F. Scott Fitzgerald

Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald (September 24, 1896 â€" December 21, 1940) was an American author of novels and short stories, whose works are the paradigmatic writings of the Jazz Age. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century. Fitzgerald is considered a member of the "Lost Generation" of the 1920s. He finished four novels: This Side of Paradise, The Beautiful and Damned, The Great Gatsby (his best known), and Tender Is the Night. A fifth, unfinished novel, The Love of the Last Tycoon, was published posthumously. Fitzgerald also wrote many short stories that treat themes of youth and promise along with age and despair.

Fitzgerald's work has been adapted into films many times. His short story, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, was the basis for a 2008 film. Tender Is the Night was the subject of the eponymous 1962 film, and made into a television miniseries in 1985. The Beautiful and Damned was filmed in 1922 and 2010. The Great Gatsby has been the basis for numerous films of the same name, spanning nearly 90 years: 1926, 1949, 1974, 2000, and 2013 adaptations. In addition, Fitzgerald's own life from 1937 to 1940 was dramatized in 1958 in Beloved Infidel.

Life and career

Born in 1896 in Saint Paul, Minnesota, to an upper-middle-class family, Fitzgerald was named after his famous second cousin, three times removed, Francis Scott Key, but was referred to by the familiar moniker Scott Fitzgerald. He was also named after his deceased sister, Louise Scott, one of two sisters who died shortly before his birth. "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." His parents were Mollie (McQuillan) and Edward Fitzgerald. His mother was of Irish descent, and his father had Irish and English ancestry.

Fitzgerald spent the first decade of his childhood primarily in Buffalo, New York (1898â€"1901 and 1903â€"1908, with a short interlude in Syracuse, New York between January 1901 and September 1903). His parents, both Catholic, sent Fitzgerald to two Catholic schools on the West Side of Buffalo, first Holy Angels Convent (1903â€"1904, now disused) and then Nardin Academy (1905â€"1908). His formative years in Buffalo revealed him to be a boy of unusual intelligence and drive with a keen early interest in literature. His doting mother ensured that her son had all the advantages of an upper-middle-class upbringing. In a rather unconventional style of parenting, Fitzgerald attended Holy Angels with the peculiar arrangement that he go for only half a dayâ€"and was allowed to choose which half.

In 1908, his father was fired from Procter & Gamble, and the family returned to Minnesota, where Fitzgerald attended St. Paul Academy in St. Paul from 1908 to 1911. When he was 13 he saw his first piece of writing appear in printâ€"a detective story published in the school newspaper. In 1911, when Fitzgerald was 15 years old, his parents sent him to the Newman School, a prestigious Catholic prep school in Hackensack, New Jersey. Fitzgerald played on the 1912 Newman football team. At Newman, he met Father Sigourney Fay, who noticed his incipient talent with the written word and encouraged him to pursue his literary ambitions.

After graduating from the Newman School in 1913, Fitzgerald decided to stay in New Jersey to continue his artistic development at Princeton University. Fitzgerald tried out for the college football team, but was cut the first day of practice. At Princeton, he firmly dedicated himself to honing his craft as a writer. There he became friends with future critics and writers Edmund Wilson (Class of 1916) and John Peale Bishop (Class of 1917), and wrote for the Princeton Triangle Club, the Nassau Lit, and the Princeton Tiger. He also was involved in the American Whig-Cliosophic Society, which ran the Nassau Lit. His absorption in the Triangleâ€"a kind of musical-comedy societyâ€"led to his submission of a novel to Charles Scribner's Sons where the editor praised the writing but ultimately rejected the book. He was a member of the University Cottage Club, which still displays Fitzgerald's desk and writing materials in its library.

Fitzgerald's writing pursuits at Princeton came at the expense of his coursework. He was placed on academic probation, and in 1917 he dropped out of school to join the U.S. Army. Afraid that he might die in World War I with his literary dreams unfulfilled, in the weeks before reporting for duty Fitzgerald hastily wrote a novel called The Romantic Egotist. Although the publisher Charles Scribner's Sons rejected the novel, the reviewer noted its originality and encouraged Fitzgerald to submit more work in the future.

