Biography

F. Scott Fitzgerald

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Overview

Born
September 24, 1896 · St. Paul, Minnesota, USA
Died
December 21, 1940 · Hollywood, Los Angeles, California, USA (heart attack)
Birth name
Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald
Height
5′ 8½″ (1.74 m)

Mini bio

"There are no second acts in American lives," wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald, who himself went from being the high priest of the Jazz Age to a down-and-out alcoholic within the space of 20 years, but not before giving the world several literary masterpieces, the most famous of which is "The Great Gatsby" (1924).

He was born in 1896 to a mother who spoiled him shamelessly, leading him to grow up an especially self-possessed young man. While he was obsessed by the image of Princeton University, he flunked out, less interested in Latin and trigonometry than bathtub gin and "bright young things". The brightest was an unconventional young lady from Montgomery, Alabama named Zelda Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald invoked the jealousy of numerous local boys, some of whom had even begun a fraternity in Zelda's honor, by snagging her shortly before the publication of his first novel, "This Side of Paradise". The novel was a huge success, and Fitzgerald suddenly found himself the most highly-paid writer in America.

During the mid-to-late '20s the Fitzgeralds lived in Europe among many American expatriates including Gertrude Stein, Cole Porter, Ernest Hemingway and Thornton Wilder. He wrote what is considered his greatest masterpiece, "The Great Gatsby", while living in Paris. It was at the end of this period (1924-30) that his marriage to the highly strung, demanding and mentally unstable Zelda began to unravel. She was diagnosed with schizophrenia and spent much of the rest of her life in a variety of mental institutions. Fitzgerald turned more and more to alcohol. In 1930 a major crisis came when Zelda had a series of psychotic attacks, beginning a descent into madness and schizophrenia from which she would never recover. Much of Fitzgerald's income would now be dedicated to keeping his wife in mental hospitals. Emotionally and creatively wrung out, he wrote "Tender is The Night" (1934), the story of Dick Diver and his schizophrenic wife Nicole, that shows the pain that he felt himself. In the mid-30s Fitzgerald had a breakdown of his own. He had become a clinical alcoholic, something he would detail in his famous "The Crack-Up" series of essays.

With Zelda institutionalized on the East Coast, it was Hollywood that proved to be Fitzgerald's salvation. Although he had little success in writing for films, which he had attempted several times previously, he was paid well and gained a new professional standing. His experiences there inspired "The Last Tycoon", his last--and unfinished--novel which some believe might have been his greatest of all. Fitzgerald died at the home of his mistress, writer Sheilah Graham, of a heart attack in 1940, believing himself to be a failed and broken man. He never knew that he would one day be considered one of the finest writers of the 20th century.
- IMDb mini biography by: Camille Scaysbrook (qv's & corrections by A. Nonymous)

Family

Spouse

Trivia

Eight years after his death, his wife Zelda Fitzgerald died in a fire at the mental hospital where she was a voluntary patient. Contrary to popular myth, Zelda spent less than nine months at mental hospitals during the ten years after Scott's death.
Popularized the phrase "the Jazz Age" in reference to the riotous 1920s decade of American history. A later anachronistic phrase to describe this same era, "the Roaring Twenties," would not enter the popular lexicon until the 1940s.
An alcoholic for many years, he overcame his addiction and achieved sobriety over a year before his death. He died of a heart attack in the apartment of gossip columnist Sheilah Graham in November 1940.
Was a mentor and close friend of the young Ernest Hemingway, who grew more distant with him as Hemingway's fame grew and Fitzgerald's declined, and he became increasingly more dependent on alcohol. Hemingway disapproved of Fitzgerald's lowering his great talent to write high-priced stories for slick commercial magazines like "The Saturday Evening Post" and his sojourns to Hollywood to make money writing screenplays. Unlike his great contemporaries Fitzgerald, William Faulkner and John Steinbeck, Hemingway never wrote for the movies, but he had no objection to selling his novels and short stories to the studios.
He tried writing movie scripts but was frustrated by the image-based medium, which he had difficulty comprehending as it was so different from the language-based forms of the novel and short-story that he excelled in.

Quotes

[on alcohol] It's a great advantage not to drink among hard-drinking people. You can hold your tongue and, moreover, you can time any little irregularity of your own so that everybody else is so blind that they don't see or care.
[on belief] At 18 our convictions are hills from which we look; at 45 they are caves in which we hide.
[on age and aging in your 20s] One of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at 21 that everything afterward savors of anti-climax.
[on California and the West] Only remember--west of the Mississippi it's a little more look, see, act. A little less rationalize, comment, talk.
[on despair] In a real dark night of the soul it is always three o'clock in the morning, day after day.