F. Scott Fitzgerald: His Beautiful and Damned World
Uploaded by nycyclone99 on May 05, 2001
F. Scott Fitzgerald was born into a Catholic family in St. Paul, Minnesota, on September 24, 1896. Educated in private prep schools and then at Princeton until 1917, when he enlisted in the army because he feared he wouldn’t graduate , he was a middle-class, Midwestern boy who coveted the wonders of the East. When he married Zelda Sayre, a southern, upper-class daughter of a wealthy Alabama Supreme Court judge , Fitzgerald thought he had it all. The couple lived the high life, moving back and forth between Paris, the Riviera, and New York, but after a while Fitzgerald became an old name and his money dwindled. After Zelda had her first mental breakdown in April 1930, Fitzgerald’s life went spiraling downhill. Trying to become a star in Hollywood, Fitzgerald failed, as he thought he had done in everything else in life. All the fame that he has today has come to him post-mortem, but undeservedly so. Although The Great Gatsby was not a hit when it was first published, it is now recognized as one of the great American novels. F. Scott Fitzgerald “epitomized the mood and manners of the 1920’s” as well as the writers living in the Jazz Age.
Fitgerald’s parents were of contrasting backgrounds. His father’s family was rich in Southern traditions and was from Maryland, while his mother was the daughter of a wealthy Irish immigrant. When Edward, his father, moved to upstate New York, after failing in the wicker business in St. Paul, Scott became home-schooled. However, in 1908, when Scott was twelve, the family moved back to St. Paul and Fitzgerald enrolled in the St. Paul Academy. The family moved again in late 1911 and Scott went to the Newman School in New Jersey, until 1913. After graduating high school, Fitzgerald was accepted to the Princeton class of 1917, but he didn’t graduate, and enlisted in the army instead. While in Europe, Fitzgerald came to terms with the fact that he was going to die in the war, so to leave a living legacy, he wrote a scanty novel entitled, “The Romantic Egotist”. Although the novel was praised for its originality, it was rejected and asked to be resubmitted when revised. This tumultuous way of life and Fitzgerald’s constant movement is a classic example of life in the 1920’s, where everything was alive but nothing was stable. The world was moving on a...