Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was born in St. Paul, Minnesota. Fitzgerald’s chosen names signify his parents’ pride in his father’s ancestry. His father, Edward, was from Maryland, with a loyalty to the Old South and its morals. Fitzgerald’s mother, Mary McQuillan (also known as Mollie), was the daughter of an Irish immigrant who became wealthy as a wholesale grocer in St. Paul. Both his parents were Catholics.
The Fitzgerald family moved between St. Paul and New York depending on his father’s employment, till he was twelve. Scott’s first writings were school related, school newspaper articles and such, in one of the private schools he attended he met a Father who motivated him to follow his passionate works deeper. Later, once in collage Fitzgerald neglected his studies for his literary apprenticeship. He was very involved with the Princeton Triangle Club. He was put on educational probation and unlikely to graduate, Fitzgerald joined the army, convinced that he would die in the war. Although, while he was stationed near Montgomery, he met Zelda Sayre, daughter of Alabama Supreme Court judge, and fell deeply in love, as soon as he could and after the war, he headed for New York believing he would achieve immediate realizations and marry Zelda; but what he reached was an advertising career, only. The engagement was off as Zelda was not willing to live on the very small salary he could provide, this got Scott to become a drunk and retire to St. Paul to rewrite a novel he had begun at Princeton. This Side of Paradise was published, made Fitzgerald well known nearly overnight; a week later he married Zelda. They moved a lot and one of their stops was Long Island. They settled in St. Paul for some time for the birth of their only da...
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Works Cited
Fitztgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. Scribner: New York, 2004. Print.
Turnbull, Andrew. Scott Fitzgerald A Biography. Collier Books: New York, 1962. Print.
Matthew J. Bruccoli. “A Brief Life of Fitzgerald.” University Of South Carolina. the Board of Trustees of the University of South Carolina, 4 December 2003. http://www.sc.edu/fitzgerald/biography.html, 24 March 2014.
Arthur Mizener. “F. Scott Fitzgerald.” Encyclopedia Britannica. Last Updated 2 July 2013. http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/208897/F-Scott-Fitzgerald , 24 March 2014.
Gold, Robert S. "Fitzgerald, Francis Scott Key (1896-1940)." Encyclopedia of World Biography.” Ed. Suzanne M. Bourgoin, 1998.http://find.galenet.com/srcx/infomark.do?&source=gale&srcprod=DISC&userGroupName=miss64567&prodId=DC&tabID=T001&docId=EK1631002213&type=retrieve&contentSet=GBRC&version=1.0, 24 March 2014.
F. Scott Fitzgerald said, “I am not a great man, but sometimes I think the impersonal and objective quality of my talent, and the sacrifices of it, in pieces, to preserve its essential value has some sort of epic grandeur” (“F. Scott Fitzgerald” St. James). Fitzgerald had heavy drinking problems and faced many financial failures throughout his life of writing but has proved to be gifted in many ways of writing. Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was a short story writer, an essayist, and a novelist that was most famous during the Jazz Age of the 1920s and the Great Depression of the 1930s.
Francis Scott Fitzgerald, also known under his writer’s name, F. Scott Fitzgerald, is revered as a famous American novelist for his writing masterpieces in the 1920’s and 1930’s. F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote about his extravagant lifestyle in America that his wife, Zelda, their friends, and him lived during that era. In fact, a lot of his novels and essays were based off of real-life situations with exaggerated plots and twists. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novels were the readers looking glass into his tragic life that resulted in sad endings in his books, and ultimately his own life. F. Scott Fitzgerald lived in a nice neighborhood, but growing up, he wasn’t privileged.
Fitzgerald, F S, and Matthew J. Bruccoli. The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald: A New
Mizener, Arthur, ed. F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1963.
Bruccoli, Matthew J. Some Sort of Epic Grandeur: The Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald. New York: Carrol and Graf, 1993.
Merriman, C. D. "F. Scott Fitzgerald." The Literature Network. Jalic Inc., 2007. Web. 17 Jan. 2014.
