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F. Scott Fitzgerald Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1896. The son of a failed wicker furniture salesman, Edward Fitzgerald, and an Irish immigrant with a large inheritance, Mary Mollie McQuillan, Fitzgerald grew up in a solidly Catholic and upper middle class environment. Fitzgerald started writing at an early age. He was educated at St.
Paul Academy, the Newman School, and Princeton University. His high school newspaper published his detective stories, encouraging him to pursue writing more enthusiastically than academics. At 21 years of age, he submitted his first novel The Romantic Egoist for publication and Charles Scribner's Sons rejected it, but with words of encouragement. This began a pattern of constant revising that would characterize his writing style for the rest of his career.
In 1917, he left Princeton to join the army. In 1918 the U. S. army stationed him near Montgomery, Alabama, where he met and fell in love with an 18 -year-old Southern belle Zelda Sayre. Scribner's rejected his novel for a second time, and so Fitzgerald turned to advertising as a steady source of income.
Unfortunately, his salary was not enough to convince Zelda to marry him, and tired of waiting for him to make his fortune, she broke their engagement in 1919. Happily, