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 Biography - eNotes.com F. Scott Fitzgerald Biography Trivia F. Scott Fitzgerald Biography F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is widely regarded as one of the most influential works of the twentieth century, and if great art is born of great misery, that might help explain Gatsby's success.

The novel tells the story of Fitzgerald’s “Lost Generation” during the “Jazz Age.” Both terms describe those young people of the 1920s who, like Fitzgerald, felt purposeless in a world of excess. But Fitzgerald also wrestled with many personal demons, alcoholism in particular and his problematic relationship with his wife, Zelda Sayre. Zelda was from a markedly higher social ranking than himself, so Fitzgerald constantly struggled with feelings of inadequacy. And despite his many publications, Fitzgerald died believing himself a failure as a writer. History has judged otherwise, and today Fitzgerald is considered one of America’s most celebrated authors. Facts and Trivia Don’t underestimate the influence of Zelda Sayre on Fitzgerald’s work. She was the basis of the characters Judy Jones in “Winter Dreams” and Daisy Fay in The Great Gatsby. Later, Zelda’s mental illness would also influence his novel Tender Is the Night. Hemingway once ridiculed Fitzgerald’s famous line, “The rich are different than you and I,” by quipping, “Yes, they have more money.” Despite his successes, Fitzgerald was continually in debt and often had to write for magazines to support his family.

During the last three years of his life, Fitzgerald worked as a scriptwriter in Hollywood. A famous line from The Great Gatsby embodies Fitzgerald’s lifelong philosophy of trying to reclaim youth: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” Article abstract: With a poetic style and an insight into the lure of and the fallacies within the American Dream, Fitzgerald created some of the most distinctively American fiction. Early Life Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was born September 24, 1896, in St. Paul, Minnesota. His father, Edward Fitzgerald, was a furniture manufacturer, and his mother, Mollie McQuillan Fitzgerald, the daughter of a wealthy St. Paul businessman. After Edward Fitzgerald’s business failed in 1898, he became a wholesale grocery salesman for Procter and Gamble in Buffalo, New York. Edward was transferred to Syracuse, New York, in 1901 (when Scott’s sister Annabel was born) and back to Buffalo in 1903 before losing his job in 1908. The family then returned to St. Paul to live off the money Mollie had inherited from her father.

Edward Fitzgerald, who had cowritten a novel when he was young, read from the works of George Gordon, Lord Byron and Edgar Allan Poe to his son and praised the boy’s attempts at writing, but he hoped that Scott would become an army officer. Mollie did not encourage his literary interests and wanted him to be a successful businessman like her father, to make up for Edward’s failure and to live up to the illustrious ancestors on his father’s side of the family, a long line of wealthy Maryland landowners, politicians, and lawyers. (Francis Scott Key was a distant relative.) Because Scott’s family believed that he needed discipline, he was sent in 1911 to the Newman School, a Catholic preparatory school in Hackensack, New Jersey. At Newman, Fitzgerald met Father Sigourney Fay, a wealthy intellectual who introduced him to Henry Adams and other well-known literary figures. Fay became the boy’s surrogate father and is the model for Monsignor Darcy in This Side of Paradise (1920). In 1913, Fitzgerald enrolled at Princeton University. He dreamed of becoming a college football star but did not make the team.

He had worked on school publications throughout high school and began writing for the Princeton Tiger, the college humor magazine. He also wrote the books and lyrics for musical productions of the prestigious Triangle Club, and through such literary endeavors he made friends with fellow students Edmund Wilson, who became one of America’s most important critics, and John Peale Bishop, later a successful poet. Fitzgerald and Wilson wrote The Evil Eye for the Triangle Club in 1915. After a publicity photograph for that production of Fitzgerald dressed as a girl ran in The New York Times, he received an offer to become a female impersonator in vaudeville. Earlier that year, Fitzgerald had met sixteen-year-old Ginevra King of Lake Forest, Illinois, at a party in St. Paul. For him, she was the embodiment of the perfect woman: beautiful, rich, socially prominent, and sought after. Ginevra, the model for many of the young women in Fitzgerald’s short stories, rejected him eventually because he was not wealthy. That disappointment was not Fitzgerald’s only one in 1915. He was elected secretary of the Triangle Club, meaning that he would be its president during his senior year, but bad grades made him ineligible for campus offices.

