F. Scott Fitzgerald

F. Scott Fitzgerald was born September 26 1896 in Saint Paul, Minnesota he was born Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald . His nationality is American but his ethnicity is Irish. Fitzgerald’s given names were from his parents’ pride in his father’s ancestry. His father’s name was Edward and he was from Maryland and his mother, Mary (Mollie) McQuillan, was the daughter of an Irish immigrant who became wealthy as a wholesale grocer in St. Paul and they were both Catholics. Fitzgerald attended the St. Paul Academy the first thing he wrote was a detective story in the school newspaper when he was thirteen. (http://people.brandeis.edu/~teuber/fitzgeraldbio.html)

In June 1918 Fitzgerald was assigned to Camp Sheridan, it was near Montgomery, Alabama. There he fell in love with an eighteen-year-old girl named Zelda Sayre; she was the youngest daughter of an Alabama Supreme Court judge. The war ended just before he was about to be sent overseas; after his discharge in 1919 he went to New York City to seek his fortune in order to marry. Unwilling to wait while Fitzgerald succeeded in the advertisement business and unwilling to live on his small salary, Zelda Sayre broke their engagement. He then quit his job in July 1919 and returned to St. Paul to rewrite his novel as This Side of Paradise. (http://www.sc.edu/fitzgerald/biography.html)

When he went to France in 1924, he wrote The Great Gatsby. The Great Gatsby marked a striking advance in Fitzgerald’s technique, showing a complex structure and a controlled narrative point of view. Fitzgerald’s achievement received critical praise, but sales of Gatsby were disappointing, though the stage and movie rights brought additional income. The Great Gatsby was about the 1920s and the time of flappers and successful rich people. Fitzgerald made little progress on his fourth novel, a study of American expatriates in France provisionally titled “The Boy Who Killed His Mother,” “Our Type,” and “The World’s Fair.” During those years Zelda Fitzgerald’s unconventional behavior became increasingly worse. Her condition got worse and she had to go to the hospital. In 1948 there was a horrible fire in the hospital and she died in the fire. In 1939, he had written more than half of a working draft when he died of a heart attack in Graham’s apartment on December 21, 1940. F. Scott Fitzgerald died believing himself a failure. (http://www.sc.edu/fitzgerald/biography.html)