F. Scott Fitzgerald

Assignment Six -- F. Scott Fitzgerald
Great Gatsby

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940)

In his "Introduction" to A Historical Guide to F. Scott Fitzgerald (2004) Kirk Curnett notes that Fitzgerald "belongs to that handful of American writers whose life stories threaten to overshadow their art.... the sustained fascination with the Fitzgerald story arises from its irresisteble blend of glamour and dissolution....At once gifted, handsome, and charming, he epitomizes the youthful vim and vigor of the decade known as the roaring Twenties. At the same time the debilitating tendency toward self-destruction that made him, as he admitted, 'a mediocre caretaker of most of the things left in my hands, including my own talent' (Crack-Up) places him in the pantheon of distinctly American icons...who embody the 'live fast, die young' credo."

Curnett continues by noting that "Zelda Sayre (1900-1948) is every bit as arresting a personality, a dynamic, often outrageous southern belle whose beauty and impulsiveness are the very qualities that her husband strove to incarnate in his art. The couple's love affair makes for a roller-coaster ride of a plot, its highs and lows wrought vivid through scenes of passion, jealousy, betrayal and decline. Mix in a heartbreaking conclusion (he dies in obscurity from a heart attack, she in a sanitaritum fire), exotic settings (Paris, the French Riviera, Hollywood), and a stellar supporting cast (Hemingway and Gertrude Stein among others), and it is little wonder tha thte Scott and Zelda story has been told so many times in so many forms" (3-4).

Zelda and Scott

Fitzgerald was born in this home on Laurel Avenue in St. Paul, Minnesota

Fitzgerald was born in St. Paul Minnesota to Mollie McQuillan Fitzgerald and Edward Fitzgerald. He was named after Francis Scott Key, author of the "Star-Spangled Banner," from whom his father was descended. Fitzgerald's mother was the daughter of an Iriswh immigrant who had made a small fortune in the wholesale grocery business, and it was her family money that permitted Scott to attend exclusive Catholic prep schools and eventually attend Princeton.

His father, however, was not so successful and the family moved between Minnesota and Buffalo usually living in modest housing on the edges of exclusive residential areas.

When Fitzgerald was twelve years old, his father was fired from his job a Proctor and Gamble. Fitzgerald recalled that day as transformative: "That morning he had gone out a comparatively young man, a man full of confidence. He came home that evening, an old man, a completely broken man .... He was a failure the rest of his days" (In His Own Time 296).

In a "Brief Biography" in A Historical Guide to F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jackson Bryer argues that Fitzgerald's background led Fitzgerald to "aspire to a social position that her fervantly sought but was painfully aware he could never reach" (24).

Fitzgerald at fifteen

Fitzgerald began attending Princeton in 1913 but by 1917 the country's focus was on America's impending entry into World War I, and Scott applied for appointment as a second lieutenant in the army. He received his commision in Ocober and left princeton during his senior year. He was on academic probation at the time and would have been barred from paricipatin ght emany extra-currcular activities that had made Princeton seem like the "pleasantest country clud in America."

Fitzgerald did not "get over" before the war ended and regretted missing the opportunity to participate in this great romantic adventure for the rest of his days. He did, however, meet Zelda Sayre, the daughter of an Alabama Supreme Court justice, while stationed as Camp Sheridan outside of Birmingham, Alabama. Although Zelda accepted an engagement ring from Scott, after his discharge she broke off the engagement until he could show better prospects.

He quit his job at a New York advertising agency and spent two months during the summer of 1919 in his parents house rewriting the manuscript he had completed during his army training at Fort Leavenworth. The manuscript was accepted and when This Side of Paradise was published in March of 1920 it became an immediate sensation. Sinclair Lewis and F. Scott Fitzgerald were the only major figures in the 1920s to make their living exclusively from fiction.

Scott and Zelda were married six months after the publication of this Side of Paradise and their daughter Frances Scott Fitzgerald, who they nicknamed "Scottie,"was born a year later. Fitzgerald reported that Zelda said after Scottie's birth "I hope it's beautiful and a fool--a beautiful little fool," words that he gave to Daisy Buchanan in The Great Gatsby.

