F Scott Fitzgerald (full name Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald) was born on September 24, 1896 in St. Paul, Minnesota. He was the first of the American novelists to convey the disillusionment and consequent rebelliousness of post-war American youth – the representatives of the so-called Jazz Age.
Biography and Career :
F Scott Fitzgerald had the feeling that the cynical, materialistic and emancipated youth of the twenties would end in a disastrous way. That is why he explained “All the stories that came into my head had a touch of disaster in them”.
Fitzgerald was a student of St. Paul Academy, the Newman School and had attended Princeton for a short while. In 1917 he joined the army and was posted in Alabama. This is where he will meet his future wife Zelda Sayre, but first h
e had to make some money to impress her. They become famous for their partying and outrageous scenes. They also traveled extensively and new all the expatriate American writers in England and France.
His life with her furnished his greatest happiness, as he written in an autobiographical sketch:” my own happiness in the past often approached such ecstasy that I could not share it even with the person dearest to me but had to walk it away in quiet streets and lanes with only fragments of it to distill into little lines in books - and I think that my happiness, or talent for self-delusion or what you will, was an exception”.
“The Side of Paradise”, his first novel, was published in 1920. Encouraged by its success, Fitzgerald began to devote mote time to his literary career. Then he continued with the novel “The Beautiful and the Damned” (1922), a collection of stories “Tales of the Jazz Age” (1922), a play “The Vegetable” (1923). But his greatest success was “The Great Gatsby”, published in 1925, and it quickly brought him praise from the literary community, but it failed to give him the needed financial security. Then, in 1926, he published another collection of short stories “All the Sad Young Man”.
However, Fitzgerald’s problems with his wife Zelda affected his writing. During the 1920s he tried reordering his life, but without success. By 1930, his wife had her first breakdown and went to a Swiss clinic. During this period he completed “Tender in the Night”, published in 1934, and his last novel “The Last Tycoon”, published in 1940. While his wife was in a hospital in the United States, he totally drowned himself in alcohol. Sheila Graham, his dear friend, was the one helping him fight his alcoholism.
“The Great Gatsby” is set in the 1920s, a period known in America as the Roaring Twenties. After the end of the World War I and before the stock market crash of 1929, there was a spirit of rebellion in the United States. Writers such as Edith Wharton and Henry James had brought a new realism to literature. Authors were encouraged to cease using restrained language, to write with realism about the problems of city life. So, Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner followed the call of this new realism.
F. Scott Fitzgerald – who had attained undeniable success as a writer, a serious novelist and prolific producer of short stories - died in Hollywood, on December 21, 1940.
Ernest Hemingway once said of F. Scott Fitzgerald:
"His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly's wings"
Quotes :
- "He wanted not association with glittering things and glittering people — he wanted the glittering things themselves."
- "But the brilliance, the versatility of madness is akin to the resourcefulness of water seeping through, over, and around a dyke. It requires the united front of many people to work against it."
Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald Image : hofstra.edu
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