown writer named Ernest Hemingway, who became Fitzgerald’s “artistic conscience.” Though he published a third collection of stories, All the Sad Young Men (1926), the author’s heavy drinking and destructive marriage took an increasing toll on his writing.
By 1930, when Zelda suffered a complete mental breakdown, the couple’s extravagantly led life read like scenes from Fitzgerald’s fiction. “Sometimes I don’t know whether Zelda and I are real or whether we are characters in one of my novels,” he confessed. Struggling against a mountain of debt, he wrote Tender Is the Night (1934) as well as scores of short stories, some of which were included in his final collection, Taps at Reveille (1935), before announcing his own “emotional bankruptcy” in a series of confessional essays, beginning with “The Crack-Up,” which appeared in Esquire magazine. In 1937 Fitzgerald resettled in Los Angeles, where he had worked periodically as a screenwriter. He died there suddenly of a heart attack on December 21, 1940. The Last Tycoon, an unfinished novel about Hollywood, came out in 1941. Several works drawn from his unpublished papers appeared posthumously, notably The Letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald (1963), Dear Scott/Dear Max (1963), As Ever, Scott Fitz— (1972), The Notebooks of F. Scott Fitzgerald (1978), and Correspondence of F. Scott Fitzgerald (1980). Zelda died in a hospital fire on March 10, 1948.
“Fitzgerald lived in his great moments, and lived in them again when he reproduced their drama,” observed critic Malcolm Cowley, “but he also stood apart from them and coldly reckoned their causes and consequences. That is his irony, and it is one of his distinguishing marks as a writer. He took part in the ritual orgies of his time, but he kept a secretly detached position. . . . Always he cultivated a double vision. In his novels and stories he was trying to intensify the glitter of life in the Princeton eating clubs, on the north shore of Long Island, in Hollywood, and on the Riviera; he surrounded his characters with a mist of admiration, and at the same time he kept driving the mist away. . . . It was as if all his fiction described a big dance to which he had taken, as he once wrote, the prettiest girl . . . and as if he stood at the same time outside the ballroom, a little Midwestern boy with his nose to the glass, wondering how much the tickets cost and who paid for the music.”