Fitzgerald had neglected his studies almost from his arrival at Princeton. At the end of the fall semester, poor grades and illness forced him to drop out of school. Fitzgerald returned to Princeton in the fall of 1916 to repeat his junior year, and he continued to write stories for the campus literary magazine. He was never graduated, however, since the United States entered World War I, and he joined the army as a second lieutenant in October, 1917. On weekends, he began writing “The Romantic Egotist,” an early version of This Side of Paradise. In June, 1918, he was sent to Camp Sheridan, near Montgomery, Alabama. At a country club dance that July, Fitzgerald met eighteen-year-old Zelda Sayre, and they fell in love two months later. Zelda came from a prominent Montgomery family, her father being a justice of the Alabama Supreme Court. Zelda, considered the most popular girl in Montgomery, was attracted to Fitzgerald because they wanted the same things: success, fame, and glamour. The war ended just as Fitzgerald was to go overseas. He was disappointed because he wanted to test himself in battle and because he saw the war as a romantic adventure.

Yet more disappointments were the rejection of his novel by Charles Scribner’s Sons and the disapproval of Zelda’s parents, who believed that Scott was not stable enough to take proper care of their high-strung daughter. Nevertheless, Zelda agreed to marry him if he went to New York—where she desperately wanted to live—and became a success. Fitzgerald began working for the Barron Collier advertising agency in February, 1919, writing advertisements which appeared in trolley cars. That spring, he sold his first short story, “Babes in the Woods,” to The Smart Set, the sophisticated magazine edited by H. L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan. Zelda, however, was too impatient for his success and broke off their engagement that June. Life’s Work Fitzgerald quit his job in July, 1919, and returned to St. Paul to live with his parents while revising his novel. Maxwell Perkins, the legendary Scribner’s editor, accepted This Side of Paradise that September, despite objections to what his very conservative employer considered a frivolous novel. Perkins, whose suggestions helped Fitzgerald improve the book, said he would resign if Scribner’s did not publish it.

Shortly after the novel was accepted, Fitzgerald became a client of agent Harold Ober and began publishing stories in the Saturday Evening Post, at that time the highest-paying magazine in the field. Unfortunately, he also began a lifelong pattern of drinking and wild spending. He and Zelda seemed made for each other because of their youth, beauty, ambition, and excesses. They were married April 3, 1920, a few days after This Side of Paradise was published. Scribner’s published three thousand copies of Fitzgerald’s autobiographical novel about a college student’s coming of age, and the book was sold out in three days. By the end of 1921, it had gone through twelve printings of 49,075 copies, a huge success for a serious first novel. This Side of Paradise, considered the first realistic American college novel, was read as a handbook for collegiate conduct. By presenting the new American girl in rebellion against her mother’s values, the novel also created the prototype of the flapper. Novelist John O’Hara later claimed that a half million Americans between the ages of fifteen and thirty fell in love with the book.

The Fitzgeralds quickly became major celebrities in New York because of Scott’s success and the young couple’s good looks and flamboyant personalities. (Unfortunately, few photographs capture the charismatic good looks of Zelda, with her wavy hair, almond-shaped eyes, and oval face, and blond, blue-eyed, stocky Scott, whose impact is widely attested in contemporary accounts.) Zelda went from the center of attention she had been in Montgomery to the wife of a famous novelist, and she resented the change. She remained jealous of her husband’s artistic success and attempted, in... (The entire section is 3034 words.) Get Free Access Start your free trial with eNotes for complete access to this resource and thousands more. 30,000+ Study Guides Save time with thousands of teacher-approved book and topic summaries. Get Homework Help Ask real teachers questions on any subject or search 300,000+ answers. On the Go Access link Link F. Scott Fitzgerald was educated at St. Paul Academy and at the Newman School in Hackensack, New Jersey. While attending Princeton University he wrote for the Princeton Tiger and Nassau Literary Magazine.