Zelda and Scott with Frances ("Scottie")
Fitzgerald published The Beautiful and the Damned in 1922 and despite good sales, the royalties were insufficient to support the Fitzgeralds' lifestyle. "From early in his career until the end of his life, Fitzgerald found himself constantly needing to borrow against his future earnings from his publisher and from his agent" (Bryer 31).

In 1923, Fitzgerald published his second collection of stories, Tales of the Jazz Age, and moved his family to a rented home in Great Neck, Long Island, the model for East and West Egg in the Great Gatsby. While beginning work on the Great Gatsby, he and Zelda were the center of a crowd entertainers, playwright, and socialites, many of whom spent their weekends at the Fitzgeralds' home.

In 1924, to escape these distractions and to take advantage of the favorable exchange rate, the couple moved to a rented villa on the French Riviera where Scott finished the novel. During this period, Zelda had a relationship of some sort with a young French aviator, Edouard Jozan, a relationship that affected Scott deeply: "I knew something had happened that could never be reparied" (Notebooks). The emotions behind his sense of loss are reflected in the Gatsby-Daisy-Tom traingle in The Great Gatsby.

In the late 1920s, Zelda began to evidence the symptoms that led her in and out of mental institutions for the remainder of her life, an experience reflected in Fitzgerald's 1943 Tender is the Night, whose protagonist is a young psychiatrist. A gifted writer herself, Zelda published the autobiographical novel Save Me the Waltz in 1932.

Fitzgerald's literary career declined dramatically in the 1930s. He found some work in Hollywood, but he never became a successfully screenwriter. He died of a heart attack in 1940.

Fitzgerald died of a heart attack in 1940 in this apartment building in West Hollywood, California

As I noted on the Sinclair Lewis notes page, during the 1920s, the maturation of advertising promoted consumer values in American society and reflected the rise of the consumer society. Read "The Rise of Marketing and Advertising" from Business Enterprise in Americdan History.

"The Jazz Age was a period of unprecedented prosperity during which the rising standards of living enjoyed by many Americans fueled an expanding marketplace of purchasable goods, from automobiles to fashion to cosmetics...advertising promoted new more flexible models of selfhood that excited concerns about authenticity and choice [and encouraged] ... a shift in vlaues that suddenly denigrated presevation and thrift in favor of obsolescence and squandering" (Curnutt 15).

"The single most important product in the new culture of consumption was the automobile, and the number of cars manufactured more than tripled during the 1920s. By 1929, almost half the families in the United States owned a car -a level not reached in England until 1970." from "Autos for the Masses" in Who Built America?

"The new consumer culture was accompanied by the rise of a truly national popular culture. Popular entertainments like radio, recorded music, and motion pictures pulled previously isolated social groups into the mainstream. At the same time, however, they divided families by appealing differently to members of different generations. As they reached their wide audiences, these entertainment forms created new desires and aspirations, reinforcing the development of a consumer culture."from "Mass Culture: Radio, Music, and the Movies" in Who Built America?

The article "Cultural Conflicts" from Who Built America? summarizes some of the important cultural issues that separated Americans in the 1920s. In The Great Gatsby Gatsby introduces Wolfsheim as the man who fixed the World Series, referencing the 1919 Black Sox Scandal that resulted in Shoeless Joe Jackson being banned from baseball for life. In 1925, the year The Great Gatsby was published The Scopes Trial pitted noted civil libertarian lawyer Clarence Darrow against former presidential candidate and defender of the lieralnessof the Bible, William Jennings Bryan.

Near the beginning of The Great Gatsby, Tom Buchanan tries to explain the premise of a book he has just read, The Rise of the Colored Empires. Fitzgerald is referencing books like Madison Grant's The Passing of the Great Race (1916). Grant was a proponent of eugenics, the study of how humans could "self-direct evolution" through selective breeding practices. The desire to protect the Nordic race as expressed by Tom in the novel was behind the zenophobia of the 1920s that led to extremely harsh restrictions on "undesirable" immigrants (primarily immigrants from Catholic countries).

