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Francis Scott Fitzgerald
1896-1940
Novelist, poet, playwright, screenwriter, author of short stories
Evelyn Sung/宋怡緻
 Family Background
School Years
Marriage Life
Writing
Late Years
Family Background
Francis Scott Fitzgerald was born on September 24, 1896, in St. Paul, Minnesota, the only son of Edward and Mollie （McQuillan） Fitzgerald. His father, Edward Fitzgerald, had beautiful manners but was never a success. His mother, Mollie McQuillan, whose family emigrated from Ireland in 1843, and built a substantial grocery store in St. Paul, was an eccentric, decisive woman and very protective for his only son. Because Fitzgerald's grandfather, Francis Scott Key, had penned the "Star-Spangled Banner," Edward took great pride in such an honor and often told his son the stories with his patrician, Confederate past, though it was Mollie's less patrician ancestor that made themselves successful in America. As the biographer Jeffrey Meyers puts it, Fitzgerald "was the son of a weak father and strong mother." Since Edward Fitzgerald lost his job in 1908, the finance of the Fitzgeralds had weighed on Mollie McQuillan's side. The Fitzgeralds lived on Mollie's inheritance and strove to maintain a patrician or at least an upper-middle class lifestyle. His father's failure and such struggles for maintaining certain lifestyle had an influence on Fitzgerald's writing, in which he revealed his fear of financial difficulties, and his concern for what kind of writing career he was going to pursue—for him, writing lucrative short stories for the Saturday Evening Post market would be more important and urgent than novels, though he personally considered his novels more like artistic achievements.
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School Years
Prep school
Fitzgerald studied at the Newman School, a Catholic Prep school in New Jersey and where he fell under the influence of Father Sigourney Fay, who was to be fictionalized as Monsignor Darcy in Fitzgerald's first novel, This Side of Paradise . Father Fay introduced him to the worlds of arts and letters, and another side of Catholicism, which emphasizes the "beauty and richness of the experience [Fitzgerald] would always try to capture in his writing." Fitzgerald later wrote in a review-essay that "[Father Fay] came into my life as the most romantic figure I had ever known."
Princeton Years
Fitzgerald went to Princeton from 1913 to 1917. These are the central years for Fitzgerald's development to be a writer. He wrote short stories, poems, plays, book reviews, and even jokes for the Nassau Literary Magazine and the humor magazine Princeton Tiger. He also composed lyrics for the university's Triangle Club productions. It was also during these years that Fitzgerald made acquaintances with the future poet, John Peale Bishop, the future critic and writer, Edmund Wilson, who became his intellectual conscience, and such friendships turned out to be lifelong ones. He read wildly and voraciously, from Oscar Wilde to Compton Mackenzie, and from Bernard Shaw to H. G. Wells. Although he was socially and literally successful in Princeton, he was forced to withdrawn because of low grades in 1916. He returned in the following year but never graduated due to the intervention of the Great War.
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Marriage Life
Fitzgerald applied for a commission in the U.S. Army in October 1917, but never served oversea. While he stationed at Camp Sheridan near Montgomery, Alabama, he met and soon fell in love with the eighteen-year-old Zelda Sayre, the daughter of a judge, a belle of shockingly unconventional behavior. Fitzgerald pursued Zelda with vigor and will, though he was penniless while Zelda's family was much wealthier. He wrote prolifically and composed the novel, This Side of Paradise, whose film rights were sold later, and many other short stories to make money. Fitzgerald and Zelda got married in New York in 1920. They spent their time in different cities, New York, Westport in Connecticut, and Great Neck in Long Island, Europe, and had their daughter born St. Paul . They never stayed long in one city and never had an owned home. They lived luxuriously in hotel or renting large estates in the United States and Europe . They indulged themselves in heavy drinking and parting. They were the darling couple, the daring ones, the rule breakers, leading the lifestyle of characters chronicled in his novels. Fitzgerald therefore gained a reputation as the symbol of the Jazz Age.
To support such high standard of living, Fitzgerald continually borrowing money from Scribner and his literary agent, Harold Ober, yet the poor sale of his later novels even further put him in debt. Only the sale of his short stories, the income from the magazine market could alleviate his financial situation and allow him to devote time to his novels to some extent. Fitzgerald's marriage started to get stranded in 1924, when Zelda had a brief liaison with a French aviator and the husband became more steadily dependent on liquor. Often left alone while Fitzgerald toured to the bars, Zelda shifted her focus into ballet, taking lessons and beginning so hard for a writing career in her late twenties. In 1930 Zelda suffered a mental breakdown, and started to accept hospitalizations in the sanatoriums, where she spent the rest of her life.
