F. Scott Fitzgerald

F. Scott Fitzgerald, born Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald on September 24, 1896, in Saint Paul, Minnesota, was an American novelist, essayist, and short story writer. He is best known for fiction that captured the flamboyance and excess of the Jazz Age, a term he popularized in his 1922 collection Tales of the Jazz Age. During his lifetime he published four novels, four story collections, and 164 short stories. He found brief success and money in the 1920s, but broad critical praise came only after his death. He is now widely regarded as one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century.

Fitzgerald grew up in a middle-class Catholic family with roots in Saint Paul and New York state. His father’s wicker-furniture business failed when Fitzgerald was very young, and the family moved to Buffalo, where his father worked as a salesman for Procter & Gamble. After his father lost that job in 1908, the family returned to Saint Paul, supported in part by his mother’s inheritance. Fitzgerald attended Catholic schools, showed an early interest in literature, and published his first piece of fiction in a school newspaper at 13. At the Newman School in New Jersey, Father Sigourney Fay recognized his literary promise and encouraged him to become a writer.

In 1913 Fitzgerald entered Princeton University, where he wrote for campus publications and became friends with Edmund Wilson and John Peale Bishop, both of whom later helped his literary career. His romance with Chicago debutante Ginevra King also shaped his fiction. She became a model for several characters, including Isabelle Borgé in This Side of Paradise and Daisy Buchanan in The Great Gatsby. Fitzgerald left Princeton in 1917 to join the Army during World War I. While stationed in Alabama, he met Zelda Sayre, a Southern debutante from Montgomery’s country-club set. She first rejected his proposal because he lacked financial prospects, but agreed to marry him after the success of This Side of Paradise in 1920.

This Side of Paradise became a cultural sensation and made Fitzgerald one of the eminent writers of the decade. His second novel, The Beautiful and Damned, followed in 1922 and brought him further into the cultural elite. To support an affluent life, he wrote many stories for magazines including The Saturday Evening Post, Collier’s Weekly, and Esquire. He also spent time in Europe, where he befriended writers and artists of the “Lost Generation,” including Ernest Hemingway. His third novel, The Great Gatsby, appeared in 1925. It received generally favorable reviews but sold fewer than 23,000 copies in its first year; later, some critics would hail it as the “Great American Novel.”

Fitzgerald’s later years were marked by strain. After the deterioration of Zelda’s mental health and her placement in a mental institution for schizophrenia, he completed Tender Is the Night in 1934. During the Great Depression, the popularity of his work declined, and he struggled financially. He moved to Hollywood and tried, without success, to build a screenwriting career. There he lived with columnist Sheilah Graham, his final companion. Fitzgerald had long struggled with alcoholism, attained sobriety, and died of a heart attack on December 21, 1940, at age 44. Afterward, Edmund Wilson edited and published the unfinished The Last Tycoon in 1941. Wilson described Fitzgerald’s style as “romantic, but also cynical,” “bitter as well as ecstatic,” and gifted in “turning language into something iridescent and surprising.” That mix of glamour, wit, longing, and clear-eyed disappointment is why readers still return to his sentences.