Zelda Fitzgerald

Fitzgerald was commissioned a second lieutenant in the infantry and assigned to Camp Sheridan outside of Montgomery, Alabama. While at a country club, Fitzgerald met and fell in love with Zelda Sayre (1900â€"1948), the daughter of an Alabama Supreme Court justice and the "golden girl," in Fitzgerald's terms, of Montgomery youth society. The war ended in 1918, before Fitzgerald was ever deployed, and upon his discharge he moved to New York City hoping to launch a career in advertising that would be lucrative enough to convince Zelda to marry him. He worked for the Barron Collier advertising agency, living in a single room at 200 Claremont Avenue in the Morningside Heights neighborhood on Manhattan's west side.

Zelda accepted his marriage proposal, but after some time and despite working at an advertising firm and writing short stories, he was unable to convince her that he would be able to support her, leading her to break off the engagement. Fitzgerald returned to his parents' house at 599 Summit Avenue, on Cathedral Hill, in St. Paul, to revise The Romantic Egoist, recast as This Side of Paradise, a semi-autobiographical account of Fitzgerald's undergraduate years at Princeton. Fitzgerald was so short of money that he took up a job repairing car roofs. His revised novel was accepted by Scribner's in the fall of 1919 and was published on March 26, 1920 and became an instant success, selling 41,075 copies in the first year. It launched Fitzgerald's career as a writer and provided a steady income suitable to Zelda's needs. They resumed their engagement and were married at St. Patrick's Cathedral, New York. Their daughter and only child, Frances Scott "Scottie" Fitzgerald, was born on October 26, 1921.

"The Jazz Age"

Paris in the 1920s proved the most influential decade of Fitzgerald's development. Fitzgerald made several excursions to Europe, mostly Paris and the French Riviera, and became friends with many members of the American expatriate community in Paris, notably Ernest Hemingway. Fitzgerald's friendship with Hemingway was quite vigorous, as many of Fitzgerald's relationships would prove to be. Hemingway did not get on well with Zelda. In addition to describing her as "insane" he claimed that she "encouraged her husband to drink so as to distract Fitzgerald from his work on his novel", the other work being the short stories he sold to magazines. Like most professional authors at the time, Fitzgerald supplemented his income by writing short stories for such magazines as The Saturday Evening Post, Collier's Weekly, and Esquire, and sold his stories and novels to Hollywood studios. This "whoring", as Fitzgerald and, subsequently, Hemingway called these sales, was a sore point in the authors' friendship. Fitzgerald claimed that he would first write his stories in an authentic manner but then put in "twists that made them into salable magazine stories".

Although Fitzgerald's passion lay in writing novels, only his first novel sold well enough to support the opulent lifestyle that he and Zelda adopted as New York celebrities. (The Great Gatsby, now considered to be his masterpiece, did not become popular until after Fitzgerald's death.) Because of this lifestyle, as well as the bills from Zelda's medical care when they came, Fitzgerald was constantly in financial trouble and often required loans from his literary agent, Harold Ober, and his editor at Scribner's, Maxwell Perkins. When Ober decided not to continue advancing money to Fitzgerald, the author severed ties with his longtime friend and agent. (Fitzgerald offered a good-hearted and apologetic tribute to this support in the late short story "Financing Finnegan".)