Certain authors, including F. Scott Fitzgerald, wanted to reflect the horrors that the world had experienced not a decade ago. In 1914, one of the most destructive and pointless wars in history plagued the world: World War I. This war destroyed a whole generation of young men, something one would refer to as the “Lost Generation”. Modernism was a time that allowed the barbarity of the war to simmer down and eventually, disappear altogether. One such author that thrived in this period was F. Scott Fitzgerald, a young poet and author who considered himself the best of his time. One could say that this self-absorption was what fueled his drive to be the most famous modernist the world had seen. As The New Yorker staff writer Susan Orlean mentions in her literary summary of Fitzgerald’s works, “I didn’t know till fifteen that there was anyone in the world except me, and it cost me plenty” (Orlean xi). One of the key factors that influenced and shaped Fitzgerald’s writing was World War I, with one of his most famous novels, This Side Of Paradise, being published directly after the war in 1920. Yet his most famous writing was the book, The Great Gatsby, a novel about striving to achieve the American dream, except finding out when succeeding that this dream was not a desire at all. Fitzgerald himself lived a life full of partying and traveling the world. According to the Norton Anthology of American Literature, “In the 1920’s and 1930’s F. Scott Fitzgerald was equally equally famous as a writer and as a celebrity author whose lifestyle seemed to symbolize the two decades; in the 1920’s he stood for all-night partying, drinking, and the pursuit of pleasure while in the 1930’s he stood for the gloomy aftermath of excess” (Baym 2124). A fur...
“Riding in a taxi one afternoon between very tall buildings under a mauve and rosy sky; I began to bawl because I had everything I wanted and knew I would never be so happy again.”(Fitzgerald). F. Scott Fitzgerald was born on September 24, 1896 in St. Paul, Minnesota, into a very prestigious, catholic family. Edward, his father, was from Maryland, and had a strong allegiance to the Old South and its values. Fitzgerald’s mother, Mary, was the daughter of an Irish immigrant who became wealthy as a wholesale grocer in St. Paul. His upbringing, affected much of his writing career. Half the time F. Scott Fitzgerald thought of himself as the “heir of his father's tradition, which included the author of The Star-Spangled Banner, Francis Scott Key, after whom he was named” (F. Scott Fitzgerald Biography). The other half the time he acted as “straight 1850 potato-famine Irish” (F. Scott Fitzgerald Biography). Consequently, he had typically indecisive feelings about American life, which seemed to him at once “vulgar and dazzlingly promising” (F. Scott Fitzgerald Biography). This idea is expressed in much of Fitzgerald’s writing. From an early age he had an “intensely romantic imagination” (F. Scott Fitzgerald Biography); he longed for a life of passion, fame and luxury.
Doreski, C. K. "Fitzgerald, F. Scott 1896—1940." American Writers: A Collection of Literary Biographies, Retrospective Supplement 1. Ed. A. Walton Litz and Molly Weigel. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1998. 97-120. Literature Resources from Gale. Web. 14 Jan. 2014.
Eble, Kenneth. F. Scott Fitzgerald Limited Edition. Ed. Sylvia E. Bowman. N.p.: Twayne Publishers, 1977. Print. Twayne’s United States Authors Series.
Magill, Frank N. "F. Scott Fitzgerald." Critical Survey of Long Fiction. Vol. 3. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Salem, 1983. 953-67. Print.
The Board of Trustees of the University of South Carolina. "Quotations". January 28, 1997. University of South Carolina. September 9, 2003 <http://www.sc.edu/fitzgerald/quotes/quotes1.html>
Stern, Milton R. The Golden Moment: The Novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1971.
When luxuriant lifestyles of the 1920s, commonly labeled the Roaring ‘20s, come about, morality and individual ethics go instantaneously out of style. Along with these poor morals, crass materialism becomes widespread among the fortunate, transforming noblesse oblige into an unpopular belief, and furthermore leaving those incapable of tremendous success back in the dust. The inevitable alterations in morality repeatedly occur as America continues to progress, and several traits similar to those of the 1920s are visible today. Fitzgerald’s use of The Great Gatsby for social commentary is parallel to today’s social atmosphere.
Fitzgerald was born in St. Paul, Minnesota to Mollie McQuillan, the daughter of an Irish immigrant (Fitzgerald, Bruccoli and Baughman, 1994) and charming businessman, Edward Fitzgerald (Martin, 1985). Fitzgerald was christened ‘Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald’, in honour of his second cousin, Francis Scott Key, (Ibid, 2004). Francis Scott Key was an American lawyer, author, and amateur poet, from Georgetown. Key famously wrote the lyrics to the United States ' national anthem, "The Star-Spangled Banner" (Weybright, 2007). Fitzgerald 's mother, Mollie McQuillan, made her fortune in the wholesale grocery business (Pelzer, 2000). Fitzgerald’s father, Edward, although a businessman, Edward experienced only borderline financial success (Magill, 1999). The Fitzgerald family lived contentedly on the outskirts of the city 's most fashionable residential neighborhood, Summit Avenue, in a modest house, which was described by F. Scott Fitzgerald as “a house below the average on a street above the average” (Kane, 1976). The house has now been listed a National Historic Landmark for its association with the author of The Great Gatsby (National Historic Landmarks Program, 2007). The Fitzgeralds were supported largely and owed a lot to the liberality of the McQuillan family (Ibid,