F. Scott Fitzgerald biography
• Name: Francis Scott’s Fitzgerald.
• Born: 24 September 1896, St. Paul, Minnesota, US . .
• mother : Mollie McQuillan Fitzgerald
• Wife / Husband: Zelda (nee Surrey).
Early life of f. Scott Fitzgerald
Born in an upper-middle-class family in 1896 in St. Paul, Minnesota, Fitzgerald was named after his famous second cousin, three times removed to his father’s side, Francis Scott Key. But it was always known as Scott Fitzgerald.
He was also named after her deceased sister Louise Scott Fitzgerald, one of two sisters who died shortly before her birth. “Well, three months before I was born,” he wrote as an adult, “my mother lost her two children … I think I started becoming a writer then.”
His father, Edward Fitzgerald, was of Irish and English descent, and moved from Maryland to St. Paul after the American Civil War, and was described as “a quiet gentleman with southern manners”.
His mother Mary “Molly” McQuillan Fitzgerald, was the daughter of an Irish immigrant who made her fortune in the wholesale grocery business.
The first cousin of Edward Fitzgerald once hanged Mary Surratt in 1865 for plotting to assassinate Abraham Lincoln.
Francis Scott’s Fitzgerald (popularly known as F. Scott Fitzgerald) was a short story writer and novelist considered one of the pre-eminent writers in the history of American literature, almost entirely in his third book,
The Great Gatsby Was due to huge posthumous success. Perhaps the poignant American novel, as well as the definitive social history of the Jazz Age, The Great Gatsby has become a must-read for almost every American high school student and has had a transportation impact on readers generation after generation.
At the age of 24, the success of his first novel, The Side of Paradise, made Fitzgerald famous. A week later, he married the woman he loved and his music, Zelda Sawyer. However by the late 1920s, Fitzgerald got into drinking, and Zelda had mental breakdowns.
After the unsuccessful Tender Is Night, Fitzgerald moved to Hollywood and became a screenwriter. He died of a heart attack in 1940 at the age of 44, his last novel is only half completed.
Deploying Camp Sheridan in Alabama, Second Lieutenant Fitzgerald met with Zelda Sawyer, the Alabama supreme court judge and the daughter of a society darling.
The Great War ended in 1918, so Scott was never deployed to Europe. Zelda would not marry Scott until she could support him financially, and although he moved to New York to work in advertising and write short stories, they broke off the engagement.
Fitzgerald took his parents home to work on a romantic ego. It was accepted for publication in 1919 to republish it as this side of heaven. Zelda and Scott resumed their engagement, and the couple married in New York in 1920, a week after publication.
Their only child, Francis Scott Fitzgerald, was born a year later.
Many of Scott’s short stories are autobiographical reflections regarding him and Zelda. His first collection of short stories ‘Flappers and Philosophers’ was published in 1922 in 1920, followed by his second collection ‘Tales of the Jazz Age’.
His second novel, The Beautiful and the Damned, which was also adapted on screen, was published that same year.
Scott had published three novels by the late 20s and had already started his fourth but was strapped with financial difficulties courtesy of his lavish lifestyle. These crises necessitated his writing commercial short stories.
The book was finally published in 1934 as Tender is Night. Critics had mixed opinions about the novel.
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