Fitzgerald began working on his fourth novel during the late 1920s but was sidetracked by financial difficulties that necessitated his writing commercial short stories, and by the schizophrenia that struck Zelda in 1930. Her emotional health remained fragile for the rest of her life. In February 1932, she was hospitalized at the Phipps Clinic at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, Maryland. During this time, Fitzgerald rented the "La Paix" estate in the suburb of Towson, Maryland to work on his latest book, the story of the rise and fall of Dick Diver, a promising young psychiatrist who falls in love with and marries Nicole Warren, one of his patients. The book went through many versions, the first of which was to be a story of matricide. Some critics have seen the book as a thinly-veiled autobiographical novel recounting Fitzgerald's problems with his wife, the corrosive effects of wealth and a decadent lifestyle, his own egoism and self-confidence, and his continuing alcoholism. Indeed, Fitzgerald was extremely protective of his "material" (i.e., their life together). When Zelda wrote and sent to Scribner's her own fictional version of their lives in Europe, Save Me the Waltz, Fitzgerald was angry and was able to make some changes prior to the novel's publication, and convince her doctors to keep her from writing any more about what he called his "material", which included their relationship. His book was finally published in 1934 as Tender Is the Night. Critics who had waited nine years for the followup to The Great Gatsby had mixed opinions about the novel. Most were thrown off by its three-part structure and many felt that Fitzgerald had not lived up to their expectations. The novel did not sell well upon publication but, like the earlier Gatsby, the book's reputation has since risen significantly. Fitzgerald's alcoholism and financial difficulties, in addition to Zelda's mental illness, made for difficult years in Baltimore. He was hospitalized nine times at Johns Hopkins Hospital, and his friend H.L. Mencken noted in a 1934 letter that "The case of F. Scott Fitzgerald has become distressing. He is boozing in a wild manner and has become a nuisance."

Hollywood years

In 1937, Fitzgerald moved to Hollywood, and he made his highest annual income thus far of $29,757.87. He made most of his earnings on the sales of short stories. Besides writing, he also started to get involved in the film industry. Although he reportedly found movie work degrading, Fitzgerald was once again in dire financial straits, and spent the second half of the 1930s in Hollywood, working on commercial short stories, scripts for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (including some unfilmed work on Gone with the Wind), and his fifth and final novel, The Love of the Last Tycoon. Published posthumously as The Last Tycoon, it was based on the life of film executive Irving Thalberg. Among his other film projects was Madame Curie, for which he received no credit. In 1939, MGM ended the contract, and Fitzgerald became a freelance screenwriter. However, during all this, Fitzgerald's alcoholic tendencies still remained, and conflict with Zelda surfaced. Fitzgerald and Zelda became estranged; she continued living in mental institutions on the East Coast, while he lived with his lover Sheilah Graham, the gossip columnist, in Hollywood. In addition, records from the 1940 US Census reflect that he was officially living at the estate of Edward Everett Horton in Encino, California in the San Fernando Valley. From 1939 until his death in 1940, Fitzgerald mocked himself as a Hollywood hack through the character of Pat Hobby in a sequence of 17 short stories, later collected as "The Pat Hobby Stories", which garnered many positive reviews. The Pat Hobby Stories were published in The Esquire and appeared from January 1940 to July 1941, even after Fitzgerald died.

Illness and death

Fitzgerald had been an alcoholic since his college days, and became notorious during the 1920s for his extraordinarily heavy drinking, leaving him in poor health by the late 1930s. According to Zelda's biographer, Nancy Milford, Fitzgerald claimed that he had contracted tuberculosis, but Milford dismisses it as a pretext to cover his drinking problems. However, Fitzgerald scholar Matthew J. Bruccoli contends that Fitzgerald did in fact have recurring tuberculosis, and according to Nancy Milford, Fitzgerald biographer Arthur Mizener said that Fitzgerald suffered a mild attack of tuberculosis in 1919, and in 1929 he had "what proved to be a tubercular hemorrhage". It has been said that the hemorrhage was caused by bleeding from esophageal varices.

Fitzgerald suffered two heart attacks in the late 1930s. After the first, in Schwab's Drug Store, he was ordered by his doctor to avoid strenuous exertion. He moved in with Sheilah Graham, who lived in Hollywood on North Hayworth Avenue, one block east of Fitzgerald's apartment on North Laurel Avenue. Fitzgerald had two flights of stairs to climb to his apartment; Graham's was on the ground floor. On the night of December 20, 1940, Fitzgerald and Sheilah Graham attended the premiere of This Thing Called Love starring Rosalind Russell and Melvyn Douglas. As the two were leaving the Pantages Theater, Fitzgerald experienced a dizzy spell and had trouble leaving the theater; upset, he said to Graham, "They think I am drunk, don't they?"