He left Princeton without a degree, joined the army, and was stationed near Montgomery, Alabama, where he met Zelda Sayre. In 1920, they were married in New York City before moving to Westport, Connecticut. Their only child, Frances Scott Fitzgerald, was born in 1921. In the mid-1920’s the Fitzgeralds traveled extensively between the United States and Europe, meeting Ernest Hemingway in Paris in 1925. The decade of the 1930’s was a bleak one for the Fitzgeralds; Zelda had several emotional breakdowns and... (The entire section is 198 words.) link Link Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, on September 24, 1896. His mother’s side of the family (the McQuillans) was what Fitzgerald referred to as “straight 1850 potato famine Irish,” but by the time of his maternal grandfather’s death at the age of forty-four, the McQuillan fortune, earned in the grocery business, was in excess of $300,000.

Fitzgerald’s father was a poor but well-bred descendant of the old Maryland Scott and Key families. Always an ineffectual businessman, Edward Fitzgerald had met Mary McQuillan when he arrived in St. Paul to open a wicker furniture business, which shortly went out of business. In search of a job by which he could support the family, Edward Fitzgerald moved his... (The entire section is 625 words.) link Link Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald is considered one of the three most important American authors (along with Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner) who wrote between the two world wars. On his father’s side he was a descendant of the Scotts and the Keys who produced Francis Scott Key, the distinguished lawyer who wrote “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Fitzgerald’s father, Edward Fitzgerald, was unable to hold a steady job; his mother was the eccentric and powerful Mary McQuillan, whose father had left her a million-dollar grocery business and a substantial personal fortune. Fitzgerald’s childhood was a pampered one—though somewhat unstable, owing to frequent moves—and included two years at the St. Paul Academy...

(The entire section is 1205 words.) link Link Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald, one of the most talented of American writers, was born on September 24, 1896, in St. Paul, Minnesota. His father, Edward, was unsuccessful in a variety of enterprises, and the family moved numerous times until Fitzgerald’s mother inherited sufficient money for them to settle in one of the more exclusive neighborhoods of St. Paul. Even as a young boy, Fitzgerald was acutely aware that his mother, rather than his father, provided the financial foundation of the family. It was a situation—a wife’s inherited money—that was to recur frequently in his writing. In 1911, Fitzgerald entered Newman School, a Catholic institution in Hackensack, New Jersey. It was there that he decided upon... (The entire section is 1063 words.) link Link Fitzgerald was an acute social observer and an incomparable stylist. His central concern was with the individual whose promise is destroyed by an uncaring or hostile world, a destruction made possible by some inherent flaw in an otherwise noble nature. Fitzgerald’s writings all have this viewpoint, which can best be described as romantic moralism.

Immensely popular with his first novel, highly successful with his short stories, and critically acclaimed for his masterpiece, The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald has come to be recognized as one of American literature’s premier authors and the creator of some of its most memorable and individual characters. Although his work is clearly a product of and a reflection of... (The entire section is 127 words.) link Link Bruccoli’s work is the most comprehensive collection of Fitzgerald letters to date (including hundreds not previously published), but it is also the most revealing. For Matthew Bruccoli has organized the letters to give readers a glimpse into Fitzgerald’s life, in epistolary descriptions of his relationships, his travels, and his philosophy about writing. The letters detail the Jazz Age life that was the basis of the Fitzgerald myth from the 1920’s on, but they also reveal the other side of that glamorous expatriate life: his growing concern with his wife’s health (Zelda Fitzgerald was institutionalized for much of the 1930’s), his frantic attempts to raise money through his writings, his failed Hollywood career, his... (The entire section is 262 words.) Writer F. Scott Fitzgerald Was Born Fitzgerald's hometown of St.

