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 fast track, and Fitzgerald was going with the flow.
Still in the army after the...
... middle of paper ...
...nd, both Zelda and Frances became hindrances to Fitzgerald’s life, not part of it, and he reverted to alcohol to drown out his sorrows. Many of his novels contained forlorn, lovesick characters that resembled Scott himself. The 1920’s were full of wonderful highs, but also deathly lows in which the rising economy of the first eight years of the decade paralleled the early portion of Fitzgerald’s life, but the crash of 1929 matched his downfall. “Like the Jazz Age, they [Zelda and Scott] were both beautiful and damned, and like it, they destroyed themselves.” Fitzgerald’s life was “an extraordinary portrait of an age, of a marriage, and of a man and a woman who cared too much, who lived too passionately, whose fatal flaw was their incredible capacity for life.”
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
Bruccoli, Matthew. A Brief Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1992.
Fitzgerald, Zelda. Save Me the Waltz. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1932
Turnbull, Andrew. Scott Fitzgerald: A Biography. London: William Clowes & Sons, 1962
“Fitzgerald, F(rancis) Scott (Key).” Bookshelf 1998. CD-ROM. Microsoft, 1996-7.
“Fitzgerald, F(rancis) Scott (Key).” Encarta 1998. CD-ROM. Microsoft
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.
Fitzgerald was gaining notoriety. It was said to be a representation of the free lifestyle and relaxed morals of what became known as the "Lost Generation.” This couple “personified the immense lure of the East, of young fame, of dissolution and early death.” (Milford, 2011, p. 6) She was said to be his muse, but there was also talk that he plagiarized much of his writing from her journals. In addition, to inspiring his major heroines, she supplied him with many other memorable lines. “Much has been written on Zelda Fitzgerald as F. Scott Fitzgerald's muse and as a victim of mental illness.” (Grogan, 2015, p.110) Zelda was considered an embodiment of the Jazz Age (1920-1929), and had a very tumultuous, substance abuse filled life with Mr.
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.
...im to critique American society in the 1920s, and Zelda specifically was the inspiration for the character of Daisy Buchanan. The parallel can be drawn between the two women when examining their similarly wealthy upbringings and their selfish personalities. It is often said that the key to good writing is to ‘write what you know’, and in this case, Fitzgerald did just that- this novel is basically a thinly veiled autobiography. His unpleasant life experiences led him to be very critical of the wealthy, and it was ultimately his own wife that inspired this criticism. However, the importance of this great novel is not that its author drew on life experience to craft his critique. While that is interesting, what really matters is that it continues to be taught, because Fitzgerald’s message that society is corrupted is certainly one that still applies today.
F. Scott Fitzgerald was born Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald. He was the author of The Great Gatsby and was born on September 24, 1896 in St. Paul, Minnesota, and died on December 21, 1940 in Hollywood, California. Fitzgerald published the book The Great Gatsby on April 10, 1925, among other books like The Other Side of Paradise, another of Fitzgerald’s successes when living which permitted him to marry the woman he loved. Although The Great Gatsby was not much of a success during his time it became a very popular novel that appropriately portrayed the Jazz Age also known as the Roaring Twenties later in time. The author’s purpose for the book was to inform and at the same time entertain the audience of what the Jazz Age was mainly about and peoples
Dubbed the ‘roaring 20s’, because of the massive rise in America’s economy, this social and historical context is widely remembered for its impressive parties and sensationalist attitude. However, Fitzgerald also conveys a more sinister side to this culture through numerous affairs, poverty and a rampage of organised crime. By exposing this moral downfall, Fitzgerald reveals to the responder his value of the American dream and his belief of its decline. As a writer, Fitzgerald was always very much concerned with the present times, consequently, his writing style and plot reflects his own experiences of this era. So similar were the lives of Fitzgerald’s characters to his own that he once commented, “sometimes I don't know whether Zelda (his wife) and I are real or whether we are characters in one of my novels”. In 1924, Fitzgerald was affected by Zelda’s brief affair with a young French pilot, provoking him to lock her in their house. A construction of this experience can be seen in the way Fitzgerald depicts the 1290s context. For example in ‘The Great Gatsby’, there are numerous affairs and at one point, Mr Wilson locks up his wife to pre...
Hobbes, on the other hand attested to a role of government akin to monarchy or dictatorship. His definition of the role of the state is a direct inversion of Locke’s. He states society is a creation of the state and therefore the governed surrender their rights so the state can fulfill its main func...
Magill, Frank N. "F. Scott Fitzgerald." Critical Survey of Long Fiction. Vol. 3. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Salem, 1983. 953-67. Print.
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.
...at should the people do? With Rebellion against the Government that is abusive to the people. Hobbes mentions because people had no say in their Government, they could do nothing if the monarch were abusive. But Locke the people had the right to revolt against an abusive government. With both of these views we see one side saying that people should revolt if they feel like there rights are violated while the other side thinks more on the lines that people shouldn’t do anything because you rights are decide by the government. But could people be trusted to govern themselves? Hobbes said No, people could be trusted to govern themselves and an absolute monarch would demand obedience in to maintain order. But Locke says yes, people could be trusted to govern themselves, he believed that if provided with the right information would make good decisions should be fine.
F. Scott Fitzgerald was one of the most compelling twentieth century writers, (Curnutt, 2004). The year 1925 marks the year of the publication of Fitzgerald’s most credited novel, The Great Gatsby (Bruccoli, 1985). With its critiques of materialism, love and the American Dream (Berman, 1996), this dramatic idyllic novel, (Harvey, 1957), although poorly received at first, is now highly regarded as Fitzgerald’s finest work (Rohrkemper, 1985) and is his publisher, Scribner 's most popular title, (Donahue, 2013). The novel achieved it’s status as one of the most influential novels in American history around the nineteen fifties and sixties, over ten years after Fitzgerald 's passing, (Ibid, 1985)