The following day, as Fitzgerald ate a candy bar and made notes in his newly arrived Princeton Alumni Weekly, Graham saw him jump from his armchair, grab the mantelpiece, gasp, and fall to the floor. She ran to the manager of the building, Harry Culver, founder of Culver City. Upon entering the apartment to assist Fitzgerald, he stated, "I'm afraid he's dead." Fitzgerald had died of a heart attack. His body was moved to the Pierce Brothers Mortuary.

Among the attendants at a visitation held at a funeral home 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. His body was transported to Maryland, where his funeral was attended by twenty or thirty people in Bethesda; among the attendants were his only child, Frances "Scottie" Fitzgerald Lanahan Smith (then age 19), and his editor, Maxwell Perkins. Fitzgerald was originally buried in Rockville Union Cemetery. Zelda died in 1948, in a fire at the Highland Mental Hospital in Asheville, North Carolina. Scottie Smith worked to overturn the Archdiocese of Baltimore's ruling that Fitzgerald died a non-practicing Catholic, so that he could be buried at the Roman Catholic Saint Mary's Cemetery where his father's family was interred; this involved "re-Catholicizing" Fitzgerald after his death. Both of the Fitzgeralds' remains were moved to the family plot in the cemetery of Saint Mary's Church, in Rockville, Maryland, in 1975.

Fitzgerald died before he could complete The Love of the Last Tycoon. His manuscript, which included extensive notes for the unwritten part of the novel's story, was edited by his friend, the literary critic Edmund Wilson, and published in 1941 as The Last Tycoon. In 1994 the book was reissued under the original title The Love of the Last Tycoon, which is now agreed to have been Fitzgerald's preferred title.

Legacy

Fitzgerald's work has inspired writers ever since he was first published. The publication of The Great Gatsby prompted T. S. Eliot to write, in a letter to Fitzgerald, "[I]t seems to me to be the first step that American fiction has taken since Henry James ...". Don Birnam, the protagonist of Charles Jackson's The Lost Weekend, says to himself, referring to The Great Gatsby, "There's no such thing ... as a flawless novel. But if there is, this is it." In letters written in the 1940s, J. D. Salinger expressed admiration of Fitzgerald's work, and his biographer Ian Hamilton wrote that Salinger even saw himself for some time as "Fitzgerald's successor". Richard Yates, a writer often compared to Fitzgerald, called The Great Gatsby "the most nourishing novel [he] read ... a miracle of talent ... a triumph of technique". It was written in a New York Times editorial after his death that Fitzgerald "was better than he knew, for in fact and in the literary sense he invented a generation ... He might have interpreted them and even guided them, as in their middle years they saw a different and nobler freedom threatened with destruction."

Into the 21st century, millions of copies of The Great Gatsby and his other works have been sold, and Gatsby, a constant best-seller, is required reading in many high school and college classes.

Fitzgerald is a 2009 inductee of the New Jersey Hall of Fame. He is also the namesake of the Fitzgerald Theater in St. Paul, Minnesota, home of the radio broadcast of A Prairie Home Companion.

Fitzgerald is the first cousin once removed of Mary Surratt, hanged in 1865 for conspiring to assassinate Abraham Lincoln.

Portrayals

A musical about the lives of Fitzgerald and wife Zelda Fitzgerald was composed by Frank Wildhorn entitled Waiting for the Moon, formerly known as Zelda, followed by Scott & Zelda: The Other Side Of Paradise. The musical shows their lives from when they first met, through Fitzgerald's career, their lives together (the good and bad), to both of their deaths. The musical made its world premiere at the Lenape Regional Performing Arts Center in a production that ran from July 20, 2005 through July 31, 2005. It starred Broadway veteran actors Jarrod Emick as Fitzgerald and Lauren Kennedy as Zelda.

The Japanese Takarazuka Revue has also created a musical adaptation of Fitzgerald's life. Entitled The Last Party: S. Fitzgerald's Last Day, it was produced in 2004 and 2006. Yuhi Oozora and YÅ«ga Yamato starred as Fitzgerald, while Zelda was played by Kanami Ayano and Rui Shijou.

