Francis Scott
Key Fitzgerald was born September 24, 1896, in St. Paul, Minnesota. His
namesake Francis Scott Key, who wrote the lyrics of "The Star-Spangled Banner."
Fitzgerald's mother, Mary McQuillan, was an Irish Catholic family who made a
fortune in the wholesale grocery Minnesota. his father, Edward Fitzgerald, had opened
a business of wicker furniture in St. Paul, and when he took a job selling Procter
& Gamble took his family back and forth between Buffalo and Syracuse, New York
during the first decade of the life of Fitzgerald. However, Edward Fitzgerald lost
his job at Procter & Gamble in 1908, when F. Scott Fitzgerald was 12, and the
family moved to St. Paul to live with the legacy of his mother.
Fitzgerald was
a smart guy, handsome and ambitious, the pride and joy of his parents and
especially his mother. He attended St. Paul Academy and at age 13 he had his
first piece of writing appears in the press: a detective novel published in the
school newspaper. In 1911, when Fitzgerald was 15, his parents sent him to
school in Newman a prestigious Catholic prep school in New Jersey. There he met
Father Sigourney Fay, who noticed his burgeoning talent with writing and
encouraged him to pursue his literary ambitions.
After
graduating from Newman School in 1913, Fitzgerald decided to stay in New Jersey
to continue his artistic development at the University of Princeton. At
Princeton, who worked tirelessly to perfect her craft as a writer, writing
musicals Princeton Triangle Club famous scripts, as well as frequent articles
for the Princeton Tiger humor magazine and the stories of the literary magazine
Nassau. However, Fitzgerald was writing at the expense of their course. He was
placed on probation and in 1917, he left school to join the army. Lest he die
in the First World War, with its unfulfilled literary dreams in the weeks
before reporting to work in a hurry Fitzgerald wrote a novel called The Romantic
Egotist. Although children of publisher Charles Scribner rejected the novel,
critic said originality and encouraged Fitzgerald to have more work in the
future.
Fitzgerald was
commissioned a second lieutenant in the infantry and was assigned to Camp Sheridan
in Montgomery, Alabama. It was there that he met and fell in love with a
beautiful young 18 year old girl named Zelda Sayre, the daughter of a judge of
the Supreme Court of Alabama. The war ended in 1919, before Fitzgerald was
never applied, and after his release, he moved to New York City in hopes of
starting a career in the lucrative enough advertising to convince Zelda to
marry him , However, he quit his job after a few months, and returned to St. Paul
to rewrite his novel.
New incarnation
of the novel, This Side of Paradise, a largely autobiographical story about
love and greed, Amory Blaine focused on an ambitious Falls Midwest, but
ultimately rejected by two girls high class. The novel was published in 1920 to
good reviews and became overnight Fitzgerald, at the age of 24 years, in one of
the country's most promising young writers. A week after the publication of the
novel, he married Zelda Sayre in New York. They had a son, a daughter, Frances
Scott Fitzgerald, born in 1921.
F. ScottFitzgerald eagerly embraced his new celebrity status and embarked on an
extravagant lifestyle, which earned him a reputation as a playboy and hindered
his reputation as a serious literary writer. From 1920 and for the rest of his
career, Fitzgerald is supported by writing a large number of short stories for
popular publications such as The Saturday Evening Post and Esquire. Some of his
most notable stories include "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz", "The
Curious Case of Benjamin Button", "yellow" and "The Last of
the Belles". In 1922 Fitzgerald published his second novel, The Beautiful
and the Damned, the history of troubled marriage of Anthony and Gloria Patch.
Beauty and the Damned helped cement his status as one of the greatest satirical
writers and cultural wealth, extravagance and ambition that has emerged during
the prosperity of the 1920s, the so-called the Jazz Age. It was a time of
miracles, "wrote Fitzgerald," was a time of art, it was a time of
excess, and it was an age of satire. "
Looking for a
change of scenery to spark your creativity, Fitzgerald in 1924 moved to France,
and was there Valescure Fitzgerald wrote his best novel, The Great Gatsby. Published
in 1925, The Great Gatsby is told by Nick Carraway, the Midwest who moves to
the town of West Egg, Long Island, next to a mansion belonging to the wealthy
and mysterious Jay Gatsby. The novel follows Nick and Gatsby strange friendship
and the pursuit of a married woman named Daisy Gatsby, ultimately leading to the
exhibition as a passer and his death. With its beautiful lyricism height perfect
portrait of the Jazz Age, and seek criticism of materialism, love and the
American Dream, The Great Gatsby is considered Fitzgerald's finest work. Although
the book was well received when it was published, it was not until the 1950s
and 1960s, long after the death of Fitzgerald, who has reached his stature as
the definitive portrait of the "Roaring Twenties" and one of greatest
American novels ever written.
After finishing
The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald's life began to crumble. Always a heavy drinker,
steady progress in alcoholism and suffered prolonged writer's block episodes.
His wife Zelda
also suffered from mental health problems as they spent the 1920s, which reciprocates
between Delaware and France. In 1930, he was briefly committed to a mental
health clinic in Switzerland, and after Fitzgerald returned to the United
States in 1931, suffered another crisis and entered Johns Hopkins Hospital in
Baltimore. In 1934, after years of hard work, Fitzgerald finally published his
fourth novel, Tender is the Night, about an American psychiatrist in Paris and
his troubled marriage to a wealthy patient. While Tender is the Night was a
commercial failure and was initially well received because of its disordered
structure chronologically, which has since grown in popularity and is now
considered one of the great American novels.
After two years
lost due to alcohol and depression in 1937, she tried to revive his career as a
freelance writer and storyteller in Hollywood, and a modest financial success,
if not critical, success their efforts. He began work on another novel, The
Love of the Last Tycoon, in 1939, and had completed more than half of the
manuscript when he died of a heart attack December 21, 1940, at the age of 44
years .
F. Scott
Fitzgerald died believing himself a failure. None of his works have received
nothing but the modest critical and commercial success during his lifetime.
However, since his death, Fitzgerald has earned a reputation as one of the most
important authors in the history of American literature, almost entirely due to
the huge success of The Great Gatsby posthumously. As perhaps the
quintessential American novel, and a definitive social history of the Jazz Age,
The Great Gatsby has become almost required reading for all American high
school students in the last half-century, and had a transportive effect of
generations of readers.
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