F. Scott Fitzgerald

• 1. Introduction

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  F. Scott Fitzgerald sold fewer than 23,000 copies of The Great Gatsby in its first year, and the novel posted tepid sales for the rest of his life. He died in 1940 believing his life was a failure and his work forgotten. The few critics who knew his name remembered a failed alcoholic, the embodiment of Jazz Age decadence. Yet by 1960, that same novel was selling 100,000 copies a year. By the 21st century it had sold millions and become required reading in high school and college classrooms.

  Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was born in 1896 and died at 44. In between, he published four novels, four story collections, and 164 short stories. He achieved transient success and fortune in the 1920s. He popularized the very phrase, the Jazz Age, that would later be used to dismiss him. How does a writer become a household name, lose it entirely, and then return from the dead as what one critic called an American version of the Dying God? Why did the woman he married almost ruin him, and inspire some of his finest lines? And how did a poor boy from St. Paul build a body of work about the unbridgeable gulf between the rich and everyone else?

• 2. A Poor Boy In A Rich Town

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  Charles Garfield King, the imperious father of Chicago debutante Ginevra King, purportedly told a young Fitzgerald that "poor boys shouldn't think of marrying rich girls." That sentence followed Fitzgerald the rest of his life. He had fallen in love with the 16-year-old Ginevra over a Christmas break during his sophomore year at Princeton, where he was one of the few Catholics in the student body. Her wealthy family belittled his courtship because of his lower-class status compared to her other suitors.

  Fitzgerald himself described the wound plainly. He was "a poor boy in a rich town; a poor boy in a rich boy's school; a poor boy in a rich man's club at Princeton." He had been named after a distant cousin, Francis Scott Key, who wrote the lyrics to "The Star-Spangled Banner" in 1814. His mother was the daughter of an Irish immigrant who grew wealthy as a wholesale grocer. His father, Edward Fitzgerald, ran a wicker-furniture manufacturing business that failed one year after Scott's birth.

  Edward then joined Procter & Gamble as a salesman in Buffalo, New York, only to be fired in March 1908. His mother's inheritance kept the family in a middle-class lifestyle even as his alcoholic father went destitute. The young Fitzgerald had his first piece of fiction published in his school newspaper at age 13. At the Newman School, a Catholic prep school in New Jersey, Father Sigourney Fay recognized his literary potential and encouraged him to become a writer. Rejected by Ginevra as an unsuitable match, a suicidal Fitzgerald enlisted in the United States Army amid World War I.

• 3. The Army And Zelda Sayre

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  At Fort Leavenworth, Fitzgerald served under the command of Captain Dwight D. Eisenhower, the future general of the Army and President of the United States. He purportedly chafed under Eisenhower's authority and disliked him intensely. Hoping to publish a novel before what he assumed would be his death in Europe, Fitzgerald wrote a 120,000-word manuscript called The Romantic Egotist in three months. Scribner's rejected it, though the reviewer Max Perkins praised his writing and urged him to revise and resubmit.

  In June 1918, Fitzgerald was garrisoned near Montgomery, Alabama, where at a country club he met Zelda Sayre, a 17-year-old Southern belle. She was the granddaughter of a Confederate senator whose extended family owned the first White House of the Confederacy, and one of the most celebrated debutantes of Montgomery's country club set. Three days after Ginevra married a wealthy Chicago businessman, Fitzgerald professed his affection for Zelda in September 1918.

  Zelda declined to marry him until he proved financially successful. Discharged in February 1919, Fitzgerald moved to New York City and begged newspaper editors for work in vain. He took a job at the Barron Collier advertising agency and lived in a single Manhattan room. He earned a small raise for the slogan "We keep you clean in Muscatine," written for an Iowa laundry. Rejected over 120 times, he sold only one story, "Babes in the Woods," for a pittance of $30. In June 1919, unconvinced he could support her, Zelda broke off the engagement.

