A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W Y Z
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Life and Works: Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald (September 24, 1896 – December 21, 1940) was an Irish-American novelist and short story writer, known for his depictions of the Jazz Age (the 1920s). Fitzgerald is regarded as one of the greatest American writers of the twentieth century. In his own age, Fitzgerald was the self-styled spokesman of the "Lost Generation", or the Americans born in the 1890s who came of age during World War I. He finished four novels, left a fifth unfinished, and wrote dozens of short stories that treat themes of youth, despair, and age. Many admire what they consider his remarkable emotional honesty. His heroes—handsome, confident, and doomed—blaze brilliantly before exploding, and his heroines are typically beautiful, intricate, and alluring. Several of Fitzgerald's stories have been filmed. The Great Gatsby was adapted into screen first time in 1926, but the most famous version, starring Robert Redford and Mia Farrow, was made in 1974. Henry King's Tender is the Night (1962) is considered a thoughtful and absorbing romantic drama. The Last Tycoon (1976) was adopted by Harold Pinter and directed by Elia Kazan. Richard Brooks's The Last Time I Saw Paris (1954), starring Elizabeth Taylor and Van Johnson, was based on the short story Babylon Revisited. Born into a fairly well-to-do family in St Paul, Minnesota in 1896, of mixed Southern and Irish descent, Fitzgerald was named for his distant and famous relative Francis Scott Key, but was commonly known as 'Scott'. His father, Edward Fitzgerald, was a salesman, a Southern gentleman, whose furniture business had failed. Then he became a salesman for Procter & Gamble in upstate New York. After he was dismissed in 1908, when his son was twelve, the family returned to St. Paul and lived comfortably on Mollie Fitzgerald’s inheritance. Mary McQuillan, his mother, was the daughter of a successful wholesale grocer, and devoted to her only son. Fitzgerald attended Saint Paul Academy and Summit School in Saint Paul, Minnesota from 1908–1911. He then attended Newman School, a prep school in Hackensack, New Jersey, in 1911–12. Fitzgerald entered in 1913 Princeton University, where he failed to become a football hero. He entered as a member of the Class of 1917 and became friends with the future critics and writers Edmund Wilson and John Peale Bishop. He wrote the scripts and lyrics for the Princeton Triangle Club musicals and was a contributor to the Princeton Tiger humor magazine and the Nassau Literary Magazine. Saddled with academic difficulties throughout his three-year career at the university, Fitzgerald dropped out in 1917 to enlist in the United States Army when America entered World War I, but he never saw active service abroad. Convinced that he would die in the war, he rapidly wrote a novel, The Romantic Egotist; the letter of rejection from Charles Scribner’s Sons praised the novel’s originality and asked that it be resubmitted when revised. The war ended shortly after Fitzgerald's enlistment, and he was discharged without ever having been shipped to Europe. The turning point in his life was when he met in 1918 the beautiful Zelda Sayre, (1900–1948), of Montgomery, Alabama. She was the "top girl," in Fitzgerald's words, herself as aspiring writer. The two were engaged in 1919 and Fitzgerald moved into an apartment at 200 Claremont Avenue in New York City to try to lay a foundation for his life with Zelda. Working at an advertising firm and writing short stories, Fitzgerald was unable to convince Zelda that he would be able to support her. She broke off the engagement and Fitzgerald returned to his parents' house in St. Paul to revise The Romantic Egotist. Its hero, Armory Blaine, studies in Princeton, serves in WW I in France. At the end of the story he finds that his own egoism has been the cause of his unhappiness. Recast as This Side of Paradise, it was accepted by Scribner's in the fall of 1919, and Zelda and Scott resumed their engagement. The novel was published on March 26, 1920, and became one of the most popular books of the year, defining the flapper generation. Doors opened for Fitzgerald into literary magazines, such as Scribner's and The Saturday Evening Post, which published his stories, among them The Diamond as Big as the Ritz. The next week, Scott and Zelda were married in New York's St. Patrick's Cathedral. Fitzgerald's debts started to grow, and Zelda discovered that she was pregnant. Their daughter and only child, Frances Scott "Scotitbuse" Fitzgerald, was born on October 26, 1921. He followed his first success with The Beautiful and the Damned (1922), Fitzgerald's second novel, depicted Anthony Patch, an intelligent, sensitive but weak man. He spends his grandfather's money in drinking. In the end of the novel he has lost with his wife, Gloria, illusions of beauty and truth. The work was less well received and in 1924 Fitzgerald moved to Europe. In 1925 Fitzgerald published The Great Gatsby, probably his masterpiece. The Great Gatsby received excellent reviews but the book did not make the money Fitzgerald expected. He was drunk long periods. His reputation as a drinker inspired the myth that he was an irresponsible writer; yet he was a painstaking reviser whose fiction went through layers of drafts. Fitzgerald’s clear, lyrical, colorful, witty style evoked the emotions associated with time and