The Novel
53 The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)
Biography
Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald (September 24, 1896–greeDecember 21, 1940) was an American fiction writer whose works helped to illustrate the flamboyance and excess of the Jazz Age. While he achieved popular success, fame, and fortune in his lifetime, he did not receive much critical acclaim until after his death. A notable member of the “Lost Generation” of the 1920s, Fitzgerald is now widely regarded as one of the greatest American writers of the twentieth century.
He finished four novels: This Side of Paradise (1920), The Beautiful and Damned (1922), The Great Gatsby (1925), and Tender Is the Night (1934). A fifth, unfinished novel, The Last Tycoon, was published posthumously in 1941. Four collections of his short stories were published, as well as 164 short stories in magazines during his lifetime, and fifty more uncollected stories were published by Fitzgerald scholar Matthew J. Bruccoli in The Price Was High (1979).
Born in 1896 in Saint Paul, Minnesota, to an upper-middle-class family, Fitzgerald was a distant relative of Francis Scott Key, who wrote the poem that became the basis for the American national anthem.
With the help of relatives, he studied at Princeton University. There, he firmly dedicated himself to honing his craft as a writer. But his writing pursuits at Princeton came at the expense of his coursework, causing him to be placed on academic probation, and in 1917, he dropped out of university to join the army.
Fitzgerald was commissioned a second lieutenant in the infantry and assigned to Camp Sheridan near Montgomery, Alabama, where he met and fell in love with Zelda Sayre, the “golden girl,” in Fitzgerald’s terms, of Montgomery society. The war ended in 1918 before Fitzgerald was ever deployed. Upon his discharge, he moved to New York City, hoping to launch a career in advertising that would be lucrative enough to persuade Zelda to marry him.
Zelda accepted his marriage proposal, but unconvinced that he would be able to support her, she later broke off the engagement. However, with the success of Fitzgerald’s first novel, This Side of Paradise (1920), they resumed their engagement and were married in New York. Their only child, Frances Scott “Scottie” Fitzgerald, was born on October 26, 1921.
During the 1920s—his most productive decade—Fitzgerald made several excursions to Europe, mostly Paris and the French Riviera, and became friends with many members of the American expatriate community in Paris, notably Ernest Hemingway. Like most professional authors at the time, Fitzgerald supplemented his income by writing short stories for several large-circulation American magazines.
Although Fitzgerald’s passion lay in writing novels, only his first novel sold well enough to support the opulent lifestyle that he and Zelda adopted as New York celebrities. (The Great Gatsby, now considered to be his masterpiece, did not become popular until after Fitzgerald’s