Fitzgerald was portrayed by the actor Malcolm Gets in the 1994 film Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle.

Others include the TV movies Zelda (1993, with Timothy Hutton), F. Scott Fitzgerald in Hollywood (1976, with Jason Miller), and F. Scott Fitzgerald and 'The Last of the Belles' (1974, with Richard Chamberlain).

A film based on Fitzgerald and Zelda's relationship called "The Beautiful and the Damned" (not an adaptation of the novel "The Beautiful And Damned") was announced for a 2011 release by director John Curran.

The last years of Fitzgerald and his affair with Sheilah Graham, the Hollywood gossip columnist, was the theme of the movie Beloved Infidel (1959). The film depicts Fitzgerald (played by Gregory Peck) during his final years as a Hollywood scenarist and his relationship with Ms. Graham (played by Deborah Kerr), with whom he had a years-long affair, while his wife, Zelda, was institutionalized.

Another film, Last Call (2002) (Jeremy Irons plays Fitzgerald) describes the relationship with Frances Kroll (Neve Campbell) during his last two years of life. The film was based on the memoir of Frances Kroll Ring, titled Against the Current: As I Remember F. Scott Fitzgerald (1985), that records her experience as secretary to Fitzgerald for the last 20 months of his life.

The standard biographies of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald are Arthur Mizener's The Far Side of Paradise (1951, 1965) and Matthew Bruccoli's Some Sort of Epic Grandeur (1981).

Fitzgerald's letters have also been published in various editions such as Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda: The Love Letters of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, ed. Jackson R. Bryer and Cathy W. Banks (2002); Correspondence of F. Scott Fitzgerald, ed. Matthew Bruccoli and Margaret Duggan (1980), and F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Life in Letters, ed. Matthew Bruccoli (1994).

A collection of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald's scrapbooks of photographs and reviews was compiled by Bruccoli and F. Scott and Zelda's daughter Frances "Scottie" Fitzgerald (as Scottie Fitzgerald Smith) in a book The Romantic Egoists (1976).

Fitzgerald appears alongside Pablo Picasso and Ernest Hemingway in the play Villa America by British playwright Crispin Whittell, which premiered at Williamstown Theatre Festival (2007).

Tom Hiddleston and Alison Pill appear briefly as Fitzgerald and Zelda in Woody Allen's 2011 feature film Midnight in Paris.

Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald appear alongside Ernest Hemingway, Hadley Hemingway, Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound in the novel The Paris Wife by Paula McLain. The novel was adapted by Sheila Yeger for a 2011 BBC Radio 4 Woman's Hour Drama.

Stewart O'Nan's 2015 novel West of Sunset presents a detailed fictional account of Fitzgerald's final years as a Hollywood scriptwriter and his relationship with gossip columnist Sheilah Graham.

Bibliography

Novels

• This Side of Paradise (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1920)
• The Beautiful and Damned (New York: Scribners, 1922)
• The Great Gatsby (New York: Scribners, 1925)
• Tender Is the Night (New York: Scribners, 1934)
• The Love of the Last Tycoon â€" originally The Last Tycoon â€" (New York: Scribners, unfinished, published posthumously, 1941)

Novellas

• The Diamond as Big as the Ritz (1922) (in Tales of the Jazz Age)
• May Day (1922) (in Tales of the Jazz Age)

Short story collections

• Flappers and Philosophers (New York: Scribners, 1921)
• Tales of the Jazz Age (New York: Scribners, 1922)
• All the Sad Young Men (New York: Scribners, 1926)
• Taps at Reveille (New York: Scribners, 1935)
• Afternoon of an Author (New York: Scribners, 1957)
• Babylon Revisited and Other Stories (New York: Scribners, 1960)
• The Pat Hobby Stories (Esquire Magazine, 1940â€"41)
• The Basil and Josephine Stories (New York: Scribners, 1973)
• The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald (New York: Scribners, 1989)
• The Price Was High: Fifty Uncollected Stories (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1995)