place. Dramatized version of the book opened at the Ambassador Theatre in New York on February 2, 1926. The play's success made possible the sale of The Great Gatsby to the movies. The first film adaptation was made in the same year, directed by Herbert Brenon. It was also at this time that Fitzgerald wrote many of his short stories which helped to pay for his extravagant lifestyle. Fitzgerald made several famous excursions to Europe, notably Paris and the French Riviera, and became friends with many members of the American expatriate community in Paris, notably Ernest Hemingway. Fitzgerald drew largely upon his wife’s intense personality in his writings, at times quoting direct segments of her personal diaries in his work. Although Fitzgerald's passion lay in writing novels, they never sold well enough to support the opulent lifestyle that he and Zelda adopted as New York celebrities. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald did spend money faster than he earned it; the author who wrote so eloquently about the effects of money on character was unable to manage his own finances. To support this lifestyle, he turned to writing short stories for such magazines as the "Saturday Evening Post", "Collier's Magazine", and "Esquire magazine", and sold movie rights of his stories and novels to Hollywood studios. He was constantly in financial trouble and often required loans from his literary agent, Harold Ober, and his editor at "Scribner's", Maxwell Perkins. The Fitzgeralds returned to America to escape the distractions of France. After a short, unsuccessful stint of screen writing in Hollywood, Fitzgerald rented “Ellerslie,” a mansion near Wilmington, Delaware, in the spring of 1927. The family remained at “Ellerslie” for two years interrupted by a visit to Paris in the summer of 1928, but Fitzgerald was still unable to make significant progress on his novel. At this time Zelda Fitzgerald commenced ballet training, intending to become a professional dancer. The Fitzgeralds returned to France in the spring of 1929, where Zelda’s intense ballet work damaged her health and contributed to the couple’s estrangement. In April 1930 she suffered her first breakdown. She was treated at Prangins clinic in Switzerland until September 1931, while Fitzgerald lived in Swiss hotels. Work on the novel was again suspended as he wrote short stories to pay for psychiatric treatment. She spent the rest of her life as a resident or outpatient of sanitariums. In 1932, while a patient at Johns Hopkins, Zelda Fitzgerald rapidly wrote Save Me the Waltz. Her autobiographical novel generated considerable bitterness between the Fitzgeralds, for he regarded it as pre-empting the material that he was using in his novel-in-progress. In the same year Fitzgerald rented the "La Paix" estate in the suburb of Towson to work on his book, which had become the story of the rise and fall of Dick Diver, a promising young psychiatrist and his wife, Nicole, who is also one of his patients. It was published in 1934 as Tender is the Night. Critics regard it as one of Fitzgerald's finest works, but the book was not well received in America and he turned to script-writing in Hollywood for the final three years of his life. The 1936-1937 period is known as “the crack-up” from the title of an essay Fitzgerald wrote in 1936. Ill, drunk, in debt, and unable to write commercial stories, he lived in hotels in the region near Asheville, North Carolina, where in 1936 Zelda Fitzgerald entered Highland Hospital. Fitzgerald spent the second half of the 1930s in Hollywood, working on commercial short stories, scripts for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, and his fifth and final novel, The Love of the Last Tycoon, which is often published under the shortened title The Last Tycoon, based on the life of film executive Irving Thalberg. He and Zelda became estranged; she continued living in mental institutions on the east coast, while he lived with his lover Sheilah Graham, a gossip columnist, with whom he lived for the rest of his life. Fitzgerald worked on various screenplays, but completed only one, Three Comrades (1938), before he was fired because of his drinking. Always something of an alcoholic and consequently in poor health during the late 1930s, Fitzgerald suffered two heart attacks in late 1940. After the first he was ordered by his doctor to avoid strenuous exertion and to obtain a first floor apartment. As Sheilah Graham, his lover at the time, had an apartment on the first floor, he moved in with her. On the night of December 20, 1940 he had his second heart attack; but since the doctor was to come to his house the following day, he and Sheilah went home. On December 21, 1940, F. Scott Fitzgerald collapsed while clutching the mantlepiece in Sheilah Graham's apartment and died at the age of 44. His funeral was attended by very few people. Among the attendants was Dorothy Parker, who reportedly cried and murmured, "the poor son of a bitch," a line from Jay Gatsby's funeral in Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. Zelda died in a fire at the Highland mental institution in Asheville, North Carolina, in 1948. The two were originally buried in Rockville Union Cemetery but with the permission and assistance of their only child, Frances "Scotitbuse" Fitzgerald Lanahan Smith, the Women's Club of Rockville had their bodies moved to the family plot in Saint Mary's Cemetery, in Rockville, Maryland. |
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