F. Scott Fitzgerald | Biography, Books and Facts [Cite This] F. Scott Fitzgerald Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald, an author well known for his short stories and novels, was born on September 24th, 1896 in Saint Paul, Minnesota to an upper middle class family. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest writers American soil has produced in the 20th century. Being from a practicing Catholic family, Scott started his education from Catholic schools in 1903. Since early age Scott developed a reputation of being a boy with unusual aptitude and keen interest in literature. Young Scott’s first publication The Mystery of the Raymond Mortgage was a detective story issued in school’s newspaper at the age of 13. In 1913 Scott was enrolled in Princeton University where his love for theater and writing really came to the fore. He wrote many short stories for Princeton Tiger, a college humor magazine published by Princeton University and scripts for Princeton Triangle Club, a musical comedy society. His association with Triangle Club provided him with an opportunity to submit his first novel, The Romantic Egoist to Charles Scribner’s Sons a renowned publisher and editor of his time. Charles though praised the writing yet rejected the book.

Although, it proved to be a great success when finally published after three revisions as This Side of Paradise. In 1917 Fitzgerald left university to join army during World War I. However; war ended soon after his acceptance in army. In 1919 Scott moved to New York City after his discharge from the army. 1920’s was the most influential decade of Scott’s life. He got married with his ex-fiancée Zelda in 1920. They had a daughter Frances Scott in 1922. His masterpiece novel ‘The Great Gatsby’ was published in 1925. Scott had a number of excursions to Paris and developed close relations with many members of American community there. He also established acquaintance with Ernest Hemingway an American author and journalist. However this friendship remained shadowed mostly. The sore point of this friendship was that Hemingway never approved selling of Scott’s stories and novels to Hollywood studios. Many of Scott’s short stories are autobiographical reflection to his and Zelda’s relation.

His first collection of short stories ‘Flappers and Philosophers’ was published in 1920 followed by his second collection, ‘Tales of the Jazz Age’ in 1922. His second novel, The Beautiful and the Damned, also adapted to the screen, was published the same year. By the end of 20’s Scott had published three novels and had already begun his fourth one but was sidetracked by financial difficulties courtesy of his lavish life style. These crises necessitated his writing commercial short stories. This book was finally published in 1934 as Tender is the Night. Critics had mixed opinion about the novel. In the mid of 1930s, forced by his financial condition, Scott found himself working on commercial short stories and scripts for Hollywood. This gave him basis for his fifth and final novel which was published posthumously. Scott died before he could complete this novel and left behind extensive notes for the unwritten part. This manuscript was edited by his friend Edmund Wilson and in 1941 the book once started as The love of the Last Tycoon was published as The Last Tycoon.

On 21st December 1940 Fitzgerald died of a massive heart attack. His work has inspired writers ever since he was first published. T.S Eliot, one of the most important and admired poet of 20th century, wrote in his letter to Fitzgerald upon the publication of The Great Gatsby: “It seems to me to be the first step that American fiction has taken since Henry James “ Buy Books by F. Scott Fitzgerald On the Author of The Great Gatsby | Interesting Literature On the Author of The Great Gatsby Posted by interestingliterature To coincide with the imminent release of Baz Luhrmann’s new film adaptation of The Great Gatsby, we thought we’d offer some interesting facts about the author who wrote this masterpiece of the ‘Jazz Age’. (Left: composite picture of Fitzgerald, pictured right, with Ernest Hemingway.) F. Scott Fitzgerald’s full name was Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald – he was named after Francis Scott Key, the man who wrote the lyrics to the patriotic American song ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’, and a distant relation of the family.

