About the Author

F. Scott Fitzgerald

American author Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald, or F. Scott Fitzgerald was born in St. Paul, Minnesota. His family was Irish Catholic, his mother's side wealthy. The family lived for some years in Buffalo and Syracuse; but in 1908, when Scott's father lost his job, they returned to St. Paul. For the most part, Scott was privately educated; he attended Newman School in Hackensack, N.J., from 1911 to 1913. 

Fitzgerald enrolled at Princeton University in 1913 and struck up enduring friendships with Edmund Wilson and John Peale Bishop. Because of ill health and low grades, he left college in 1915. He returned to Princeton in 1916 but left a year later without a degree and joined the Army with a second lieutenant's commission. Stationed in Alabama in 1918, he met Zelda Sayre, then 18 years old; he would marry her a few years later. After his Army discharge he took an advertising job briefly. Back home in St. Paul, he finished his first novel, This Side of Paradise, which was accepted by Scribner's in 1919, and that same year he had remarkable success placing nine short stories in leading commercial journals.

Upon publication of This Side of Paradise (1920), Fitzgerald married Sayre in New York City. Of this period he later recalled riding up Fifth Avenue in a cab--young, rich, famous, and in love (he might easily have added handsome)--suddenly bursting into tears because he knew he would never be so happy again. He was right. Despite great earnings and fame, he and Zelda lived luxuriously, dissolutely, and tragically.

A daughter was born in 1921 after the couple had spent some time in Europe. When Fitzgerald's second novel, The Beautiful and the Damned (1922), and a collection of short stories, Tales of the Jazz Age (1922), sold very well, they rented a house on Long Island and ran into debt because of their extravagance. Fitzgerald attempted to recoup by writing a play, The Vegetable (1923), but it flopped quickly. The Fitzgeralds went to Europe for over 2 years. The high points of this sojourn were publication of The Great Gatsby (1925) and the beginning of Scott's friendship with Ernest Hemingway. In 1927 Scott went to Hollywood on his first movie assignment. Afterward the Fitzgeralds again went abroad several times.

Zelda's first major nervous breakdown, in 1930, and treatment in a Swiss clinic became the basis for Fitzgerald's next novel, Tender Is the Night (1934). Zelda spent the rest of her life in and out of sanitariums, and Fitzgerald's own life ran a parallel disastrous course.

Fitzgerald earned over $400,000 between 1919 and 1934, but he and Zelda lived so expensively that they barely managed to cover their bills. When Tender Is the Night failed to excite interest, financial problems became acute; by 1937 Fitzgerald owed $40,000 despite continued earnings from magazine stories. Zelda had been permanently returned to the sanitarium in 1934; and the years 1935-1937 saw Fitzgerald's own descent--increasing alcoholism and physical illness--which he described with poignant candor in articles appearing in Esquire in the mid-1930s.

In 1937 Fitzgerald signed a movie contract at a weekly salary of $1,000. His liaison with gossip columnist Sheilah Graham during the last 3 years of his life is described in her Beloved Infidel (1958). But the heartbreak and dissolution took their toll, and after two heart attacks Fitzgerald died on Dec. 21, 1940. Zelda Fitzgerald died in a fire in 1947 at Highland Sanitarium, Asheville, N.C., leaving a novel, Save Me the Waltz (1932, American edition).

Beginning early in his life, F. Scott Fitzgerald strove to become a great writer. In a 1944 essay, "Thoughts on Being Bibliographed," Edmund Wilson wrote that Fitzgerald told him soon after college, "I want to be one of the greatest writers who have ever lived, don't you?" Although today most college-level American literature survey courses usually include at least one of his works, during Fitzgerald's lifetime he was regarded mainly as a portrayer of the 1920s Jazz Age and of flaming youth, but not as one of this country's most important writers. And while close to fifty thousand copies of his first novel, This Side of Paradise, were printed in 1920 and 1921, he was never a best-selling novelist. Fewer than twenty-nine thousand copies of The Great Gatsby and some fifteen thousand copies of Tender Is the Night were published in the United States during Fitzgerald's lifetime. By the time of his death in 1940, very few copies of his books were being sold, and he was earning his living as a free-lance film writer. Since then, however, Fitzgerald's popularity has increased dramatically.

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