The 1920s was a period in which the more permissive mores that were evidenced in films, popular literature, music, clothing styles, new-age religions, and a general willingness to break the law by drinking alcoholic beverages battled the small-town revival of strictly enforced patriotism, fundamentalist religion, and legal prohibitions on personal behavior.

Flapper

Fitzgerald is often credited with inventing the "flapper," the rebellious young woman of the twenties. In his work was a symbol of liberated femininity and moral uncertainty. But Zelda did as much as Scott to define the type. With her husband's guidance, Zelda began wrote and published essays and short stories that appeared under a joint byline or sometimes under her husband's name, probably because his name resulted in higher payment from the periodicals. Some have concluded that tension and an element of competition crept into the relationship as Zelda's proficiency as a writer grew. The occasional magazine articles and essays, generally with themes of youth, flappers, and the Jazz Age, continued over several years. In a 1922 article, Zelda claimed that "flapperdom" was a "philosophy": "The flapper awoke from her lethargy of subdebism, bobbed her hair, put on her choicest pair of earrings and a great deal of audacity and rouge and went into battle. She flirted because it was great fun to flirt and wore a one-piece bathing suit because she had a good figure, she covered her face with powder and paint because she didn't need it and she refused to be bored chiefly because she wasn't boring."

Flappers were the subject of many popular books and films in the 1920s: If you would like to read excerpts try "Flappers Mentality" from Flaming Youth (1923) written as Warner Fabian by by Samuel Hopkins Adams or Anita Loos "Paris is Devine" from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1925). This is the story of a beauiful young flapper from Little Rock, Arkansas.

There were also numerous serious discussions of the significane of young women's rebellious behanvior. Beatrice Hinkle in "Against the Double Standard" argued that women were asserting new sexual independence.

Clara Bow, the "It" girl

Clara Bow in It (1927)