(He was also the first cousin of Mary Surratt, a woman hanged in 1865 for conspiring to assassinate Abraham Lincoln.) Fitzgerald was born in Minnesota in 1896, and completed just four novels: This Side of Paradise (1920), The Beautiful and Damned (1922), The Great Gatsby (1925), and Tender is the Night (1934; the title of which was borrowed from John Keats’s ‘Ode to a Nightingale’). A fifth novel was left unfinished at his death: for many years this was known as The Last Tycoon, though it is more properly known by the full title The Love of the Last Tycoon, in keeping with Fitzgerald’s preferred choice of title. While in Paris with his wife, Zelda, in the 1920s, Fitzgerald became friends with numerous other writers, most notably Ernest Hemingway . Hemingway considered Zelda ‘insane’ (she would be hospitalised for schizophrenia in the 1930s) and a bad influence on Fitzgerald: Hemingway thought she encouraged her husband to drink when he should have been working.

Zelda returned the compliment by describing Hemingway’s early novel The Sun Also Rises, which she hated, as being about three things: ‘bullfighting, bull-slinging, and bullshitting’. Fitzgerald popularised the term ‘Jazz Age’ to describe 1920s America and the setting for The Great Gatsby (the ‘action’ of which takes place during 1922). Among the many working titles Fitzgerald considered for the novel were Gatsby, Gold-Hatted Gatsby, On the Road to West Egg, Trimalchio in West Egg, The High-Bouncing Lover (what a title!) and the title Fitzgerald almost insisted on at the last minute: Under the Red, White and Blue, which carries patriotic echoes of the song written by his distant relation and namesake. (However, he requested this change too late, so the former title stuck.) The Great Gatsby was first filmed in 1926, just one year after the novel was published, in a silent movie adaptation of the stage version. Although it is now the novel he is best remembered for, and is undoubtedly his masterpiece, his first novel, This Side of Paradise, was his bestselling book during his lifetime.

The Great Gatsby is a short novel, and is narrated by Nick Carraway, a Yale graduate (and veteran of WWI) who takes a house on Long Island next door to the mysterious eponymous millionaire, Jay Gatsby, known for throwing parties. We’re not here to offer spoilers for those who’ve yet to read the novel (or see the film), so we won’t say more than this. Suffice to say that the novel’s evocation of 1920s America, a time of prohibition, cocktails, and the ‘American Dream’, has helped to ensure its place among the great American novels of the twentieth century, or, indeed, any century. The actress Sigourney Weaver took her ‘stage’ name from Sigourney Howard, a minor character mentioned in The Great Gatsby (and the character’s name, ‘Mrs Signourney Howard’, actually refers to the husband, so Sigourney is a male given name in the novel). Before then, the name was rare – it still is – but Weaver’s adopting of the name has helped it to become a more popular girls’ name in the last thirty years.

Despite his talent for prose, Fitzgerald was reportedly a bad speller who spelt his friend’s name as ‘Earnest Hemminway’ and could not spell ‘definite’ correctly (instead falling into the common trap of spelling it ‘definate’). Towards the end of the 1930s, Fitzgerald began writing for Hollywood, although he considered such work degrading to someone who wished to write novels first and foremost. (However, much of his income in these later years came from sales of short stories.) Perhaps his most famous achievement in the film world was his work on the classic 1939 film Gone with the Wind – although, unfortunately, his contribution to the script was never actually filmed. During these final years, he drank bottles of Coca-Cola by the case, in an effort to stave off alcoholism. A year later, at the age of just 44, he died, four days before Christmas. It is now believed that he suffered from a form of tuberculosis, although this was thought at one stage to have been a cover for his heavy drinking during the 1920s.

However, he died of a heart attack – he had suffered two attacks earlier in his life, but this third was to kill him. At his funeral service, the American wit Dorothy Parker is supposed to have murmured, ‘the poor son-of-a-bitch’ (a quotation from The Great Gatsby). The Great Gatsby has been called a ‘Great American novel’, and the Modern Library Publishing House has stated that it is the second greatest novel of the twentieth century, behind James Joyce’s Ulysses. Whether this new film will become the definitive adaptation of this classic novel remains to be seen. Fitzgerald is credited, in the Oxford English Dictionary, with the first citations of the words T-shirt, daiquiri (a cocktail containing rum and lime, named after a region of Cuba), stinko (slang meaning ‘of a very low standard’), and even wicked (as in ‘excellent’ or ‘remarkable’). With the exception of stinko (which comes from a letter of 1924), all of these early uses of these words are found in Fitzgerald’s first novel, This Side of Paradise. Perhaps this earlier novel deserves more recognition? Share this: F.

