Summary
F. Scott Fitzgerald is best known for his Roaring Twenties novel, The Great Gatsby, which provides a definitive social account of lifestyles of the wealthy during the Jazz Age. At 24 years old, Fitzgerald released his first literature success, The Side of Paradise. One week later, he married his love, Zelda Sayre. Despite his success in literature, Fitzgerald was an alcoholic, and Zelda later had a mental breakdown. Amidst the Great Depression of the 1930s and his lackluster later novels, such as the less successful Tender is the Night, Fitzgerald moved to Hollywood in 1937 and became an unremarkable scriptwriter instead. He died in 1940 of a heart attack at 44 years old.
F. Scott Fitzgerald and His Life As A Writer
Francis Scott Fitzgerald was born in St. Paul, Minnesota in September 1896. His second cousin, three times removed, on his father's side, was Francis Scott Key, the writer of the lyrics to the "Star Spangled Banner." Fitzgerald's mother was Irish-Catholic and her family had a successful wholesale grocery business. Fitzgerald's father had a wicker furniture business, and when it failed, became a sales manager for Procter & Gamble, the consumer products company. At around 10 years old, Fitzgerald and his family moved to Upstate New York because of his father's job, and he lived in Buffalo and Syracuse. However, at 12 years old in 1908, Fitzgerald moved back to St. Paul, Minnesota because his father lost his job, and the family lived off his mother's inheritance. In 1911, at 15 years old, Fitzgerald was sent off to Newman School, a prestigious Catholic school in Hackensack, New Jersey. It was this school that recognized his literary talents and nourished his ambitions.
In 1913, Fitzgerald graduated from the Newman School and continued his literary development at Princeton University. Fitzgerald wrote scripts for the famous Princeton Triangle Club musicals and also published humor articles for the Princeton Tiger. However, Fitzgerald's obsession with his writing came at the expense of his college work and his grades. He was placed on academic probation as soon as his freshman year. In 1917, in his junior year, Fitzgerald dropped out of Princeton, although it is not clear whether he left on his own accord or he was made to leave.
In April 1917, the U.S. joined World War I, and Fitzgerald joined the Army. Afraid that he would die before publishing his first novel, he hastily wrote a novel called The Romantic Egotist. The publisher, Charles Scribner, rejected the novel but encouraged him to revise the novel, which he never did, and submit additional work in the future. By November 1918, World War I was over before Fitzgerald was even deployed to Europe as a Second Lieutenant. Upon his discharge from the Army, Fitzgerald moved to New York City, hoping to launch a more stable career in advertising instead to convince his girlfriend, Zelda, to marry him. However, his advertising career lasted only a few months, before Fitzgerald moved back to St. Paul, Minnesota.
In 1920, at 24 years old, Fitzgerald wrote an autobiographical story about love and greed called This Side of Paradise. The story is about an ambitious Midwesterner named Amory Blaine, who falls in love with two girls from higher-class families, but who is ultimately rejected. The storyline sounds so much like The Great Gatsby. The novel received glowing reviews and Fitzgerald was quickly identified as one of America's most promising young writers. His new celebrity status led him to an extravagant lifestyle that promoted his reputation as a playboy as much as he was an excellent writer.
In 1922, Fitzgerald published his second major novel, The Beautiful and the Damned, a story about a trouble marriage between Anthony and Gloria Patch. This second novel cemented his celebrity status as a writer about the culture of wealth, extravagance, and ambition that characterized the Roaring Twenties. Fitzgerald refers to the Jazz Age as such: "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." This is described in "Echoes of the Jazz Age," which Fitzgerald wrote in 1931. https://gutenberg.ca/ebooks/fitzgeraldfs-echoesofthejazzage/fitzgeraldfs-echoesofthejazzage-00-h.html
The Great Gatsby was Fitzgerald's greatest work and was published in 1925. It is one of the greatest pieces of American literature ever written, and it is the definitive portrait of the lifestyles of the wealthy during the Roaring Twenties. Fitzgerald also published a series of short stories for publications such as The Saturday Evening Post and Esquire, including "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" and "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz." Unfortunately, Fitzgerald's career and life declined after publishing The Great Gatsby.
It was not until 1934 that Fitzgerald published his fourth major novel, Tender is the Night, which is a story about an American psychiatrist in Paris, France and his troubled marriage to a wealthy patient. This novel was poorly received and it was a commercial failure. It is said to have a "chronologically jumbled structure." Unfortunately, it was also reflective of his own life. Fitzgerald never finished and never published his fifth major novel when he died of a heart attack in 1940 at 44 years old. Fitzgerald's health head been in a terminal spiral from depression, heavy drinking, and chain smoking. Fitzgerald's destructive alcoholism reflected his lack of significant commercial success after publishing The Great Gatsby and his tumultuous marriage to Zelda.
Zelda Sayre and Her Marriage to F. Scott Fitzgerald
Fitzgerald married Zelda Sayre in New York City in April 1920. Zelda was the 18 year old daughter of an Alabama Supreme Court Judge, and Fitzgerald met Zelda at a country club dance when he was stationed as an officer at Camp Sheridan, an Army training facility in Montgomery, Alabama. One week Fitzgerald published This Side of Paradise, the couple married. In 1921, the couple had a daughter named Frances "Scottie" Fitzgerald.
While the likeness of Zelda was prominently featured in Fitzgerald's works, including his four major novels, Fitzgerald also heavily plagiarized Zelda. As Zelda wrote in a review of Fitzgerald's second novel in 1922, The Beautiful and the Damned, "plagiarism begins at home." Zelda recognized that many stories and phrases in Fitzgerald's works, including in The Great Gatsby, come from the repackaging of her own diaries, scraps of writing in love letters to Fitzgerald, and multiple conversation phrases.
