F. Scott Fitzgerald
(1896–1940)
To some readers, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s life is a kind of parable—the story of a writer who dreams of becoming rich and famous, succeeds, and is then destroyed by his dream; who realizes his gifts early and burns out early. This vision of Fitzgerald is too simple to encompass the complicated, divided man he actually was, and it does little justice to his best writing. Yet it touches on the reasons why he fascinates those who read him. In his stories and novels Fitzgerald managed to include all the hectic charm of the 1920s, that period of "flaming youth" and wild parties, of postwar disillusion with ideals and of obsession with sensations, of defiance of convention and aspiration for personal fulfillment. The titles of his short story collections, Flappers and Philosophers, Tales of the Jazz Age, All the Sad Young Men, and Taps at Reveille recall the flavor of that era even for readers who never lived through it. More than any other writer, Fitzgerald responded to the spirit of that time and made literature of it. When the stock market crash of 1929 put an end to this period, he recorded the aftermath—the morning after the wild party.
Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, to a family with social pretensions but not enough money to live up to them. Even as a boy he was noted for his charm and good looks and traveled in the best circles, but he was aware of the gap between himself and the rich. The glamour of the rich became an important fact in his life. In his writing, the rich and the "liberated" were to become symbols of the death of the "old America" in the dawn of an age of moral irresponsibility and mindless selfishness. From the very beginning of his career, Fitzgerald would write a poignant moral history of the country.
In 1913 Fitzgerald entered Princeton University, where he failed in his principal ambition of making the football team. Nevertheless, he was a very popular undergraduate and gained early fame as a writer for the student drama society. In 1917, after the United States entered World War I, he accepted a commission in the army but did not serve overseas. In 1918, at an officers’ dance in Alabama, he met and fell in love with Zelda Sayre, a Montgomery belle. Discharged from the army, he came to New York to try to earn enough money to persuade Zelda to marry him. All he could find was a job at an advertising agency at a miserable salary. After three months he returned to St. Paul to rewrite a novel he had completed in the army. This Side of Paradise was published in 1920 and was an enormous success. Fitzgerald, only twenty-four years old, became an important literary figure, the voice of the young men and women of the "jazz age." His short stories were published in popular magazines; he turned them out quickly for large sums of money. Once again living in New York, he was able to persuade Zelda to come North to marry him.
The Fitzgeralds were a dazzling couple. They lived on Long Island, in Rome and Paris, and on the Riviera. They gave and attended spectacular parties. They drove, drank, and spent recklessly. Through it all Fitzgerald managed to find the time to write story after story, some of them among his best and some damaged by a relentless need for productivity. An increasingly divided view of the rich pervaded his work. He was still fascinated by them, but more and more he came to distrust them and his own ambition to be one of them. This ambivalence toward the rich pervades The Great Gatsby (1925), a novel some critics consider one of the best written in the twentieth century.
In 1930 Zelda Fitzgerald suffered a nervous breakdown, and from then on she spent most of her time in sanitariums. Fitzgerald was obliged to find money to pay her bills; in addition, he had run up considerable debts. He worked feverishly at his writing, trying to put his life in order and to earn more than he owed. But in the world of the Depression, the concerns of the twenties seemed dated and naive. In 1935 Tender Is the Night, a novel that many admirers of Fitzgerald’s work regard as his finest novel, was published; it sold few copies. To earn money he went to Hollywood, where he was treated as a dim figure from the past and given hack writing jobs. He has described his state of mind during these years in several disturbing, memorable essays. In 1940 he died of a heart attack. That Fitzgerald continued growing as a writer to the very end is attested to by his final, unfinished novel, The Last Tycoon.
