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| Birth Name(s) : F Scott Fitzgerald |
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Full F Scott Fitzgerald Biography
Born on Cathedral Hill in St. Paul, Minnesota, to an upper-middle class Irish Catholic household, Fitzgerald was named after his famous relative Francis Scott Key, but was referred to as 'Scott'. He spent 1898–1901 and 1903–1908 in Buffalo, New York, where he attended Nardin Academy. When his father was fired from Proctor & Gamble, the family moved back to Minnesota, where Fitzgerald attended St. Paul Academy in St. Paul from 1908–1911. His first piece of literature was published in his school newspaper when he was 13. He attended Newman School, a prep school in Hackensack, New Jersey, in 1911–1912, and then entered Princeton University in 1913 as a member of the Class of 1917. There he became friends with future critics and writers Edmund Wilson (Class of 1916) and John Peale Bishop (Class of 1917), and wrote for the Princeton Triangle Club.
While at Camp Sheridan, Fitzgerald met Zelda Sayre (1900–1948), the "top girl," in Fitzgerald's words, of Montgomery, Alabama youth society. She was the daughter of an Alabama Supreme Court Judge. The two were engaged in 1919, and Fitzgerald moved into an apartment at 1395 Lexington Avenue in New York City to try to lay a foundation for his life with Zelda. Working at an advertising firm and writing short stories, he was unable to convince Zelda that he would be able to support her, leading her to break off the engagement.
Fitzgerald returned to his parents' house at 599 Summit Avenue, on Cathedral Hill, in St. Paul to revise The Romantic Egotist. Recast as This Side of Paradise, about the flapper generation of the Roaring 20s, it was accepted by Scribner's in the fall of 1919, and Zelda and Scott resumed their engagement. The novel was published on March 26, 1920, and became one of the most popular books of the year. Scott and Zelda were married in New York's St. Patrick's Cathedral. Their daughter and only child, Frances Scott "Scottie" Fitzgerald, was born on October 26, 1921.
Hemingway looked up to Fitzgerald as an experienced professional writer. Hemingway greatly admired The Great Gatsby and wrote in his A Moveable Feast "If he could write a book as fine as The Great Gatsby I was sure that he could write an even better one" (153). Hemingway expressed his deep admiration for Fitzgerald, and Fitzgerald's flawed, doomed character, when he prefaced his chapters concerning Fitzgerald in A Moveable Feast with:His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly's wings. At one time he understood it no more than the butterfly did and he did not know when it was brushed or marred. Later he became conscious of his damaged wings and their construction and he learned to think and could not fly any more because the love of flight was gone and he could only remember when it had been effortless. (129)
Much of what Hemingway wrote in A Moveable Feast helped to create the myth of Fitzgerald's eventual demise and Zelda's hand in that demise. Though much of Hemingway's text is factually correct, it is always tinged with his disappointment with Fitzgerald. That disappointment was most evident when in The Green Hills of Africa he specifically mentions Fitzgerald as a ruined writer.
Fitzgerald’s friendship with Hemingway was a tumultuous one, as it seems most of Fitzgerald’s relationships were. Hemingway did not get along well with Zelda, either. He claimed that she “encouraged her husband to drink so as to distract Scott from his ‘real’ work on his novel,"1 the other work being his short stories he sold to magazines. The “whoring” as Fitzgerald, and subsequently Hemingway, called these sales, was a sore point in the authors’ friendship. Fitzgerald claimed that he would first write his stories in an authentic manner but then put in “twists that made them into saleable magazine stories.”²
Fitzgerald suffered two heart attacks in late 1940. After the first, in Schwab's Drug Store, he was ordered by his doctor to avoid strenuous exertion and to obtain a first floor apartment, which he did by moving in with Sheilah Graham. On the night of December 20, 1940, he had his second heart attack, and the next day, December 21, while awaiting a visit from his doctor, Fitzgerald collapsed in Graham's apartment and died. He was 44.
Among the attendants at a visitation held at a funeral home in Hollywood was Dorothy Parker, who reportedly cried and murmured "the poor son of a bitch," a line from Jay Gatsby's funeral in Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. In another strange coincidence, the author Nathanael West, who was a friend and admirer of Fitzgerald, was killed along with his wife on the way to Fitzgerald's services. Fitzgerald's remains were then shipped to Maryland, where his funeral was attended by very few people. The Catholic church would not allow him to be buried in his family's plot in Rockville and he was originally buried in Rockville Union Cemetery. Zelda died tragically in a fire at the Highland Mental Hospital in Asheville, North Carolina, in 1948. With the permission and assistance of their only child, Frances "Scottie" Fitzgerald Lanahan Smith, the Women's Club of Rockville had their bodies moved to the family plot in Saint Mary's Cemetery, in Rockville, Maryland. |
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