Paul, Minnesota Writer F. Scott Fitzgerald Was Born September 24, 1896 After turbulent years of schooling, Fitzgerald joined the army. While stationed at Camp Sheridan, he met and fell in love with Zelda Sayre. To win her hand, he rewrote and published his first novel, This Side of Paradise, in 1920. The novel, reflecting his years at Princeton University, tells the story of a young man's quest for fulfillment in love and career. Over the course of the next decade and a half, while struggling to cope with the demons of his alcoholism and Zelda's emerging mental illness, the Fitzgeralds enjoyed a life of literary celebrity. page 2 of 4 The Curious Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald | Great Writers Inspire The Curious Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald by: Kate O'Connor F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) was born on 24 September 1896 to a salesman father and an Irish-Catholic mother who was the heir to a successful Minnesota grocery store. The F. Scott of F.

Scott Fitzgerald stands for Francis Scott; he was named for his distant cousin, the writer of the poem that became the lyrics to American national anthem. Until 1908 the family moved throughout upstate New York, but when his father lost his job the Fitzgeralds moved to St. Paul, Minnesota. F Scott Fitzgerald circa 1920 [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons Scott, as family and friends knew him, had his first story published when he was 13 - a detective story printed in the school newspaper. After his expulsion for lack of academic effort, he boarded at Newman School, a Catholic school in New Jersey. After graduation in 1913, he attended Princeton University, where he wrote articles for the college humour magazine, stories for the literary magazine, and scripts for the musicals of the Triangle Club. However, again he neglected his studies; in 1917 he was placed on academic probation, and he dropped out of Princeton to join the army. Shortly before reporting for duty Fitzgerald wrote his first novel, The Romantic Egoist, and although the publisher rejected it, Fitzgerald was encouraged to submit later works.

Zelda While posted to Camp Sheridan in Alabama, then Second Lieutenant Fitzgerald met Zelda Sayre, daughter of an Alabama Supereme Court judge and society darling. The Great War ended in 1918, so Scott never was deployed to Europe. Zelda would not marry Scott until he could support her financially, and although he moved to New York to work in advertising and write short stories, she broke off the engagement. Fitzgerald moved home to his parents to work on The Romantic Egoist. Recast as This Side of Paradise it was accepted for publication in 1919. Zelda and Scott resumed their engagement, and the couple were married in New York a week after publication in 1920. Their only child, Frances Scott Fitzgerald, was born a year later. F. Scott Fitzgerald and wife Zelda, by Kenneth Melvin Wright (Minnesota Historical Society) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons Writing & Celebrity This Side of Paradise became an immediate hit. With literary success came wealth, and with wealth came the Fitzgeralds' new penchant for high living. Scott became known as a playboy and drank heavily, supporting himself largely through short stories published in popular magazines and papers like The Saturday Evening Post and Esquire.

In 1922 Fitzgerald published his second novel, The Beautiful and the Damned . It was this novel's satire of the Jazz Age that secured his position as a member of the Lost Generation . However, Zelda and Scott lived beyond their means, embracing the decadent lifestyle of the New York celebrity, and Fitzgerald had to take out frequent loans from his literary agent and editor to avoid financial troubles. Like so many American writers after World War I, Fitzgerald moved to France, where he befriended fellow writer Ernest Hemingway. In France he wrote the now classic (then underrated) novel The Great Gatsby . Decline & Death In the 1920s Fitzgerald fell into severe alcoholism and suffered from writer's block, and Zelda's mental health deteriorated (in 1930 she was diagnosed with schizophrenia). The couple moved between Delaware and France, and Zelda was hospitalised in Switzerland and Baltimore. In 1932 Zelda published her semi-autobiographical novel Save me the Waltz. Scott was furious that she had drawn heavily on their life together, but would go on to do the same himself in his novel Tender is the Night (1934), the story of an American psychiatrist married to a schizophrenic.

