Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald

A BIOGRAPHY OF F SCOTT FITZGERALD
Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, on September 24, 1896. His father, Edward, was from Maryland, with an allegiance to the Old South and its values. Fitzgerald’s mother, Mary (Mollie) McQuillan, was the daughter of an Irish immigrant who became wealthy as a wholesale grocer in St. Paul. Both were Catholics.
Edward Fitzgerald failed as a manufacturer of wicker furniture in St. Paul, and 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 on Mollie Fitzgerald’s inheritance. Fitzgerald attended the St. Paul Academy; his first writing to appear in print was a detective story in the school newspaper when he was thirteen.
Fitzgerald’s family background was not really wealthy. All his life he was on the edges of wealthy society but without the secure wealth or family connections to make him truly belong. Also he always remembered how his father’s dismissal from Proctor and Gamble left him a broken man. He knew that wealth and financial security could disappear overnight.
During 1911-1913 he attended a Catholic prep school in New Jersey, where he met Father Sigourney Fay, who encouraged his ambitions for personal distinction and achievement. At Princeton University Fitzgerald neglected his studies for his literary apprenticeship. Fitzgerald left University in 1917 to join the army (the US had entered World War One) and was commissioned a second lieutenant in the infantry. Convinced that he would die in the war, he rapidly wrote a novel, “The Romantic Egotist”.
In June 1918 Fitzgerald was assigned to Camp Sheridan, near Montgomery, Alabama. There he fell in love with a celebrated belle, eighteen-year-old Zelda Sayre, the youngest daughter of an Alabama Supreme Court judge. The romance intensified Fitzgerald’s hopes for the success of his novel, but after revision it was rejected by Scribners for a second time. The war ended just before he was to be sent overseas; after his discharge in 1919 he went to New York City to seek his fortune in order to marry. Unwilling to wait while Fitzgerald succeeded in the advertisement business and unwilling to live on his small salary, Zelda Sayre broke their engagement.
Fitzgerald quit his job in July 1919 and returned to St. Paul to rewrite his novel as This Side of Paradise. It was accepted by editor Maxwell Perkins of Scribners in September. Set mainly at Princeton and described by its author as “a quest novel,” This Side of Paradise traces the career aspirations and love disappointments of Amory Blaine.
The publication of This Side of Paradise on March 26, 1920, made the twenty-four-year-old Fitzgerald famous almost overnight, and a week later he married Zelda Sayre in New York. Fitzgerald was famous but not really that rich and his lifestyle with Zelda was well beyond his income. They embarked on an extravagant life as young celebrities. The Fitzgeralds took an apartment in New York City where he wrote his second novel, The Beautiful and Damned, a naturalistic chronicle of the dissipation of Anthony and Gloria Patch. When Zelda Fitzgerald became pregnant they took their first trip to Europe in 1921 and then settled in St. Paul for the birth of their only child, Frances Scott (Scottie) Fitzgerald, who was born in October 1921.
Next Fitzgerald planned to become rich by writing a play for Broadway but the play was not a success. In the fall of 1922 they moved to Great Neck, Long Island, in order to be near Broadway (New York). The distractions of Great Neck and New York prevented Fitzgerald from making progress on his third novel. During this time his drinking increased. He was an alcoholic, but he wrote sober. Zelda Fitzgerald regularly got “tight,” but she was not an alcoholic. There were frequent domestic rows, usually triggered by drinking bouts.
Seeking the calm needed for his work, the Fitzgeralds moved to France in the spring of 1924. There he wrote The Great Gatsby during the summer and fall in Valescure near St. Raphael. In France the Fitzgeralds’ rocky marriage was further damaged by Zelda’s involvement with a French naval aviator.
The Fitzgeralds spent the winter of 1924-1925 in Rome, where he revised The Great Gatsby; they were en route to Paris when the novel was published in April. The Great Gatsby marked a striking advance in Fitzgerald’s technique, utilizing a complex structure and a controlled narrative point of view. Fitzgerald’s achievement received critical praise, but sales of Gatsby were disappointing, though the stage and movie rights brought additional income. It is now widely regarded as Fitzgerald’s greatest novel.
The Fitzgeralds remained in France until the end of 1926, alternating between Paris and the Riviera. Fitzgerald made little progress on his fourth novel, a study of American expatriates in France. During these years Zelda Fitzgerald’s unconventional behaviour became increasingly eccentric.
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. Work on the novel was again suspended as he wrote short stories to pay for her psychiatric treatment.
