Who was F. Scott Fitzgerald and did he live like Gatsby?

F. Scott Fitzgerald was born on 24 September 1896 in St Paul, Minnesota, the only surviving child of Edward Fitzgerald, a failed furniture manufacturer who descended into alcoholism, and Mary McQuillan Fitzgerald, whose family had done well in the grocery business. The family's finances were precarious throughout his childhood, and Scott was acutely aware of the line between people who had money and people who wanted it.

He attended Princeton University, did not graduate, and joined the Army in 1917. He was stationed at Camp Sheridan in Alabama, where he met Zelda Sayre, the daughter of a judge, at a country club dance in 1918. He fell in love immediately and completely. The relationship shaped everything that followed.

Did he live like Gatsby?#

Yes and no. The short answer is that he lived the Gatsby life and knew exactly what he was doing.

The Fitzgeralds -- Scott and Zelda -- were the most celebrated literary couple of the 1920s, and they performed that role with considerable energy. They were known for their parties, their drinking, their beauty, and their extravagance. They lived in New York, on Long Island, in Paris, on the French Riviera. They spent money faster than Scott could earn it, which was fast by any normal standard. He was one of the highest-paid short story writers in America, selling stories to the Saturday Evening Post for up to four thousand dollars apiece at a time when the average annual income was less than two thousand.

But the Gatsby parallel is more precise than lifestyle. Like Gatsby, Fitzgerald was a man of talent and ambition who came from the wrong side of the economic line. Zelda's father initially refused his daughter's hand partly on the grounds of Scott's uncertain financial prospects. Scott, like Gatsby, spent his life trying to earn his way into a world that measured people by a kind of social distinction that money alone could not purchase.

He was also, like Nick Carraway, the observer of this world: simultaneously inside it and apart from it, able to render it with a precision that comes from not quite belonging.

What happened to Zelda?#

Zelda suffered a breakdown in 1930 and was diagnosed with schizophrenia. She spent most of the 1930s in and out of psychiatric hospitals in Switzerland and the United States. She was, before her illness, a writer of genuine talent -- her novel Save Me the Waltz (1932), written in six weeks during a hospitalisation, covers the same material as Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night from her perspective. Scott was furious about it.

She died in a fire at the Highland Mental Health Institute in Asheville, North Carolina, in March 1948.

What happened to Fitzgerald himself?#

The 1930s were not kind to him. He spent much of the decade in Hollywood writing screenplays for studios that did not value his talents and paid him for work they did not use. He drank heavily. His literary reputation went into eclipse -- he was considered yesterday's man, the voice of a decade that had ended badly in the Depression.

Tender is the Night (1934), his autobiographical novel of the Riviera years, was a commercial and critical disappointment at the time of publication. It is now considered among the finest American novels of the 20th century.

He died of a heart attack on 21 December 1940, in the Hollywood apartment of the gossip columnist Sheilah Graham, who had been his companion in his last years. He was forty-four. He was working on The Last Tycoon, a novel about Hollywood, at the time of his death. It was published posthumously in incomplete form.

He died believing he had failed. His books were out of print. The paperback editions that made him a canonical American writer did not appear until after World War Two.

What should you read?#

The Great Gatsby (1925) is the place to start. For everything the novel's key symbols mean, the green light and Gatsby's parties are the companion pieces. For what to read after Gatsby, the full recommendation list covers every direction.

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Further reading#

The Great Gatsby is free on Foxing.

Sources#

• Matthew J. Bruccoli, Some Sort of Epic Grandeur: The Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald, University of South Carolina Press, 2002
• Andrew Turnbull, Scott Fitzgerald, Scribner, 1962
• Zelda Fitzgerald, Save Me the Waltz, Scribner, 1932