F. Scott Fitzgerald

Life

Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1896 and named after the distant relative who wrote the words of the American national anthem. His family’s money came from his mother’s side, and his sense of being on the edge of wealth without quite belonging to it runs through his fiction. He attended Princeton, where he wrote for the college’s theatrical and literary societies, and left without a degree in 1917 to join the army.

Stationed in Alabama, he met Zelda Sayre, the daughter of a state judge. She refused to marry him until he could support her, and the success of his first novel, This Side of Paradise, in 1920 made that possible. The Fitzgeralds became celebrities of the decade he named the Jazz Age, living expensively in New York, on Long Island and in France, and he supported them chiefly by writing short stories for magazines at high rates.

The Great Gatsby appeared in 1925 to good reviews and modest sales. The years that followed brought Zelda’s breakdown and hospitalization, his own alcoholism, mounting debt and a long struggle with the novel that became Tender Is the Night in 1934. He went to Hollywood in 1937 to write for the studios and died there of a heart attack in December 1940, aged forty-four, with an unfinished novel, The Last Tycoon, on his desk.

Literary significance

Fitzgerald was the chronicler of the 1920s in America, and the terms in which the decade is remembered are largely his. His subject was money and what it does to people who have it, want it, or have just lost it, and his best work treats that subject with an exactness that his glamorous reputation can obscure.

His standing has risen steadily since his death. At the time he died most of his books were out of print; by the 1950s The Great Gatsby was a standard school text and it is now one of the most read American novels. His prose, especially in Gatsby and in a dozen of the short stories, is admired for its control and its lyricism, and his letters and notebooks are read as a record of a writer thinking about craft.

Where to start

The Great Gatsby is the place to start and, for now, the one work by Fitzgerald in this library; his later books remain under copyright in the United States.