Scott Fitzgerald Biography | List of Works, Study Guides & Essays | GradeSaver Fitzgerald, F. Scott Biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was a Jazz Age novelist and short story writer who is considered to be among the greatest twentieth-century American writers. Born on September 24, 1896, he was the only son of an aristocratic father and a provincial, working-class mother. He was the product of two divergent traditions: while his father's family included the author of "The Star-Spangled Banner" (after whom Fitzgerald was named), his mother's family was, in Fitzgerald's own words, "straight 1850 potato-famine Irish." As a result of this contrast, he was exceedingly ambivalent toward the notion of the American dream: for him, it was at once vulgar and dazzlingly promising. Like the central character of The Great Gatsby , Fitzgerald had an intensely romantic imagination; he once called it "a heightened sensitivity to the promises of life." The events of Fitzgerald's own life can be seen as a struggle to realize those promises. He attended both St.

Paul Academy (1908-10) and Newman School (1911-13), where his intensity and outsized enthusiasm made him unpopular with the other students. Later, at Princeton University, he came close to the brilliant success of which he dreamed. He became part of the influential Triangle Club, a dramatic organization whose members were taken from the cream of society. He also became a prominent figure in the literary life of the university and made lifelong friendships with Edmund Wilson and John Peale Bishop. Despite these social coups, Fitzgerald struggled academically, and he eventually flunked out of Princeton. In November 1917, he joined the army. While stationed at Camp Sheridan (near Montgomery, Alabama), he met Zelda Sayre, the daughter of an Alabama Supreme Court judge, and the two fell deeply in love. Fitzgerald needed to improve his dismal financial circumstances, however, before he and Zelda could marry. At the first opportunity, he left for New York, determined to make his fortune in the great city. Instead, he was forced to take a menial advertising job at $90 per month. Zelda broke their engagement, and Fitzgerald retreated to St. Paul, Minnesota.

There, he rewrote a novel that he had begun at Princeton. In the spring of 1920 the novel, This Side of Paradise , was published. Though today's readers might find its ideas dated, This Side of Paradise was a revelation to Fitzgerald's contemporaries. It was regarded as a rare glimpse into the morality and immorality of America's youth, and it made Fitzgerald famous. Suddenly, the author could publish not only in prestigious literary magazines such as Scribner's but also high-paying, popular publications including The Saturday Evening Post. Flush with his new wealth and fame, Fitzgerald finally married Zelda. The celebrated columnist Ring Lardner christened them "the prince and princess of their generation." Though the Fitzgeralds reveled in their notoriety, they also found it frightening, a fact which is perhaps represented in the ending of Fitzgerald's second novel. This novel, The Beautiful and Damned, was published two years later, and tells the story of a handsome young man and his beautiful wife, who gradually deteriorate into careworn middle age while they wait for the young man to inherit a large fortune. In a predictable ironic twist, they only receive their inheritance when it is too late.

To escape this grim fate, the Fitzgeralds (together with their daughter, Frances, who was born in 1921) moved in 1924 to the Riviera, where they became part of a group of wealthy American expatriates whose style was largely determined by Gerald and Sara Murphy. Fitzgerald described this society in his last completed novel, Tender is the Night , and modeled its hero on Gerald Murphy. Meanwhile, Fitzgerald's reputation as a heavy drinker tarnished his reputation in the literary world; he was viewed as an irresponsible writer despite his painstaking revisions numerous drafts of his work. Shortly after their relocation to France, Fitzgerald completed his most famous and respected novel, The Great Gatsby (1925). Fitzgerald's own divided nature can be seen in the contrast between the novel's hero, Jay Gatsby, and its narrator, Nick Carraway. The former represents the naive Midwesterner dazzled by the possibilities of the American dream; the latter represents the compassionate Princeton gentleman who cannot help but regard that dream with suspicion.

