A famous American novelist and short-story writer, Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was born on September 24, 1896 in St. Paul, Minnesota. He was raised by his parents, Mary McQuillan and Edward Fitzgerald, and moved around the country with them often as a child until his family decided to permanently settle in St. Paul in 1908. There, Fitzgerald's passion for writing sparked and took flight. He was enrolled in St. Paul's Academy, where he received the opportunity to have one of his first short stories, The Mystery of the Raymond Mortgage, published in the school magazine. [1]
Fitzgerald also had a taste in theatre, and soon embraced the art of script writing. While attending The Newman School for high school, he met Father Cyril Webster Sigourney Fay, who encouraged him to pursue his ambitions and dreams. Fitzgerald was later admitted into Princeton University, where he continued his writing and contributed to school magazines like The Princeton Tiger and The Nassau County Magazine. [2] He gave a lot of time to his writing and neglected much of his work, and was soon put on academic probation. In 1917, he left the university and entered the US Army, serving during the time of World War I. Although he did not fight in battle, being apart of the army at this time would inspire Fitzgerald for some of his later writing. He remained in the army for two years, and then in 1919 he traveled to New York to work for an advertising agency, which allowed him to begin his career in writing. He published his first short- story, “Babes in the Wood” that same year in The Smart Set magazine. Two years later, he published his first novel, This Side of Paradise, in which he used his experiences at Princeton and in the army to paint the story of the book's hero, Amory Blaine. [3] The book was a success, and he gained tremendous praise from readers.
That same year, in 1921, Fitzgerald married a woman named Zelda Sayre, whom he had met in 1918. She also had a strong interest in writing, and inspired Fitzgerald to pursue a career in publishing. His success from The Side of Paradise led him to this. He started working for the magazines The Saturday Evening Post and Scribner's, which allowed him to publish more of his short-stories, including “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz." In 1922, he published his second novel, The Beautiful and the Damned, where he portrayed the new Jazz Era that was growing in the U.S. Fitzgerald took a particular interest in the Jazz Era, and wrote in later in his career, "It was an age of miracles, it was an age of art, it was an age of excess, and it was an age of satire." [4] He also associated the period with materialism and corruption, which he conveys in other pieces of his writing, particularly in his famous novel, The Great Gatsby.[5]
Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby was published in 1925 and added great success to his career. He received stellar reviews for his work, particularly for his unique style in writing. While this served as a large stepping stone in his career Fitzgerald faced many struggles in his personal life that gave him a lot of stress and provoked his drinking problem. Among these things was his failing marriage with Zelda. During this time, he traveled throughout Europe and the U.S. to escape from some of his issues, and in the 1930s he began another chapter in his career, writing scripts for Hollywood films. He also continued writing and publishing novels and short stories, however readers were not as satisfied with his work as they were with The Great Gastby. In 1939, he began his first Hollywood novel called The Love of the Last Tycoon, but was never able to finish it. On December 21, 1940 he died of a heart attack.[6]
[5] Mizener, Arthur (1951). The Far Side of Paradise: A Biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
[6] "A Brief Life of Fitzgerald." University of South Carolina. Web. 25 Mar. 2011. <http://www.sc.edu/fitzgerald/biography.html>.