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updated June 20, 2006

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940)
	In his "Introduction" to A Historical Guide to F. Scott Fitzgerald (2004) Kirk Curnett notes that Fitzgerald "belongs to that handful of American writers whose life stories threaten to overshadow their art.... the sustained fascination with the Fitzgerald story arises from its irresisteble blend of glamour and dissolution....At once gifted, handsome, and charming, he epitomizes the youthful vim and vigor of the decade known as the roaring Twenties. At the same time the debilitating tendency toward self-destruction that made him, as he admitted, 'a mediocre caretaker of most of the things left in my hands, including my own talent' (Crack-Up) places him in the pantheon of distinctly American icons...who embody the 'live fast, die young' credo."
Curnett continues by noting that "Zelda Sayre (1900-1948) is every bit as arresting a personality, a dynamic, often outrageous southern belle whose beauty and impulsiveness are the very qualities that her husband strove to incarnate in his art. The couple's love affair makes for a roller-coaster ride of a plot, its highs and lows wrought vivid through scenes of passion, jealousy, betrayal and decline. Mix in a heartbreaking conclusion (he dies in obscurity from a heart attack, she in a sanitaritum fire), exotic settings (Paris, the French Riviera, Hollywood), and a stellar supporting cast (Hemingway and Gertrude Stein among others), and it is little wonder tha thte Scott and Zelda story has been told so many times in so many forms" (3-4).		Zelda and Scott
Fitzgerald was born in this home on Laurel Avenue in St. Paul, Minnesota	Fitzgerald was born in St. Paul Minnesota to Mollie McQuillan Fitzgerald and Edward Fitzgerald. He was named after Francis Scott Key, author of the "Star-Spangled Banner," from whom his father was descended. Fitzgerald's mother was the daughter of an Iriswh immigrant who had made a small fortune in the wholesale grocery business, and it was her family money that permitted Scott to attend exclusive Catholic prep schools and eventually attend Princeton. His father, however, was not so successful and the family moved between Minnesota and Buffalo usually living in modest housing on the edges of exclusive residential areas.
When Fitzgerald was twelve years old, his father was fired from his job a Proctor and Gamble. Fitzgerald recalled that day as transformative: "That morning he had gone out a comparatively young man, a man full of confidence. He came home that evening, an old man, a completely broken man .... He was a failure the rest of his days" (In His Own Time 296). In a "Brief Biography" in A Historical Guide to F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jackson Bryer argues that Fitzgerald's background led Fitzgerald to "aspire to a social position that her fervantly sought but was painfully aware he could never reach" (24).		Fitzgerald at fifteen
Fitzgerald began attending Princeton in 1913 but by 1917 the country's focus was on America's impending entry into World War I, and Scott applied for appointment as a second lieutenant in the army. He received his commision in Ocober and left princeton during his senior year. He was on academic probation at the time and would have been barred from paricipatin ght emany extra-currcular activities that had made Princeton seem like the "pleasantest country clud in America."
	Fitzgerald did not "get over" before the war ended and regretted missing the opportunity to participate in this great romantic adventure for the rest of his days. He did, however, meet Zelda Sayre, the daughter of an Alabama Supreme Court justice, while stationed as Camp Sheridan outside of Birmingham, Alabama. Although Zelda accepted an engagement ring from Scott, after his discharge she broke off the engagement until he could show better prospects.
He quit his job at a New York advertising agency and spent two months during the summer of 1919 in his parents house rewriting the manuscript he had completed during his army training at Fort Leavenworth. The manuscript was accepted and when This Side of Paradise was published in March of 1920 it became an immediate sensation. Sinclair Lewis and F. Scott Fitzgerald were the only major figures in the 1920s to make their living exclusively from fiction.
Scott and Zelda were married six months after the publication of this Side of Paradise and their daughter Frances Scott Fitzgerald, who they nicknamed "Scottie,"was born a year later. Fitzgerald reported that Zelda said after Scottie's birth "I hope it's beautiful and a fool--a beautiful little fool," words that he gave to Daisy Buchanan in The Great Gatsby.	Zelda and Scott with Frances ("Scottie")	Fitzgerald published The Beautiful and the Damned in 1922 and despite good sales, the royalties were insufficient to support the Fitzgeralds' lifestyle. "From early in his career until the end of his life, Fitzgerald found himself constantly needing to borrow against his future earnings from his publisher and from his agent" (Bryer 31).
In 1923, Fitzgerald published his second collection of stories, Tales of the Jazz Age, and moved his family to a rented home in Great Neck, Long Island, the model for East and West Egg in the Great Gatsby. While beginning work on the Great Gatsby, he and Zelda were the center of a crowd entertainers, playwright, and socialites, many of whom spent their weekends at the Fitzgeralds' home. In 1924, to escape these distractions and to take advantage of the favorable exchange rate, the couple moved to a rented villa on the French Riviera where Scott finished the novel. During this period, Zelda had a relationship of some sort with a young French aviator, Edouard Jozan, a relationship that affected Scott deeply: "I knew something had happened that could never be reparied" (Notebooks). The emotions behind his sense of loss are reflected in the Gatsby-Daisy-Tom traingle in The Great Gatsby.
In the late 1920s, Zelda began to evidence the symptoms that led her in and out of mental institutions for the remainder of her life, an experience reflected in Fitzgerald's 1943 Tender is the Night, whose protagonist is a young psychiatrist. A gifted writer herself, Zelda published the autobiographical novel Save Me the Waltz in 1932. Fitzgerald's literary career declined dramatically in the 1930s. He found some work in Hollywood, but he never became a successfully screenwriter. He died of a heart attack in 1940.		Fitzgerald died of a heart attack in 1940 in this apartment building in West Hollywood, California
		As I noted on the Sinclair Lewis notes page, during the 1920s, the maturation of advertising promoted consumer values in American society and reflected the rise of the consumer society. Read "The Rise of Marketing and Advertising" from Business Enterprise in Americdan History. "The Jazz Age was a period of unprecedented prosperity during which the rising standards of living enjoyed by many Americans fueled an expanding marketplace of purchasable goods, from automobiles to fashion to cosmetics...advertising promoted new more flexible models of selfhood that excited concerns about authenticity and choice [and encouraged] ... a shift in vlaues that suddenly denigrated presevation and thrift in favor of obsolescence and squandering" (Curnutt 15).


