Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, on September 24, 1896. Fitzgerald’s . His father, Edward, was from Maryland, with an allegiance to the Old South and its values. Fitzgerald’s mother, Mary McQuillan, was the daughter of an Irish immigrant who became wealthy as a wholesale grocer in St. Paul. Both were Catholics.
Edward Fitzgerald failed as a manufacturer of wicker furniture in St. Paul, and he became a salesman for Procter & Gamble in upstate New York. After he was dismissed in 1908, when his son was twelve, the family returned to St. Paul and lived comfortably on Mollie Fitzgerald’s inheritance. Fitzgerald attended the St. Paul Academy; his first writing to appear in print was a detective story in the school newspaper when he was thirteen.
During 1911-1913 he attended the Newman School, a Catholic prep school in New Jersey, where he met Father Sigourney Fay, who encouraged his ambitions for personal distinction and achievement. As a member of the Princeton Class of 1917, Fitzgerald neglected his studies for his literary apprenticeship. On academic probation and unlikely to graduate, Fitzgerald joined the army in 1917 and was commissioned a second lieutenant in the infantry. Convinced that he would die in the war, he rapidly wrote a novel, “The Romantic Egotist”; the letter of rejection from Charles Scribner’s Sons praised the novel’s originality and asked that it be resubmitted when revised.
In June 1918 Fitzgerald was assigned to Camp Sheridan, near Montgomery, Alabama. There he fell in love with a celebrated belle, eighteen-year-old Zelda Sayre. The romance intensified Fitzgerald’s hopes for the success of his novel, but after revision it was rejected by Scribners for a second time. The war ended just before he was to be sent overseas; after his discharge in 1919 he went to New York City to seek his fortune in order to marry.
In 1920 he married Zelda Sayre. His works, including the early novels This Side of Paradise (1920) and The Beautiful and Damned (1922) and the story collections Tales of the Jazz Age (1922), his brilliant The Great Gaspy and All the Sad Young Men (1926), capture the Jazz Age's vulgarity and dazzling promise. In 1924 Scott and Zelda became part of the expatriate community on the French Riviera, the setting of Tender Is the Night (1934). His fame and prosperity proved disorienting to them both, and he became seriously alcoholic. Zelda never fully recovered from a mental breakdown in 1932 and spent most of her remaining years in a sanitarium. In 1937 Scott moved to Hollywood to write film scripts; the experience inspired the unfinished The Last Tycoon (1941). He died of a heart attack at age 44.