“It seems to me that on one page I recognized a portion of an old diary of mine which mysteriously disappeared shortly after my marriage, and, also, scraps of letters which, though considerably edited, sound to me vaguely familiar. In fact, Mr. Fitzgerald (I believe that is how he spells his name) seems to believe that plagiarism begins at home.” Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald, The New York Tribune. It would take considerable rage from a wife to publicly publish that about her husband in a major American newspaper.
Zelda was one of the first American "flappers," which were a generation of women who defied social norms and disregarded "socially acceptable behavior" of that era. Flappers did not wear corsets, wore knee-length skirts which were scandalous at that time, listened to jazz, and drank in public. Zelda was an artist, a dancer, a painter, and most importantly, a great writer. As a wife, Zelda was not compliant and docile, as women were expected to be during that era. Zelda was instead active, rebellious, and provocative, and actively sought to challenge social conventions.
Fitzgerald owed much of his success to Zelda's writing skills, even though they were never acknowledged. Even though the likeness of Zelda featured prominently in Fitzgerald's novels, Fitzgerald also unscrupulously plagiarized Zelda's ideas and writings. Zelda was often furious about that, but she quietly allowed that to happen for the sake of maintaining the veneer of success and the family's extravagant lifestyle.
The marriage was characterized by extravagance and lavish excess, specifically lots of wild, alcohol-fueled parties. A book by Judith Mackrell called Flappers: Six Women of a Dangerous Generation features the life of Zelda Sayre as one of the most infamous "flapper" women, with salacious details that I cannot verify. A Daily Mail article describes the lifestyle as such: "Money flowed, jazz music rang out, and fashionable young women in 1920s London, Paris and New York set aside behaviour previously deemed 'appropriate' in favour of high spirits, short skirts, hedonism and social liberation." The birth of Scottie, their daughter, apparently did not put a stop to the Fitzgeralds' lifestyle. To maintain their unsustainable lifestyle, the Fitzgeralds employed servants and nannies to look after Scottie.
However, the over-the-top partying led into infidelity, perpetual money issues, and loud arguments. Zelda was an attractive woman and Scott was a jealous husband, which further inflamed Zelda's anger and rebellion. After Zelda's facetious public criticism of her husband's plagiarism, she began receiving multiple requests to write books and articles. At the same time, Scott's success and reputation was dwindling, which made Scott increasingly resentful. The marriage relationship deteriorated after that and never really recovered.
Life After Moving to France
When the family moved to Paris in 1924, Scott became engrossed with The Great Gatsby, and Zelda became enamored with a French pilot named Edouard Jozan. Zelda asked Scott for a divorce so that she could start a new life, and Scott locked Zelda out of the house until she withdrew the request. As Scott got more verbally abusive and also physically violent, Zelda shortly after attempted suicide. These events caused both Zelda and Scott to become alcoholics. Their marriage degenerated to a point when, in 1930, Zelda was admitted to a French psychiatric hospital; and was diagnosed with schizophrenia. While in the hospital in 1932, Zelda wrote a full-length autobiographical novel called Save Me The Waltz and sent it to Scott's publisher. That made Scott furious. Scott had published nothing substantial since The Great Gatsby in 1925. Instead, Scott forced Zelda to edit out portions of her book and used the same exact material in his next novel Tender is the Night two years later in 1934. Naturally, the heavily edited version Zelda's book was published without success, and Scott's book based on plagiarism was also incoherent because it did not flow with his own story, and it too also flopped. Both Zelda and Scott were terribly disappointed with how their respective books were received, and that would sink both of them and their relationships further.
The irony is that Scott had the gall to publicly berate Zelda's work as "plagiarism" and called Zelda a "third-rate writer" with "nothing essentially to say." https://time.com/4036984/f-scott-fitzgerald-snark/ “You pick up the crumbs I drop at the dinner table and stick them in books,” Scott reportedly told Zelda. Therefore, F. Scott Fitzgerald is not a genuine role model.
The Tragic Final Years
In the 1930s, Zelda spent time in psychiatric hospitals in Switzerland, the Sheppard Pratt Hospital in Towson, Maryland, and then Zelda spent her remaining years alive being treated at the Phipps Psychiatric Clinic at Johns Hopkins University Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland. In 1935, the couple received news that Zelda's father's health was deteriorating and they moved back to Zelda's childhood hometown of Montgomery, Alabama.
In 1937, Scott abandoned Zelda and moved to Hollywood by himself to try to become a movie script writer. Scott died of a heart attack in Hollywood in December 1940. After The Great Gatsby was published in 1925, none of F. Scott Fitzgerald's work received more than moderate commercial success, let alone achieve critical success. F. Scott Fitzgerald died an unhappy man.
Zelda was being treated at Highland Hospital in Asheville, North Carolina, when a fire broke out in March 1948. Zelda was tragically locked in a room in the sanatorium while she awaited shock therapy. Zelda was burned to death.
Conclusion and the Relation to The Great Gatsby
F. Scott Fitzgerald's life is like a lifetime of pursuing the elusive American Dream, where opportunities are presented, but even with attaining success, happiness is constantly elusive, just Zelda's affection and just like the "Green Light" at the end of "Daisy's Pier."
Perhaps, Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald is "Daisy" and F. Scott Fitzgerald is the "Great Gatsby."
The F. Scott & Zelda Fitzgerald Museum
Fitzgerald Home, 1931 to 1932
919 Felder Avenue, Montgomery Alabama
The Zelda Suite
The Scott Suite
