F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

F. SCOTT FITZGERALD (1890 – 1940)

He is best known for his novels and short stories which chronicle the excesses of America's 'Jazz Age' during the 1920s.  Born into a fairly well-to-do family in St Paul, Minnesota in 1896 Fitzgerald attended, but never graduated from Princeton University. Here he mingled with the brilliant classes from the Eastern Seaboard who so obsessed him for the rest of his life. In 1917 he was drafted into the army, but he never saw active service abroad. Instead, he spent much of his time writing and re-writing his first novel This Side of Paradise, which on its publication in 1920 became an instant success. In the same year he married the beautiful Zelda Sayre and together they embarked on a rich life of endless parties. During the next 5-10 years, Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald are at the center of Jazz Age culture, and regularly appear in gossip magazines.  They were the talk of the town!  What was their life like?

·       She was wild!  Some would say CRAZY!

·       He was an alcoholic!

·       They partied hard!

·       He worked hard also.

·       They both had affairs but loved each other deeply!

His early life is shaped by the fact that his mother’s family is wealthy but his father is unsuccessful at business so money is always an issue.  He is poor but he attends prep. schools which make him feel like an outsider. Dividing their time between America and fashionable resorts in Europe, the Fitzgeralds became as famous for their lifestyle as for the novels he wrote. Fitzgerald once said 'Sometimes I don't know whether Zelda and I are real or whether we are characters in one of my novels'. He followed his first success with The Beautiful and the Damned (1922), and The Great Gatsby (1925) which Fitzgerald considered his masterpiece. It was also at this time that Fitzgerald wrote many of his short stories which helped to pay for his extravagant lifestyle.  The bubble burst in the 1930s when Zelda became increasingly troubled by mental illness. Tender is the Night (1934), the story of Dick Diver and his schizophrenic wife Nicole, goes some way to show the pain that Fitzgerald felt. The book was not well received in America and he turned to script-writing in Hollywood for the final three years of his life. It was at this time he wrote the autobiographical essays collected posthumously in The Crack-Up and his unfinished novel, The Last Tycoon. He died in 1940.

II. His masterpiece: Great Gatsby (1925)

1.The summary:

Ø  The entire story takes place in one summer in 1922. The novel describes the life and death of Jay Gatsby, as seen through the eyes of a narrator who does not share the same point of view as the fashionable people around him. The narrator learns that Gatsby became rich by breaking the law. Gatsby pretends to be a well-educated war hero, which he is not, yet the narrator portrays him as being far more noble than the rich, cruel, stupid people among whom he and Gatsby live.

Ø  Gatsby’s character is purified by a deep, unselfish love for Daisy, a beautiful, silly woman who, earlier, married a rich husband instead of Gatsby and moved into high society.

FITZGERALD’S DEATH

“On December 21, 1940 -- the Winter Solstice -- the author F. Scott Fitzgerald jolted to his feet from a green armchair, grasped hold of a marble mantlepiece, and fell down dead of a massive heart attack. He was forty-four years old. His woman companion of three-and-a half years ran out into the hallway and began knocking frantically on doors of their small Hollywood apartment building on Laurel Avenue, just south of Sunset Boulevard, crying desperately for help. She refused to accept that Scott was dead, even later when the ambulance came, and a fire engine also, and a fireman stood over the body and shook his head.

            The name of the woman was Sheilah Graham, Fitzgerald's last heroine -- a young, pretty Hollywood newspaper columnist.” [Robert Westbrook, son of Sheilah Graham]

QUOTES FROM FITZGERALD

It is sadder to find the past again and find it inadequate to the present than it is to have it elude you and remain forever a harmonious conception of memory.

I'm a romantic; a sentimental person thinks things will last, a romantic person hopes against hope that they won't.

A great social success is a pretty girl who plays her cards as carefully as if she were plain.
- F. Scott Fitzgerald, letter to his daughter, Nov. 18, 1938

"Action is character."
- F. Scott Fitzgerald, Notes for The Last Tycoon

"Advertising is a racket, like the movies and the brokerage business. You cannot be honest without admitting that its constructive contribution to humanity is exactly minus zero."
- F. Scott Fitzgerald, letter to his daughter, Aug. 24, 1940

"After all, life hasn't much to offer except youth, and I suppose for older people, the love of youth in others."
- F. Scott Fitzgerald, letter to his cousin Cici

"All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath."
- F. Scott Fitzgerald, letter to his daughter

"All life is just a progression toward, and then a recession from, one phrase--"I love you.""
- F. Scott Fitzgerald, "The Offshore Pirate"

"An idea ran back and forward in his head like a blind man knocking over the solid furniture."
- F. Scott Fitzgerald, Notebooks

"At any rate, let us love for a while, for a year or so, you and me. That's a form of divine drunkenness that we can all try."
- F. Scott Fitzgerald, "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz"

"At eighteen our convictions are hills from which we look; at forty-five they are caves in which we hide."
- F. Scott Fitzgerald, "Bernice Bobs Her Hair"

"Boredom is not an end-product, is comparatively rather an early stage in life and art. You've got to go by or past or through boredom, as through a filter, before the clear product emerges."
- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up

"Debut: the first time a young girl is seen drunk in public."
- F. Scott Fitzgerald, Notebooks