• 4. Staking Everything On A Book

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  Defeated and rudderless, Fitzgerald publicly threatened to jump from a window ledge of the Yale Club and carried a revolver daily while contemplating suicide. Two women had rejected him in succession. He detested his advertising job, his stories would not sell, and he could not afford new clothes. In July, he quit and returned to St. Paul, a social recluse on the top floor of his parents' home at 599 Summit Avenue.

  Abstaining from alcohol and parties, Fitzgerald worked day and night to revise The Romantic Egotist into This Side of Paradise, an autobiographical account of his Princeton years and his romances. While revising, he took a job repairing train car roofs at the Northern Pacific Shops. One evening in the fall of 1919, the postman delivered a telegram from Scribner's accepting his manuscript. The ecstatic Fitzgerald ran down the streets of St. Paul and flagged down random automobiles to share the news.

  The novel appeared in bookstores on the 26th of March 1920 and became an instant success, selling roughly 40,000 copies in its first year. Critics such as H. L. Mencken hailed it as the best American novel of the year. F. Scott Fitzgerald became a household name. With his new fame, he could earn far higher rates for his stories, and The Saturday Evening Post put his name on its May 1920 cover. Zelda resumed the engagement. Yet his feelings had cooled, and he confided to a friend, "I wouldn't care if she died, but I couldn't stand to have anybody else marry her." They married on the 3rd of April 1920 at St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York.

• 5. Small Children In A Bright Barn

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  At the Biltmore Hotel, Scott did handstands in the lobby while Zelda slid down the banisters, until the hotel asked them to leave for disturbing other guests. They moved two blocks to the Commodore Hotel, where they spent half an hour spinning in the revolving door. Fitzgerald likened their behavior to two "small children in a great bright unexplored barn." Writer Dorothy Parker first met them riding on the roof of a taxi and recalled, "their youth was striking. Everyone wanted to meet him."

  Many admirers sought the acquaintance of one of the most celebrated novelists of the Jazz Age, a term Fitzgerald popularized in his essays and stories. He met sports columnist Ring Lardner, journalist Rebecca West, cartoonist Rube Goldberg, and others, and grew close to critics George Jean Nathan and H. L. Mencken. He described the era as racing "along under its own power, served by great filling stations full of money." Riding in a taxi one afternoon, he wept because he realized he would never be as happy again.

  Gin-and-fruit concoctions increasingly fueled the couple's social life and led to bitter quarrels and accusations of infidelity. On the 26th of October 1921, Zelda gave birth to their only child, Frances Scott "Scottie" Fitzgerald. Emerging from the anesthesia, Zelda said, "I hope it's beautiful and a fool, a beautiful little fool." Fitzgerald later used some of her words almost verbatim for Daisy Buchanan's dialogue in The Great Gatsby.

• 6. Gerlach And The Great Gatsby

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  Max Gerlach was a Long Island neighbor who never wore the same shirt twice, used the phrase "old sport," and fostered myths about himself, including a claimed kinship with the German Kaiser. A gentleman bootlegger who lived like a millionaire after serving as a major in the American Expeditionary Forces, Gerlach threw lavish parties that flaunted his new wealth. These details would inspire Fitzgerald in creating his next work.

  Fitzgerald had been planning the novel since 1923, telling his publisher Maxwell Perkins he wanted a work that was beautiful and intricately patterned. He had written 18,000 words by mid-1923 but discarded most of it as a false start. Initially titled Trimalchio, an allusion to the Latin Satyricon, it followed the rise of a parvenu seeking wealth to win the woman he loves. "The whole idea of Gatsby," he explained, "is the unfairness of a poor young man not being able to marry a girl with money. This theme comes up again and again because I lived it."