The Great Gatsby may be described as the most profoundly American novel of its time; Fitzgerald connects Gatsby's dream, his "Platonic conception of himself," with the aspirations of the founders of America. A year later, Fitzgerald published a collection of short stories, All the Sad Young Men. This book marks the end of the most productive period of Fitzgerald's life; the next decade was full of chaos and misery. Fitzgerald began to drink excessively, and Zelda began a slow descent into madness. In 1930, she suffered her first mental breakdown. Her second breakdown, from which she never fully recovered, came in 1932. Throughout the 1930s the Fitzgeralds fought an ultimately unsuccessful battle to save their marriage. This struggle was tremendously debilitating for Fitzgerald; he later said that he "left [his] capacity for hoping on the little roads that led to Zelda's sanitarium." He did not finish his next novel, Tender is the Night, until 1934.

It is the story of a psychiatrist who marries one of his patients, and, as she slowly recovers, she exhausts his vitality until he is "a man used up." This book, the last that Fitzgerald ever completed, was considered technically faulty and was commercially unsuccessful. It has since gained a reputation, however, as Fitzgerald's most moving work. Crushed by the failure of Tender is the Night and his despair over Zelda, Fitzgerald became an incurable alcoholic. In 1937, however, he managed to acquire work as a script-writer in Hollywood. There he met and fell in love with Sheilah Graham, a famous Hollywood gossip columnist. For the rest of his life, though he frequently had drunken spells in which he became bitter and violent, Fitzgerald lived quietly with Ms. Graham. Occasionally he went east to visit Zelda or his daughter Frances, who entered Vassar College in 1938. In October 1939, Fitzgerald began a novel about Hollywood titled The Last Tycoon. The career of its hero, Monroe Stahr, is based on that of the renowned Hollywood producer Irving Thalberg.

On December 21, 1940, Fitzgerald suffered a fatal heart attack, leaving the novel unfinished. Even in its half-completed state, The Last Tycoon is considered the equal of the rest of Fitzgerald's work for its intensity. Many of his short stories allowed Fitzgerald to explore ideas and situations which were later reworked in to his longer fiction. Descriptions of setting which were devised in Fitzgerald's 1922 story "Winter Dreams" became part of the detail of Daisy's home in The Great Gatsby. Similarly, Fitzgerald also used inspirations from his 1927 story "Jacob's Ladder" as character ideas for Tender Is the Night. Fitzgerald often rejected his short fiction as 'trash', saying that the stories he wrote were merely to fund the Fitzgerald's lavish lifestyle. His stories were indeed enough to sustain the Fitzgerald family - his highest single story fee was $4000. The stories were far from trash, however, and have been reproduced in collections many times. "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" was made in to a feature film in 2008. Study Guides on Works by F. Scott Fitzgerald F.

Scott Fitzgerald (Author of The Great Gatsby) edit data Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was an American writer of novels and short stories, whose works have been seen as evocative of the Jazz Age, a term he himself allegedly coined. He is regarded as one of the greatest twentieth century writers. Fitzgerald was of the self-styled "Lost Generation," 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. He was married to Zelda Fitzgerald . The Sensible Thing: Biographies F. Scott Fitzgerald and the American Dream F. Scott Fitzgerald's life is a tragic example of both sides of the American Dream - the joys of young love, wealth and success, and the tragedies associated with excess and failure. Named for another famous American, a distant cousin who authored the Star Spangled Banner, Fitzgerald was born in St. Paul Minnesota on September 24, 1896.

