Thursday 12 January 2012

Biography of F.Scott Fitzgerald

F. Scott Fitzgerald

           

F.Scott Fitzgerald was an American author of novels and short stories. He is regarded as one of the greatest author’s of the 20th century. Fitzgerald was born on September, 24th 1896 to Mollie McQuillan and Edward Fitzgerald in Saint Paul, Minnesota.  He was named after his uncle, writer of The Star Spangled Banner, his father and his sister Louise Scott who passed away prior to his birth.

Fitzgerald’s parents were Catholics and therefore sent him to several Catholic schools. It was at St. Paul’s Academy at the age of 13 that he made his first literary effort when a detective story he wrote was published in the school newspaper. However, he was expelled when he was 16 for neglecting his academic studies. After attending a preparatory school he attended the Princeton University in 1913. There he wrote for the Princeton Triangle Club and the Princeton Tiger. His involvement in the Triangle Club, a musical- comedy society, led to his submission of possibly his first novel. Although praised by the editor of Charles Scribners Son they rejected the book. Fitzgerald later had to leave Princeton because of poor grades, after which he enlisted in the US army in World War 1.

At a country club of Montgomery, Alabama youth society, Scott met Zelda Sayre, the youngest daughter of an Alabama Supreme Court judge and soon fell in love with her. This blossoming romance heightened his hopes for the success of his novel but after its second revision it was rejected once again by Scribner’s. The war ended just before he was to be sent overseas, after his discharge in 1919 he went to New York in hopes of gaining his fortune in order to marry, but Zelda who was unwilling to live off of his small salary 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. It was accepted by Maxwell Perkins editor at Scribners in September. In the fall-winter of 1919 he commenced his career as a writer of stories for the mass-circulation magazines. Fitzgerald continued to write fictional short stories for the rest of his life. The publication of This Side of Paradise on March 26, 1920, made the twenty-four-year-old Fitzgerald famous almost overnight, and a week later he married Zelda Sayre in New York.

In New York, he wrote his second novel, The Beautiful and Damned. When Zelda became pregnant they took their first trip to Europe in 1921 and then settled in St. Paul for the birth of their only child, Frances Scott (Scottie) Fitzgerald, who was born in October 1921.

Scott and his wife moved to France in 1924 where he began writing The Great Gatsby. They spent the winter of 1924-1925 in Rome, where he revised The Great Gatsby and were on their way to Paris when the novel was published in April. The Great Gatsby marked a striking advance in Fitzgerald’s technique.

In the spring of 1927 Scott and his small family moved back to America. In 1932 Zelda was admitted to Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore after suffering from schizophrenia for some years. She spent the rest of her life as a resident of sanitariums. Later, Fitzgerald rented “La Paix,” a house outside Baltimore, where he completed his fourth novel, Tender Is the Night, published in 1934. Scott’s habit of drinking had adverse effects on his writing for some time. His marriage too seemed to be in shambles. He moved to Hollywood on his own where he wrote for Esquire to earn a salary. There he fell in love with movie columnist Sheilah Graham. He began his Hollywood novel, The Love of the Last Tycoon, in 1939 and 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’s friend Edmund Wilson, a literary critic, edited and published his novel The Love of the Last Tycoon in 1941.


Sources : wikipedia.com, The F.Scott Fitzgerald Society, and Bio.True Story