F. Scott Fitzgerald

F. Scott Fitzgerald

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940), American writer who described the social climate of the 1920s in 160 short stories and four novels in which he sought to portray the rise and fall of the American Dream against the turbulent backdrop of the "Jazz Age" - a term that he first coined as the title of his essay, "Echoes of the Jazz Age" (1922).^[1] His most famous novel, The Great Gatsby (1925),^[2] is considered perhaps the greatest of 20th century literature. The Great Gatsby is complimentary towards the free market and capitalism, and to the loyalty of Gatsby to the woman he loved, Daisy.

F. Scott Fitzgerald was opposed to globalism, and broke from liberals over that issue:

His style is more poetic than that of his contemporaries Ernest Hemingway, whose style was simplistically plain, and William Faulkner, whose style was often insanely abstract.

Early life[edit]

Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was born on September 25, 1896 in Saint Paul, Minnesota, the son of an aristocrat who believed in the code of the Southern gentleman, and a "straight 1850 potato-famine Irish" middle-class mother, as he would later put it. His father named him after a distant relative, the author of the Star Spangled Banner. The mix of an unsuccessful father whom F. Scott admired^[4] (his father Edward lost his job as a salesman when F. Scott was 12 years old) and an energetic mother would cause young F. Scott to grow up with mixed feelings about America, looking at the country as very promising, yet coming up short. He lived in many ordinary homes in Saint Paul which are remarkably well-preserved today.^[5]

He had what he called "a heightened sensitivity to the promises of life" - he was a romantic - but his attempts to succeed were at best poor; the time spent at St. Paul Academy (1908–10) and Newman School (1911-13) made him unpopular. From Minnesota, Fitzgerald succeeded in being accepted at Princeton University where he came closest to realizing his dreams, becoming the center of literary circles, writing and producing (as well as acting) plays, and leading the Triangle Club; he would also meet and befriend the literary critic Edmund Wilson. It was at Princeton that he also met his first real love, Ginevra King; she would be identified as the character "Judy Jones" in his 1922 short, Winter Dreams. But, as in high school, his academic performance was poor; he was put on probation in 1916, and to make things worse was sent home due to a bout with malaria. Returning the following year he discovered the social positions he had coveted were gone and his class work was unacceptable. Also, his girlfriend Genevra, who was not at Princeton (it did not admit women at that time), had left him. November, 1917 had him leaving Princeton for the Army, where he managed to get a commission as a second lieutenant. Taking to drink, he began to grow despondent, expressing his despondency in his novels.

In July, 1918, he was stationed with a unit near Montgomery, Alabama, where he met Zelda Sayre, the eighteen-year-old daughter of a judge on Alabama's supreme court. Although they were in love with each other, Fitzgerald was determined to gain a measure of wealth so he could better support her. He went to New York, but the best he could do was $90 a month working for an advertising agency. Zelda, having grown tired of waiting, would break off the engagement, and Fitzgerald would end up back in St. Paul at his mother's house, while he worked on re-writing a previously-rejected novel he called "The Romantic Egotist."

Middle life[edit]

When he submitted it to Charles Scribner's Sons for the second time in 1920, it was published as This Side of Paradise,^[6] a critique of the upper class of which he had been a part as a youth after World War I. An overnight success, his first novel allowed his writings to emerge in high-quality, well-paying periodicals such as The Saturday Evening Post and Scribner's Magazine.

His new-found wealth enabled him to go back to Zelda, and a month after This Side of Paradise hit the stands they were married at St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York City. Honeymooning in New York, they soon discovered a lavish lifestyle and wild partying. The limelight was a place they both loved and were worried about at the same time, and soon Fitzgerald had his second novel which reflected on that subject. In The Beautiful and the Damned (1922)^[7] the central characters in that book have lived such a life, but "the book traces, at very great length, with much repetition of a not particularly profound subtle psychological analysis and numerous dissertations, the course of his (the main character Anthony Patch) mental, moral and physical disintegration."^[8] Such displays would surface in his private life; his abuse of alcohol put strains on his marriage and many friendships.

