F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Life and Reaction of F. Scott Fitzgerald

F Scott Fitzgerald was born in the year 1896. Writer of novels and short stories, he is best known for coining the phrase "Jazz Age" for the decade known as the 1920s.

His childhood was in St. Paul Minnesota. Coming from a wealthy family, Fitzgerald went to local Roman Catholic boarding schools. Rebelling from his catholic upbringing, at Princeton University he ignored the formal study and received his education from writers and critics from the area, including Edmund Wilson.

In 1917, he dropped out of Princeton and took a commission as an army officer during World War I. Stationed in France, this event would help him to shape his later ideas as he was exposed to Freudian theory and other theories of the day.

The most important of Fitzgerald joining of the army, was that of his meeting Zelda Sayre, an archetypal flapper, who was to become an integral part of the way he was to compose his novels. Zelda was the love of his life and his entire life.

To make Zelda his, he went and in the spring of 1920 had his novel, This Side of Paradise, published. With a booming welcome, it gave him enough money to marry Zelda and keep her in the lifestyle she was accustomed to, that of upper middle class white woman.
The story was an autobiography on how post-war youth were now finding the shattered lives of America, proper and prim, to come home and change.

The next great novel of Fitgerald's was "Beautiful and the Damned". A mood piece, it chronicled the anxieties of a rich couple. It was not as possible as the first novel, and was a set back.

What gave Fitzgerald his most spending money, was that of his short stories. He used this money to keep up a high society partying life style. Because it was in demand, and to make money, Fitzgerald authorized 46 of his stories to be published in four different books.

No long after the authority was given, F. Scott and Zelda moved their family out of the states and to Paris, the city that gave Fitzgerald his first taste of the Jazz Age. While in Paris, he write his most famous novel, The Great Gatsby. It was known as a "sensible, satiric fable of the pursuit of success and the collapse of the American dream". While today we know it as the masterpiece of his life, it was received poorly, and made little money. This was a turning point for Fitzgerald.

Zelda was battling with insanity and Fitzgerald fell more in to alcoholism. Both checked into rehabilitation facilities, Zelda staying in Baltimore and Scott moving to the midwest, where he met the writer of Bull Durham, Tony Butta. Even though Scott continued to write, his novel Tender is the Night was greeted with such poor reception that he lapsed into a breakdown, which was recorded in Edmund Wilson's The Crack Up.

Fitzgerald recovered and in 1937 became a screenwriter, which inspired his last novel, The Last Tycoon. While it was not completed at his death on Dec 21, 1940, its brilliance helped to promote him as one of the greatest writers of American History.