The son of a failed wicker furniture salesman (Edward Fitzgerald) and an Irish immigrant with a large inheritance (Mary "Mollie" McQuillan), Fitzgerald grew up in a solidly Catholic and upper middle class environment. 1935 Portrait by David Silvette, courtesy National Portrait Gallery. Fitzgerald started writing at an early age. His high school newspaper published his detective stories, encouraging him to pursue writing more enthusiastically than academics. He dropped out of Princeton University to join the army and continued to pursue his obsession, writing magazine articles and even musical lyrics. At 21 years of age, he submitted his first novel for publication and Charles Scribner's Sons rejected it, but with words of encouragement. Beginning a pattern of constant revising that would characterize his writing style for the rest of his career, Fitzgerald decided to rewrite "The Romantic Egoist" and resubmit it for publication. Meanwhile, fate, in the form of the U.S. army, stationed him near Montgomery, Alabama in 1918, where he met and fell in love with an 18-year-old Southern belle - Zelda Sayre.

Scribners rejected his novel for a second time, and so Fitzgerald turned to advertising as a steady source of income. Unfortunately, his paltry salary was not enough to convince Zelda to marry him, and tired of waiting for him to make his fortune, she broke their engagement in 1919. Happily, Scribners finally accepted the novel after Fitzgerald rewrote it for the third time as "This Side of Paradise", and published it a year later. Fitzgerald, suddenly a rich and famous author, married Zelda a week after its publication. In between writing novels, Fitzgerald was quite prolific as a magazine story writer. The Saturday Evening Post in particular served as a showcase for his short works of fiction, most of which revolved around a new breed of American woman - the young, free-thinking, independent "flapper" of the Roaring Twenties. The Fitzgeralds enjoyed fame and fortune, and his novels reflected their lifestyle, describing in semi-autobiographical fiction the privileged lives of wealthy, aspiring socialites. Fitzgerald wrote his second novel - "The Beautiful and the Damned" a year after they were married.

Three years later, after the birth of their first and only child, Scottie, Fitzgerald completed his best-known work: "The Great Gatsby." The extravagant living made possible by such success, however, took its toll. Constantly globe-trotting (living at various times in several different cities in Italy, France, Switzerland, and eight of the United States), the Fitzgeralds tried in vain to escape or at least seek respite from Scott's alcoholism and Zelda's mental illness. Zelda suffered several breakdowns in both her physical and mental health, and sought treatment in and out of clinics from 1930 until her death (due to a fire at Highland Hospital in North Carolina in 1948). Zelda's mental illness, the subject of Fitzgerald's fourth novel, "Tender is the Night," had a debilitating effect on Scott's writing. He described his own "crack-up" in an essay that he wrote in 1936, hopelessly in debt, unable to write, nearly estranged from his wife and daughter, and incapacitated by excessive drinking and poor physical health.

Things were looking up for Fitzgerald near the end of his life - he won a contract in 1937 to write for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in Hollywood and fell in love with Sheilah Graham, a movie columnist. He had started writing again - scripts, short-stories, and the first draft of a new novel about Hollywood - when he suffered a heart attack and died in 1940 at the age of 44, a failure in his own mind. Most commonly recognized only as an extravagant drunk, who epitomized the excesses of the Jazz Age, Fitzgerald's work did not earn the credibility and recognition it holds today until years after his death. Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald Artist, Writer, Dancer and Wife "By the time a person has achieved years adequate for choosing a direction, the die is cast and the moment has long since passed which determined the future." -Zelda Fitzgerald This quote perfectly illustrates Zelda Fitzgerald's lifelong struggle to create her own artistic identity. Born in 1900 in Montgomery, Alabama, she entered a world that was just starting to consider the possibility that women might have the right to be independent citizens capable of making their own decisions.

The youngest of six children, her parents raised Zelda as a free-spirited, imaginative and thoroughly spoiled little girl. By the age of eighteen, when she met F. Scott Fitzgerald at one of the many parties she attended, she embodied the quintessential southern belle. Zelda as a young girl. A constant stream of passionate and argumentative love letters punctuated the period of their engagement while Scott worked in Manhattan and Zelda remained at her parents' home in Montgomery. For Zelda, marriage represented a new lease on life, the only way out of her small-town existence as someone's daughter, without any rights of her own. For a year, Scott struggled unsuccessfully to make his fortune in the advertising business, but Zelda grew tired of waiting. When he professed that he could not be successful without her by his side and proposed, she broke the engagement because she felt too much pressure. She insisted that he find success first on his own. His first novel made Scott rich within the year, and Zelda married him a week after its publication. As his wife, she embarked on a new life as a flapper - a freethinking woman with the world at her disposal.