Notable short stories

• "Bernice Bobs Her Hair" (1920) (in Flappers and Philosophers)
• "Head and Shoulders" (1920) (in Flappers and Philosophers)
• "The Ice Palace" (1920) (in Flappers and Philosophers and Babylon Revisited and Other Stories)
• "The Offshore Pirate" (1920) (in Flappers and Philosophers)
• "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" (1921) (in Tales of the Jazz Age)
• "Winter Dreams" (1922) (in All the Sad Young Men)
• "The Baby Party" (1925) (in All the Sad Young Men)
• "The Rich Boy" (1926) (in All the Sad Young Men)
• "The Freshest Boy" (1928) (in Taps at Reveille)
• "The Bridal Party" (1930)
• "A New Leaf" (1931)
• "Babylon Revisited" (1931) (in Babylon Revisited and Other Stories)
• "Crazy Sunday" (1932) (in Babylon Revisited and Other Stories)

Other notable works

• The Vegetable, or From President to Postman â€" Play (New York: Scribners, 1923)
• The Crack-Up â€" Collection of essays, notebook excerpts, and letters (New York: New Directions, 1945)

Cambridge Editions

Cambridge University Press has published the complete works of F. Scott Fitzgerald in authoritative annotated editions. The Cambridge Edition runs to fourteen volumes.

See also

Notes

References

• Bruccoli, Matthew Joseph (ed.) (2000), F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby: A Literary Reference, New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, ISBN 0-7867-0996-0 
• Bruccoli, Matthew Joseph (2002), Some Sort of Epic Grandeur: The Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald (2nd rev. ed.), Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, ISBN 1-57003-455-9 .
• Bryer, Jackson R.; Barks, Cathy W. (eds.) (2002), Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda: The Love Letters of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, New York: St. Martin's Press, ISBN 0-312-26875-0 .
• Cline, Sally (2003), Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in Paradise, New York: Arcade Publishing, ISBN 1-55970-688-0 .
• Curnutt, Kirk (ed.) (2004), A Historical Guide to F. Scott Fitzgerald, Oxford: Oxford University Press, ISBN 0-19-515302-2 
• Donaldson, Scott (1983), Fool for Love: F. Scott Fitzgerald, New York: Congdon and Weed, ISBN 0-312-92209-4 
• Michaux, Agnes (2006), Zelda, Paris, France: Flammarion, ISBN 978-2-08-068777-7 
• Milford, Nancy (1970), Zelda: A Biography, New York: Harper & Row .
• Mizener, Arthur (1951), The Far Side of Paradise: A Biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Boston: Houghton Mifflin .
• Prigozy, Ruth (ed.) (2002), The Cambridge Companion to F. Scott Fitzgerald, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ISBN 0-521-62447-9 
• Schiff, Jonathan (2001), Ashes to Ashes: Mourning and Social Difference in F. Scott Fitzgerald's Fiction, Selingsgrove, PA: Susquehanna University Press, ISBN 1-57591-046-2 
• Turnbull, Andrew (1962), Scott Fitzgerald, New York: Charles Scribner's Sons 
• Turnbull, Andrew (ed.) (1963), The Letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald, New York: Charles Scribner's Sons 

Further reading

• Glenday, Michael K. (2012), F. Scott Fitzgerald, London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, ISBN 978-0-333-66900-6

External links

• F. Scott Fitzgerald Papers at Princeton University
• F. Scott Fitzgerald Centenary pagesâ€"at the University of South Carolina
• Annotated Bibliographyâ€"at Scott-Fitzgerald.com
• Works by F. Scott Fitzgerald at Project Gutenberg
• Works by or about F. Scott Fitzgerald at Internet Archive
• Works by F. Scott Fitzgerald at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
• Online catalog of F. Scott Fitzgerald's personal library, online at LibraryThing
• F. Scott Fitzgerald at C-SPAN's American Writers: A Journey Through History
• F. Scott Fitzgerald discussed in Conversations from Penn State interview