The novel was a commercial disaster. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald grave, by JayHenry (Own work) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons Fitzgerald's alcoholism, depression, and financial problems worsened, and after Zelda was placed in a North Carolina hospital in 1937, Scott left his wife behind and moved to Hollywood to try his hand as a screenwriter. In 1939 he began work on his final novel, The Love of the Last Tycoon, but died of a heart attack the following year without completing the work. He was forty-four, and considered himself a failure at the time of his death. It is only posthumously that he has been acknowledged as one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century. The Great Gatsby is a perpetual set text, and Fitzgerald's shrewd depiction of his degrading society is lauded. Short story colleections Overview - F. Scott Fitzgerald: Author & 1920s Icon - LibGuides at Minnesota Historical Society Library F. Scott Fitzgerald: Author & 1920s Icon MNHS loans out most microfilm materials. Contact your local library for more information and assistance with this service.

Online Research Some items such as newspapers, articles, photos and objects are available online. Look for links within this guide. Other Libraries Many books listed in the Secondary Sources page can be borrowed from other libraries. Related Research Guides & Webpages Short biography and list of Fitzgerald's selected works. Overview F. Scott Fitzgerald, author and icon of the Roaring '20s, was born on September 24, 1896 on Laurel Avenue in St. Paul, Minnesota. Though Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda lived mainly in New York and Paris, St. Paul figured significantly in their lives. F. Scott Fitzgerald spent his youth (1896-1899), his school days (1908-1911), and part of his married life (1921-1922) in St. Paul. Fitzgerald developed his obsession with wealth and status, as well as his desire to belong among the elite, on the fringes of the most fashionable neighborhoods of St. Paul. As a boy, he attended St. Paul Academy before continuing—but never completing—his education at Princeton University. In their early married life, he and Zelda frequented the University Club in St.

Paul and the magnificent lake homes and White Bear Yacht Club in Dellwood. The collections of the Minnesota Historical Society hold many interesting and valuable resources to teach us more about F. Scott Fitzgerald’s contribution to Minnesota history and Minnesota’s contribution to Fitzgerald’s life. MNHS Reference Staff Biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald A Brief Life of Fitzgerald By Matthew J. Bruccoli 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 F. Scott Fitzgerald | American writer | Britannica.com F. Scott Fitzgerald Alternative Title: Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald F. Scott Fitzgerald E.L. Doctorow F. Scott Fitzgerald, in full Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald (born September 24, 1896, St. Paul, Minnesota , U.S.—died December 21, 1940, Hollywood , California ), American short-story writer and novelist famous for his depictions of the Jazz Age (the 1920s), his most brilliant novel being The Great Gatsby (1925).

His private life, with his wife, Zelda, in both America and France, became almost as celebrated as his novels. F. Scott Fitzgerald. Public Domain Fitzgerald was the only son of an unsuccessful, aristocratic father and an energetic, provincial mother. Half the time he thought of himself as the heir of his father’s tradition, which included the author of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” Francis Scott Key , after whom he was named, and half the time as “straight 1850 potato-famine Irish.” As a result he had typically ambivalent American feelings about American life, which seemed to him at once vulgar and dazzlingly promising. He also had an intensely romantic imagination, what he once called “a heightened sensitivity to the promises of life,” and he charged into experience determined to realize those promises. At both St. Paul Academy (1908–10) and Newman School (1911–13) he tried too hard and made himself unpopular, but at Princeton he came close to realizing his dream of a brilliant success. He became a prominent figure in the literary life of the university and made lifelong friendships with Edmund Wilson and John Peale Bishop .

He became a leading figure in the socially important Triangle Club, a dramatic society, and was elected to one of the leading clubs of the university; he fell in love with Ginevra King, one of the beauties of her generation. Then he lost Ginevra and flunked out of Princeton. He returned to Princeton the next fall, but he had now lost all the positions he coveted, and in November 1917 he left to join the army. In July 1918, while he was stationed near Montgomery , Alabama , he met Zelda Sayre, the daughter of an Alabama Supreme Court judge. They fell deeply in love, and, as soon as he could, Fitzgerald headed for New York determined to achieve instant success and to marry Zelda. What he achieved was an advertising job at $90 a month. Zelda broke their engagement, and, after an epic drunk, Fitzgerald retired to St. Paul to rewrite for the second time a novel he had begun at Princeton.