She was a huge influence on his writing, providing much of the material for his novels and short stories throughout their engagement and marriage. Scott frequently quoted her and her letters directly, using her words as the voice for several of his female characters. Zelda bore her first and only child at 21, naming Scottie after her husband. By 1924, Zelda's influence on Scott's writing had become less positive. An affair with a French naval aviator strained their marriage, so Zelda sought fulfillment in other venues. In 1928, she decided to pursue a lifelong dream of becoming a professional ballerina, and began taking lessons in Paris from a famous dancer. At the late age of 27, three years of intense ballet work (eight hours a day) damaged her health, and prompted her first mental breakdown, diagnosed as "nervous exhaustion", in 1930. Zelda was eventually diagnosed with schizophrenia, and would reside in and out of hospitals for the rest of her life.

During her stay at Johns Hopkins hospital in 1932, she wrote her first and only novel: "Save Me the Waltz." A fairly prolific writer, Zelda also wrote eleven short stories and twelve articles during her lifetime. Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald, circa 1921. Writing was not Zelda's only form of artistic expression - she was also a painter. She painted brilliantly colored whimsical, sometimes fantastical works of art. Her granddaughter, Eleanor Lanahan, describes Zelda's paintings as "theatrical. They're like on a raised stage floor, and the characters are actors who are before you, waiting to perform." Several different areas of Zelda's life influenced her choice of subject matter. She painted one series based on children's fairy tales such as "Mary Had a Little Lamb" and "The Lobster Quadrille," from Alice in Wonderland. The Bible and Zelda's strong religious beliefs inspired another series of illustrations. She also painted from life, creating portraits of both herself and her husband, and depicting scenes from New York in the 1940s. A fire destroyed most paintings, and Zelda even donated some to the army during World War II to be painted over and used as canvas.

Perhaps if Zelda had focused on just one form of artistic expression, she would have found her own success and fame independent of her marriage to a famous author. Her accomplishments are still impressive, especially when one takes the context of her life into consideration. As an icon of the Jazz Age, she struggled against her traditional southern upbringing and its societal constraints to create a new, independent identity not just for herself, but for all American women. Biographer Erika Willett is a modern-day flapper enjoying the good life in San Francisco. F.Scott Fitzgerald Centenary The dominant influences on F. Scott Fitzgerald were aspiration, literature, Princeton, Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald, and alcohol. Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, on September 24, 1896, the namesake and second cousin three times removed of the author of the National Anthem. Fitzgerald’s given names indicate his parents’ pride in his father’s ancestry. 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 comfortably 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. During 1911-1913 he attended the Newman School, a Catholic prep school in New Jersey, where he met Father Sigourney Fay, who encouraged his ambitions for personal distinction and achievement. As a member of the Princeton Class of 1917, Fitzgerald neglected his studies for his literary apprenticeship. 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. His college friends included Edmund Wilson and John Peale Bishop. On academic probation and unlikely to graduate, Fitzgerald joined the army in 1917 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”; the letter of rejection from Charles Scribner’s Sons praised the novel’s originality and asked that it be resubmitted when revised. 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. In the fall-winter of 1919 Fitzgerald commenced his career as a writer of stories for the mass-circulation magazines. Working through agent Harold Ober, Fitzgerald interrupted work on his novels to write moneymaking popular fiction for the rest of his life. The Saturday Evening Postbecame Fitzgerald’s best story market, and he was regarded as a “Post writer.” His early commercial stories about young love introduced a fresh character: the independent, determined young American woman who appeared in “The Offshore Pirate” and “Bernice Bobs Her Hair.”Fitzgerald’s more ambitious stories, such as “May Day” and “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz,”were published in The Smart Set, which had a small circulation. 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. They embarked on an extravagant life as young celebrities.