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Writing
Short stories
Fitzgerald complained that he spent too much time on his short stories simply for the sake of earning money to afford the lifestyle he and Zelda established in the 1920s, yet some of his best work were found in his short stories. In the first collection, Flapper and Philosophers (1920), "The Ice Palace" and "Bernice Bobs Her Hair" are two notable stories. While the former depicts a southern belle's misfit for the northern lifestyle and customs her fiancée holds, the latter fully establishes the daring flapper type in the new fashions of the day. In the second collection, Tales of the Jazz Age (1922), "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz", a fantasy tale, and "May Day", a powerful tale set during the post World War in New York City, are two major pieces. The third collection, All The Sad Young Men (1926), contains three of Fitzgerald's best and most popular stories: "Winters Dreams," "Absolution," and "The Rich Boy." It won the most successful reaction from the critics. As one reviewer wrote, " All the Sad Young Men contains several stories of compelling fineness, along with more conventional pieces of story telling that are sufficiently amusing with the old Fitzgerald talent." However, very few publications reviewed Fitzgerald's last collection of short stories, Taps at Reveille (1935). Bryer viewed this lack of critical response as "a further indication that readers and critics were no longer interested in his Jazz Age subject matter."
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Novels
Fitzgerald's first novel, This Side of Paradise (1920), is his most autobiographical work and the first book to describe the younger generation of the Jazz Age. The activities of its young protagonists—the casual kiss and drink, the rude treatment of parents —partly exemplified the high-spirited refutation of the old order and won reader's hearts. However, some criticized its structure of poems, short stories, and even some earlier play fragments that he had written revealed the immaturity of Fitzgerald's writing ability and the novel merely as an daring writing experiment; even so, some still affirmed its ineffable quality of spirit and vitality.
The Great Gatsby (1925), Tender is the Night (1934), and The Last Tycoon (1941) are considered Fitzgerald's best novels. The Great Gatsby is outstanding in its complex, tightly knit narrative structure, and in its binary opposition—rich versus poor, old rich versus new rich, East versus West, as well as the indifference of wealth, the hollowness of the American success myth, and the sleaziness of the contemporary scene. While The Great Gatsby is a novel of "tour de force," Tender is the Night is about "the confession of faith." The protagonist is at Fitzgerald 's most complex character and the one who best represents the author's mature understanding of his own psychological makeup. Its theme is parasitism—the health of one person gained at the expense of another—and such facts bear an unmistakable resemblance to Fitzgerald and Zelda's marriage. The Last Tycoon, published posthumously after Edmund Wilson put it together from Fitzgerald's unfinished manuscript, is a story of a movie producer fashioned in the tradition of the great leaders who have contributed to the success of the United States despite flaws in their natures.
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Motifs
To sum up, Fitzgerald's writing touches on themes such as the effects of money and power on those who have too much of them, the poignant dilemma of the young man who is neither poor nor rich but falls in love with a golden girl, wealthy, beautiful, and often cruel. His male characters celebrate the ideal at the expense of the real. It seems that for Fitzgerald, only the world of illusion can sustain their emotional intensity and only in dreams can they shut out the sometimes terrifying everyday world. According to Authur Mezener, Fitzgerald's contribution to literature is his imaginative penetration to the American world. He points out the central moral dilemma of American life—the possibilities of life which are made available by wealth but the lack of a heightened sensitivity among the rich. For Fitzgerald, it is the genteel poor like James Gatz, Dick Diver and Monroe Stahr who really possesses such heightened sensitivity.
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Last Years
In 1937, Fitzgerald tried once again to do screenwriting, accepting a $1,000 per week salary from MGM, despite his decline in popularity and his own self-declared "moral bankruptcy." In Hollywood he worked on the film Three Comrades, but other scripts were failures and soon he was so desperate that his stories could only sold for $250 each. He continued to drink destructively, though a relationship with the columnist Sheilah Graham did provide some domestic stability. Zelda was not with him forever, and his daughter was in college. Fitzgerald started to write the unfinished novel The Last Tycoon and died suddenly of a heart attack in 1940.
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