The Great Gatsby | F. Scott Fitzgerald Biography

In this Section:

  • Biography
  • Timeline for F. Scott Fitzgerald
  • List of Major Works

Biography
F. Scott Fitzgerald was an American novelist and short-story writer of the Roaring Twenties. Since his early work shows a romantic feeling for “the promises of life” at college and in “The East,” he acquired the epithet “the spokesman of the Jazz Age.” His first novel, This Side of Paradise, was the first American novel to deal with college undergraduate life in the World War I era. A handsome and charming man, Fitzgerald was quickly adopted by the young generation of his time. His second novel, The Beautiful and the Damned, is a lively but shallow book, but his third, The Great Gatsby, is one of the most penetrating descriptions of American life in the 1920s.

F Scott Fitzgerald
F Scott Fitzgerald

Born in St. Paul, Minnesota, on September 24, 1896 F. Scott Fitzgerald was the son of Edward Fitzgerald, who worked for Proctor and Gamble and brought his family to Buffalo and Syracuse, New York, for most of his son's first decade. Edward Fitzgerald's great-great-grandfather was the brother of the grandfather of Francis Scott Key, who wrote the poem “The Star-Spangled Banner.” This fact was of great significance to Mrs. Fitzgerald, Mollie McQuillan, and later to Scott. Mollie Fitzgerald's own family could offer no pretensions to aristocracy, but her father, an Irish immigrant who came to America in 1843, was a self-made businessman. Equally important was Fitzgerald's sense of having come from two widely different Celtic strains. He had early on developed an inferiority complex in a family where the “black Irish half … had the money and looked down on the Maryland side of the family who had, and really had … ‘breeding,’” according to Scott Donaldson in the Dictionary of Literary Biography. Out of this divergence of classes in his family background arose what critics called F. Scott's “double vision.” He had the ability to experience the lifestyle of the wealthy from an insider's perspective, yet never felt a part of this clique and always felt the outsider.

As a youth, Fitzgerald revealed a flair for dramatics, first in St. Paul, where he wrote original plays for amateur production, and later at The Newman Academy in Hackensack, New Jersey. At Princeton, he composed lyrics for the university's famous Triangle Club productions. Fitzgerald was also a writer and actor with the Triangle Club at college. Before he could graduate, he volunteered for the army during World War I. He spent the weekends writing the earliest drafts of his first novel. The work was accepted for publication in 1919 by Charles Scribner's Sons. The popular and financial success that accompanied this event enabled Fitzgerald to marry Zelda Sayre, whom he met at training camp in Alabama. Zelda played a pivotal role in the writer's life, both in a tempestuous way and an inspirational one. Mostly, she shared his extravagant lifestyle and artistic interests. In the 1930s she was diagnosed as a schizophrenic and was hospitalized in Switzerland and then Maryland, where she died in a fire.

For some time, Fitzgerald lived with his wife in Long Island. There, the setting for The Great Gatsby, he entertained in a manner similar to his characters, with expensive liquors and entertainment. He revelled in demonstrating the antics of the crazy, irresponsible rich, and carried this attitude wherever he went. Especially on the Riviera in France the Fitzgeralds befriended the elite of the cultural world and wealthy classes, only to offend most of them in some way by their outrageous behavior. Self-absorbed, drunk, and eccentric, they sought and received attention of all kinds. The party ended with the hospitalization of Zelda for schizophrenia in Prangins, a Swiss clinic, and, coincidentally, with the Great Depression of 1929, which tolled the start of Scott's personal depression.

In the decade before his death, Fitzgerald's troubles and the debilitating effects of his alcoholism limited the quality and amount of his writing. Nonetheless, it was also during this period that he attempted his most psychologically complex and aesthetically ambitious novel, Tender Is the Night (1934). After Zelda's breakdown, Fitzgerald became romantically involved with Sheila Graham, a gossip columnist in Hollywood, during the last years of his life. He also wrote but did not finish the novel The Last Tycoon, now considered to be one of his best works, about the Hollywood motion picture industry. Fitzgerald died suddenly of a heart attack, most likely induced by a long addiction to alcohol, on December 21, 1940. At the time of his death, he was virtually forgotten and unread. A growing Fitzgerald revival, begun in the 1950s, led to the publication of numerous volumes of stories, letters, and notebooks. One of his literary critics, Stephen Vincent Benet, concluded in his review of The Last Tycoon, “You can take off your hats now, gentlemen, and I think perhaps you had better. This is not a legend, this is a reputation—and, seen in perspective, it may well be one of the most secure reputations of our time.”

Timeline for F. Scott Fitzgerald
1896—F. Scott Fitzgerald born in St. Paul, Minnesota

1911-1913—attends catholic prep school in New Jersey

1913-1917—attends Princeton University; writes dramatic and humorous pieces

1917-1919—joins the army; meets Zelda Sayre in Montgomery, Alabama

1920—publishes This Side of Paradise; marries Zelda

1921—publishes first short story collection, Flappers and Philosophers; daughter Frances “Scottie” born

1922—publishes his second novel, The Beautiful and Damned

1923—satirical play, The Vegetable, fails

1925—publishes The Great Gatsby; befriends Ernest Hemingway in Paris

1926—publishes All the Sad Young Men

1927—moves family to Delaware; first attempt to write for Hollywood

1930—Zelda has first nervous breakdown in Paris

1934—publishes Tender is the Night

1935—publishes Taps at Reveille

1937—moves back to Hollywood as scriptwriter; begins affair with Sheila Graham

1940—dies in Hollywood; buried at Rockville, Maryland

1948—Zelda dies in fire at sanitarium in North Carolina

Major Works
This Side of Paradise (1920)
Fitzgerald’s debut novel, an exuberant, semi-autobiographical coming of age story, recounts the romantic and social adventures of the sensitive and vain Amory Blaine. It was considered a guidebook for rebellious youth of the twenties.

The Beautiful and Damned (1923)
The Beautiful and Damned recalls the personal history of a wealthy, attractive young man, Anthony Patch, and his beautiful, selfish wife Gloria. From pampered childhood to alcoholic, debt-ridden decline, Fitzgerald explores the corruptive influences of money.

The Great Gatsby (1925)
His third and best novel, The Great Gatsby is considered one of the most important works in American literature. Gatsby tells the story of a self-made millionaire and the tragic pursuit of his lost love.

Tender is the Night (1934)
Set in Europe, Tender is the Night traces the decline of a brilliant American psychiatrist, Dick Diver, during the course of his marriage to a wealthy mental patient.

The Last Tycoon (1941)
Fitzgerald’s fifth novel, unfinished at the time of his death, promised to be his finest work. It tells the story of the heroic movie producer, Monroe Stahr, and his struggle for artistic integrity against the money-obsessed influences of Hollywood.

Fitzgerald wrote over 160 short stories, including “The Rich Boy,” “A Diamond as Big as the Ritz,” “May Day,” “Babylon Revisited” and “Financing Finnegan.” Excerpted letters to his daughter were published in 1945 as The Crack-Up.

Dictionary Tip:

Lookup any word on eNotes with our dictionary. Highlight the word and press SHIFT + D for a definition, or SHIFT + T for a synonym.