"The single most important product in the new culture of consumption was the automobile, and the number of cars manufactured more than tripled during the 1920s. By 1929, almost half the families in the United States owned a car -a level not reached in England until 1970." from "Autos for the Masses" in Who Built America?
"The new consumer culture was accompanied by the rise of a truly national popular culture. Popular entertainments like radio, recorded music, and motion pictures pulled previously isolated social groups into the mainstream. At the same time, however, they divided families by appealing differently to members of different generations. As they reached their wide audiences, these entertainment forms created new desires and aspirations, reinforcing the development of a consumer culture."from "Mass Culture: Radio, Music, and the Movies" in Who Built America? The article "Cultural Conflicts" from Who Built America? summarizes some of the important cultural issues that separated Americans in the 1920s. In The Great Gatsby Gatsby introduces Wolfsheim as the man who fixed the World Series, referencing the 1919 Black Sox Scandal that resulted in Shoeless Joe Jackson being banned from baseball for life. In 1925, the year The Great Gatsby was published The Scopes Trial pitted noted civil libertarian lawyer Clarence Darrow against former presidential candidate and defender of the lieralnessof the Bible, William Jennings Bryan. Near the beginning of The Great Gatsby, Tom Buchanan tries to explain the premise of a book he has just read, The Rise of the Colored Empires. Fitzgerald is referencing books like Madison Grant's The Passing of the Great Race (1916). Grant was a proponent of eugenics, the study of how humans could "self-direct evolution" through selective breeding practices. The desire to protect the Nordic race as expressed by Tom in the novel was behind the zenophobia of the 1920s that led to extremely harsh restrictions on "undesirable" immigrants (primarily immigrants from Catholic countries).
The 1920s was a period in which the more permissive mores that were evidenced in films, popular literature, music, clothing styles, new-age religions, and a general willingness to break the law by drinking alcoholic beverages battled the small-town revival of strictly enforced patriotism, fundamentalist religion, and legal prohibitions on personal behavior.
Flapper	Fitzgerald is often credited with inventing the "flapper," the rebellious young woman of the twenties. In his work was a symbol of liberated femininity and moral uncertainty. But Zelda did as much as Scott to define the type. With her husband's guidance, Zelda began wrote and published essays and short stories that appeared under a joint byline or sometimes under her husband's name, probably because his name resulted in higher payment from the periodicals. Some have concluded that tension and an element of competition crept into the relationship as Zelda's proficiency as a writer grew. The occasional magazine articles and essays, generally with themes of youth, flappers, and the Jazz Age, continued over several years. In a 1922 article, Zelda claimed that "flapperdom" was a "philosophy": "The flapper awoke from her lethargy of subdebism, bobbed her hair, put on her choicest pair of earrings and a great deal of audacity and rouge and went into battle. She flirted because it was great fun to flirt and wore a one-piece bathing suit because she had a good figure, she covered her face with powder and paint because she didn't need it and she refused to be bored chiefly because she wasn't boring."
Flappers were the subject of many popular books and films in the 1920s: If you would like to read excerpts try "Flappers Mentality" from Flaming Youth (1923) written as Warner Fabian by by Samuel Hopkins Adams or Anita Loos "Paris is Devine" from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1925). This is the story of a beauiful young flapper from Little Rock, Arkansas. There were also numerous serious discussions of the significane of young women's rebellious behanvior. Beatrice Hinkle in "Against the Double Standard" argued that women were asserting new sexual independence.		Clara Bow, the "It" girl
Clara Bow in It (1927)