F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) was one of the leading writers of 1920s America, an era that he dubbed “the Jazz Age.” A unique aspect of his writing was his ability to be both a leading participant in the life he described, and a detached observer of it. Many readers considered his stories to be a celebration of moral decline. As a result, his talent and the underlying themes of his work were not recognized until after his death.
Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was born September 24, 1896, in St. Paul, Minnesota. Despite being a mediocre student, he enrolled at Princeton University. While there, he wrote several musical comedies, however, he found academics to be a burden, and left school in 1917 without graduating. He enlisted in the Army in 1917, just as World War I neared its end.
He became a second lieutenant, and was stationed at Camp Sheridan in Montgomery, Alabama. It was there that he met and fell in love with Zelda Sayre. She agreed to marry him, but her desire for wealth, fun and leisure led her to delay the wedding until he could prove a success. Fitzgerald’s first novel, This Side of Paradise, was published in 1920. With this, he became a literary sensation, and earned enough money and acclaim to make Zelda his wife. His popularity only increased with the publication of other works about the Roaring Twenties, including The Beautiful and the Damned (1921), and two collections of short stories, Flappers and Philosophers (1920), and Tales of the Jazz Age (1922).
The Great Gatsby (1925) was less popular than Fitzgerald’s earlier works, but ultimately, it would become known as his masterpiece, the novel that would earn him lasting literary importance. This lively, yet deeply moral novel serves as a criticism of the moral emptiness that Fitzgerald observed in the wealthy American society of the 1920s.
Having become a celebrity, Fitzgerald found himself in a lifestyle of reckless decadence. He was desperately trying to please Zelda by writing to earn money. However, as the giddiness of the Roaring Twenties turned toward the bleakness during the Great Depression, Zelda suffered a nervous breakdown, and he battled alcoholism, which hampered his writing. He published Tender is the Night in 1934, and sold short stories to The Saturday Evening Post to support his lavish lifestyle. In 1937, he moved to Hollywood where he worked as a scriptwriter. In 1940, while working on The Last Tycoon, he died of a heart attack. A few years after his death, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s writing earned him the recognition he had desired while alive.
The Great Gatsby
