F. Scott FitzGerald

Fitzgerald, F. (Francis) Scott (Key)

(1896–1940) writer; born in St. Paul, Minn. He spent four years at Princeton, but left before graduating to join the army during World War I. His first novel, This Side of Paradise (1920), was blatantly autobiographical and made him temporarily rich and famous. Later that year he married Zelda Sayre, an aspiring writer he had met while stationed in Alabama. A glamorous and witty couple, they lived a legendarily extravagant life in New York City that he unsuccessfully attempted to support with his writing—stories collected in Flappers and Philosophers (1920) and Tales of the Jazz Age (1922), a novel, The Beautiful and the Damned (1922) and a failed play, The Vegetable (1923). Knowing they could live more cheaply in Europe, they moved there in 1924; he became friendly with Ernest Hemingway and other expatriates and wrote The Great Gatsby (1925), a critical but not financial success, and a volume of stories, All the Sad Young Men (1926). The continuing social round deteriorated into debts, alcoholism, and, in 1930, the first of Zelda Fitzgerald's mental breakdowns. They returned to the U.S.A. that year, and the commercial failure of Tender is the Night (1934) led to his own breakdown, described in essays later collected in The Crack-Up (1945). He wrote screenplays in Hollywood (1937–40) and with Zelda now confined to a mental hospital in North Carolina, he became involved with the columnist Sheila Graham. He died in her apartment of a heart attack, leaving an unfinished novel, The Tycoon (1941).

The Cambridge Dictionary of American Biography, by John S. Bowman. Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1995. Reproduced with permission.

Fitzgerald, F. Scott

(1896–1940) American novelist whose works reflect a life of dissipation. [Am. Lit.: NCE, 957]

See: Dissipation

Allusions—Cultural, Literary, Biblical, and Historical: A Thematic Dictionary. Copyright 2008 The Gale Group, Inc. All rights reserved.