In the spring of 1920 it was published, he married Zelda, and riding in a taxi one afternoon between very tall buildings under a mauve and rosy sky; I began to bawl because I had everything I wanted and knew I would never be so happy again. Britannica Stories EU Considers Rules For Robots Immature though it seems today, This Side of Paradise in 1920 was a revelation of the new morality of the young; it made Fitzgerald famous. This fame opened to him magazines of literary prestige , such as Scribner’s, and high-paying popular ones, such as The Saturday Evening Post. This sudden prosperity made it possible for him and Zelda to play the roles they were so beautifully equipped for, and Ring Lardner called them the prince and princess of their generation. Though they loved these roles, they were frightened by them, too, as the ending of Fitzgerald’s second novel, The Beautiful and Damned (1922), shows. The Beautiful and Damned describes a handsome young man and his beautiful wife, who gradually degenerate into a shopworn middle age while they wait for the young man to inherit a large fortune.

Ironically, they finally get it, when there is nothing of them left worth preserving. To escape the life that they feared might bring them to this end, the Fitzgeralds (together with their daughter, Frances, called “Scottie,” born in 1921) moved in 1924 to the Riviera, where they found themselves a part of a group of American expatriates whose style was largely set 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. Shortly after their arrival in France, Fitzgerald completed his most brilliant novel, The Great Gatsby (1925). All of his divided nature is in this novel, the naive Midwesterner afire with the possibilities of the “American Dream” in its hero, Jay Gatsby , and the compassionate Yale gentleman in its narrator, Nick Carraway . The Great Gatsby is the most profoundly American novel of its time; at its conclusion, Fitzgerald connects Gatsby’s dream, his “Platonic conception of himself,” with the dream of the discoverers of America.

Some of Fitzgerald’s finest short stories appeared in All the Sad Young Men (1926), particularly “The Rich Boy” and “Absolution,” but it was not until eight years later that another novel appeared. Britannica Lists & Quizzes Editor Picks: Exploring 10 Types of Basketball Movies The next decade of the Fitzgeralds’ lives was disorderly and unhappy. Fitzgerald began to drink too much, and Zelda suddenly, ominously, began to practice ballet dancing night and day. In 1930 she had a mental breakdown and in 1932 another, from which she never fully recovered. Through the 1930s they fought to save their life together, and, when the battle was lost, Fitzgerald said, “I left my 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, who, as she slowly recovers, exhausts his vitality until he is, in Fitzgerald’s words, un homme épuisé (“a man used up”).

Though technically faulty and commercially unsuccessful, this is Fitzgerald’s most moving book. Literary Favorites: Fact or Fiction? With its failure and his despair over Zelda, Fitzgerald was close to becoming an incurable alcoholic. By 1937, however, he had come back far enough to become a scriptwriter in Hollywood, and there he met and fell in love with Sheilah Graham, a famous Hollywood gossip columnist. For the rest of his life—except for occasional drunken spells when he became bitter and violent—Fitzgerald lived quietly with her. (Occasionally he went east to visit Zelda or his daughter Scottie, who entered Vassar College in 1938.) In October 1939 he began a novel about Hollywood, The Last Tycoon . The career of its hero, Monroe Stahr , is based on that of the producer Irving Thalberg . This is Fitzgerald’s final attempt to create his dream of the promises of American life and of the kind of man who could realize them. In the intensity with which it is imagined and in the brilliance of its expression, it is the equal of anything Fitzgerald ever wrote, and it is typical of his luck that he died of a heart attack with his novel only half-finished.

He was 44 years old. More about F. Scott Fitzgerald 20 References found in Britannica Articles Assorted References

Question: Zelda was the wife of which writer, born in Minnesota in 1896?
Answer: F. SCOTT FITZGERALD