The Fitzgeralds returned to America in the fall of 1931 and rented a house in Montgomery. Fitzgerald made a second unsuccessful trip to Hollywood in 1931. Zelda Fitzgerald suffered a relapse in February 1932 and entered Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. 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. Fitzgerald rented “La Paix,” a house outside Baltimore, where he completed his fourth novel, Tender Is the Night. Published in 1934, his most ambitious novel was a commercial failure, and its merits were matters of critical dispute. Set in France during the 1920s, Tender Is the Night examines the deterioration of Dick Diver, a brilliant American psychiatrist, during the course of his marriage to a wealthy mental patient.
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 went to Hollywood alone in the summer of 1937 with a six-month Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer screenwriting contract at $1,000 a week. The $91,000 he earned from MGM was a great deal of money during the late Depression years but, although Fitzgerald paid off most of his debts, he was unable to save. After MGM dropped his option at the end of 1938, Fitzgerald worked as a freelance script writer and wrote short-short stories for Esquire. He began his Hollywood novel, The Love of the Last Tycoon, in 1939 and had written more than half of a working draft when he died of a heart attack on December 21, 1940. Zelda Fitzgerald died in a fire at Highland Hospital in 1948.
Zelda and Scott's grave in Rockville, Maryland, is inscribed with the final sentence of The Great Gatsby
F. Scott Fitzgerald died believing himself a failure. The obituaries were condescending, and he seemed destined for literary obscurity. By 1960, however, he had achieved a secure place among America’s enduring writers. The Great Gatsby, a work that seriously examines the theme of aspiration in an American setting, has become regarded as a great American novel.
More Background to The Great Gatsby
The character of Daisy is partly based on Zelda. Gatsby is rejected by Daisy for financial reasons in 1917. He re-enters her life in financial triumph, and now that he is wealthy, Daisy becomes his lover. All this closely mirrors Fitzgerald's own experiences with Zelda. However, Daisy is also largely modelled on an earlier girl Fitzgerald fell in love with when he was 19.
Ginevra King (1898-1980), the daughter of a wealthy Chicago businessman, grew up amidst the Chicago social scene. Ginevra first met Fitzgerald while visiting her roommate from Westover, Marie Hershey, in St. Paul, Minnesota in 1915. She was 17, Fitzgerald was 19. According to letters and diary entries, they both fell in love. They sent letters back and forth for months, and their passionate romance continued until January 1917. In August 1916, Fitzgerald first wrote down the words, thought to have been said to him by Ginevra’s father: "Poor boys shouldn't think of marrying rich girls."
On July 15, 1918, Ginevra wrote to Fitzgerald, telling of her engagement to William Mitchell, the son of her father's business associate. They married later that year and had three children. In 1937 she left Mitchell for businessman John T. Pirie, Jr. That year she also met Fitzgerald for the last time in Hollywood; when she asked him which character was based on her in the novel The Beautiful and the Damned, Fitzgerald replied, "Which bitch do you think you are?"
The writing of The Great Gatsby
Fitzgerald started planning it in June 1922 and began the writing in 1923. He ended up discarding most of a false start, some of which would resurface in the story "Absolution."[2] Unlike his previous works, Fitzgerald intended to edit and reshape Gatsby thoroughly, believing that it held the potential to launch him toward literary acclaim. He told his editor Max Perkins that the novel was a "consciously artistic achievement" and a "purely creative work — not trashy imaginings as in my stories but the sustained imagination of a sincere and yet radiant world." He added later, during the editing process, that he felt "an enormous power in me now, more than I've ever had." [3]
After the birth of their child, the Fitzgeralds moved to Great Neck, Long Island in October 1922, appropriating Great Neck as the setting for The Great Gatsby. Fitzgerald's neighbors included such newly-wealthy New Yorkers as writer Ring Lardner, actor Lew Fields and comedian Ed Wynn.[4] Great Neck, on the shores of Long Island Sound, sat across a bay from Manhasset Neck or Cow Neck Peninsula, which was home to many of New York's wealthiest established families. In his novel, Great Neck became the new-money peninsula of "West Egg" and Manhasset Neck the old-money peninsula of "East Egg".[5]
Progress on the novel was slow. In May 1924, the Fitzgeralds moved to the French Riviera, where he completed the novel. In November, he sent the draft to his publisher Perkins and his agent Harold Ober. The Fitzgeralds again relocated, this time to Rome, for the winter. Fitzgerald made revisions through the winter after Perkins informed him that the novel was too vague and Gatsby's biographical section too long. Content after a few rounds of revision, Fitzgerald returned the final batch of revised galleys in the middle of February 1925.[6]