The Great Gatsby[edit]

In 1921 Zelda gave birth to a daughter, Francis, whom they both nicknamed "Scottie". In his ledger - which he kept up continually - Fitzgerald noted a remark made by Zelda prior to going into labor. "I hope it's beautiful and a fool," she said. "A beautiful little fool!" Fitzgerald used this remark and other portions of his life in his third novel, The Great Gatsby, a story told by the protagonist Nick Carraway of his single summer on Long Island and his fateful friendship with his next-door neighbor, Jay Gatsby, a self-made man who made it all just for the love of a woman who lived across the bay. He had the compulsive yet subtle insight of the femme fatale theme, the All-American banality of woman as destroyer.^[9]

The inspiration for the The Great Gatsby was Ginevra King, who was Fitzgerald's first love. Ginevra was from Chicago, and Fitzgerald first met her "at a snow-sledding party in St. Paul, Minnesota. He was a student at Princeton at the time but was on a visit to his home in St. Paul."^[10]

Unlike several of the works of F. Scott Fitzgerald, such as This Side of Paradise, The Great Gatsby is not yet in the public domain because it was published in 1925. It could enter the public domain on Jan. 1, 2021, unless copyright terms are extended again.

Later life[edit]

His success left Fitzgerald somewhat fearful of being too involved in it, so he left for Europe, settling with his family on the French Riviera. There he finished The Great Gatsby and had published All The Sad Young Men (1926), a collection of his best short stories. He also fell in with a group of American expatriate writers known as the "Lost Generation"; these writers included Gerald and Sara Murphy, and Ernest Hemingway. The Murphys would be models for the protagonists in his last completed novel, Tender is the Night (1934).

But Fitzgerald had a drinking problem, which got bad during his time in France, and was made worse when Zelda suffered a complete mental breakdown in 1930; she never recovered from a second breakdown two years later, and was in and out of sanitariums for the remainder of her life. In 1937 he was in Hollywood deep in debt, writing film scripts, contributing short stories to magazines such as the Saturday Evening Post, and working on The Last Tycoon, a book based on the life of producer Irving Thalberg. He also took up residence with gossip columnist Sheilah Graham, whom he had met while at a party to celebrate her own engagement. On December 21, 1940 he died of a massive heart attack, which some attribute to his tobacco use. He was buried in St. Mary's Cemetery, Rockville, Maryland. Zelda was buried with him after her death on March 10, 1948.

Despite being half-finished when he died, The Last Tycoon still showed his creative talent, and some critics have placed it on a higher par over The Great Gatsby. Edmund Wilson had successfully lobbied to get his works back into print, earning for Fitzgerald the acclaim he was due.

Screenplay[edit]

Fitzgerald wrote only one screenplay, which was an adaption of the novel Three Comrades (1929) by Erich Maria Remarque.^[11] The movie was praised by critics, more so over time, and commercially successful. Fitzgerald wrote the screenplay on a six-month contract with MGM for $1000 a week, beginning in July 1937. He completed and submitted two-thirds of it in September. The producer was Joseph Mankiewicz.

Fitzgerald's screenplay was strongly anti-Nazi, but was shockingly sanitized by Hollywood executives to remove anything critical of Nazi Germany.^[12] Released in 1938, the movie could have been the first by Hollywood to be critical of Nazi Germany. "At this critical historical moment, when a major Hollywood production could have alerted the world to what was going on in Germany, the director did not have the final cut; the Nazis did."^[12]

Fitzgerald preferred the format of short stories and novels and did write any additional screenplays.

Quotes[edit]

In his novel The Beautiful and Damned (1922), F. Scott Fitzgerald paraphrased a famous political saying in a pejorative, witty manner: "The victor belongs to the spoils." Fitzgerald also said:

See also[edit]

• Famous American writers
• F. Scott Fitzgerald Society

References[edit]

External links[edit]

• This Side of Paradise
• The Beautiful and the Damned
• The Great Gatsby
• Works by F. Scott Fitzgerald - text and free audio - LibriVox