Fitzgerald endeavored to earn a solid literary reputation, but his playboy image impeded the proper assessment of his work. After a riotous summer in Westport, Connecticut, the Fitzgeralds took an apartment in New York City; there 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. The Fitzgeralds expected to become affluent from his play, The Vegetable. In the fall of 1922 they moved to Great Neck, Long Island, in order to be near Broadway. The political satireòsubtitled “From President to Postman”òfailed at its tryout in November 1923, and Fitzgerald wrote his way out of debt with short stories. 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. Literary opinion makers were reluctant to accord Fitzgerald full marks as a serious craftsman. 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. When critics objected to Fitzgerald’s concern with love and success, his response was: “But, my God! it was my material, and it was all I had to deal with.” The chief theme of Fitzgerald’s work is aspirationòthe idealism he regarded as defining American character. Another major theme was mutability or loss. As a social historian Fitzgerald became identified with the Jazz Age: “It was an age of miracles, it was an age of art, it was an age of excess, and it was an age of satire,” he wrote in “Echoes of the Jazz Age.” Seeking tranquility for his work the Fitzgeralds went to France in the spring of 1924 .

He wroteThe Great Gatsby during the summer and fall in Valescure near St. Raphael, but the marriage was damaged by Zelda’s involvement with a French naval aviator. The extent of the affairòif it was in fact consummatedòis not known. On the Riviera the Fitzgeralds formed a close friendship with affluent and cultured American expatriates Gerald and Sara Murphy. 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. In Paris Fitzgerald met Ernest Hemingwayòthen unknown outside the expatriate literary circleòwith whom he formed a friendship based largely on his admiration for Hemingway’s personality and genius. 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 provisionally titled “The Boy Who Killed His Mother,” “Our Type,”and “The World’s Fair.” During these years Zelda Fitzgerald’s unconventional behavior 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. 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.

Fitzgerald’s peak story fee of $4,000 from The Saturday Evening Post may have had in 1929 the purchasing power of $40,000 in present-day dollars. Nonetheless, the general view of his affluence is distorted. Fitzgerald was not among the highest-paid writers of his time; his novels earned comparatively little, and most of his income came from 160 magazine stories. During the 1920s his income from all sources averaged under $25,000 a yearògood money at a time when a schoolteacher’s average annual salary was $1,299, but not a fortune. 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. 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. After Baltimore Fitzgerald did not maintain a home for Scottie.

When she was fourteen she went to boarding school, and the Obers became her surrogate family. Nonetheless, Fitzgerald functioned as a concerned father by mail, attempting to supervise Scottie’s education and to shape her social values. Fitzgerald went to Hollywood alone in the summer of 1937 with a six-month Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer screenwriting contract at $1,000 a week. He received his only screen credit for adaptingThree Comrades (1938), and his contract was renewed for a year at $1,250 a week. The $91,000 he earned from MGM was a great deal of money during the late Depression years when a new Chevrolet coupe cost $619; but although Fitzgerald paid off most of his debts, he was unable to save. His trips East to visit his wife were disastrous. In California Fitzgerald fell in love with movie columnist Sheilah Graham. Their relationship endured despite his benders. 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 in Graham’s apartment on December 21, 1940. Zelda Fitzgerald perished at a fire in Highland Hospital in 1948. F. Scott Fitzgerald died believing himself a failure. The obituaries were condescending, and he seemed destined for literary obscurity. The first phase of the Fitzgerald resurrectionò“revival” does not properly describe the processòoccurred between 1945 and 1950. By 1960 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, defines the classic American novel. Matthew J. Bruccoli’s “A Brief Life of Fitzgerald” originally appeared in F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Life in Letters, ed. Bruccoli with the assistance of Judith S. Baughman (New York: Scribners, 1994.); essay reprinted courtesy of Simon & Schuster.

Question: What was the first name of American author F Scott Fitzgerald?
Answer: Francis