  Work slowed on the French Riviera, where Zelda became infatuated with a French naval aviator and, after six weeks, asked for a divorce. The aviator left, and soon after Zelda overdosed on sleeping pills, opening a permanent breach in the marriage. In Rome, on the 1st of December 1924, a drunken Fitzgerald punched a police officer and was severely beaten. He submitted the final manuscript in February 1925 and declined a $10,000 offer for the serial rights rather than delay publication. Released on the 10th of April 1925, Gatsby drew praise from Willa Cather, T. S. Eliot, and Edith Wharton, yet sold fewer than 23,000 copies by year's end. Its acclaim and popularity would take decades to arrive.

• 7. Hemingway And The Lost Generation

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  Ernest Hemingway was a relatively unknown writer when Fitzgerald first met him in May 1925 and grew to admire him. In Paris, Fitzgerald also befriended Gertrude Stein, bookseller Sylvia Beach, novelist James Joyce, and poet Ezra Pound, members of the American expatriate community later tied to the Lost Generation. Hemingway recalled that in this early period Fitzgerald became his most loyal friend, even as he disliked Zelda and called her "insane" in his memoir, A Moveable Feast.

  Hemingway alleged that Zelda wanted her husband to write lucrative magazine stories rather than novels to support her lifestyle. "I always felt a story in the Post was tops," Zelda recalled, "But Scott couldn't stand to write them." Fitzgerald would first write a story in an authentic manner, then rewrite it to add salable plot twists. Hemingway called this practice "whoring," and it became a sore point between them.

  Zelda once belittled Fitzgerald with homophobic slurs and accused him of a homosexual relationship with Hemingway. In his private notebook Fitzgerald wrote of Hemingway, "I really loved him, but of course it wore out like a love affair." After two unpleasant years in Europe that strained their marriage, the Fitzgeralds returned to America in December 1926. Film producer John W. Considine Jr. soon invited Fitzgerald to Hollywood to write a flapper comedy for United Artists, a brief sojourn that would introduce him to a 17-year-old starlet named Lois Moran.

• 8. Forgotten, Then Resurrected

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  By 1936, Fitzgerald's book royalties amounted to $80. The Great Depression had branded his work elitist and materialistic, and writer Budd Schulberg recalled that his generation "consciously and a little belligerently turned our backs on Fitzgerald." His fourth novel, Tender Is the Night, debuted in April 1934 to mixed reviews and sold about 12,000 copies in its first three months. His alcoholism brought cardiomyopathy, coronary artery disease, and recurring tuberculosis. From 1933 to 1937 he was hospitalized for alcoholism eight times.

  A lucrative MGM screenwriting contract drew Fitzgerald back to Hollywood in 1937, where he earned his highest annual income, $29,757.87, and spent most of it on Zelda's treatment and Scottie's schooling. Director Billy Wilder likened his Hollywood foray to "a great sculptor who is hired to do a plumbing job." Failing at sobriety, Fitzgerald would ask strangers, "I'm F. Scott Fitzgerald. You've read my books. You've read The Great Gatsby, haven't you?" When he tried to buy his companion Sheilah Graham a set of his novels, he found bookstores had stopped carrying them.

  Fitzgerald achieved sobriety over a year before his death, and Graham called their last year together one of their happiest. On the 21st of December 1940, the day after a film premiere, he grabbed the mantelpiece and collapsed without a sound. He died of a heart attack at 44. Only thirty people attended his funeral in Bethesda, Maryland. Dorothy Parker, viewing the body, murmured "the poor son of a bitch," a line from Jay Gatsby's funeral.

  Then the dead man rose. Edmund Wilson completed the unfinished fifth novel, The Last Tycoon, within a year and included Gatsby in the edition. During World War II, the Council on Books in Wartime distributed free Armed Services Edition copies to American soldiers, and by 1945 over 123,000 copies had reached U.S. troops. By the 1950s Fitzgerald was a cult figure, more widely known than at any point in his life. Cyril Connolly called him an American version of the Dying God, an Adonis of letters. In 1971 his childhood Summit Terrace home in St. Paul, a house Fitzgerald detested as an architectural monstrosity, became a National Historic Landmark.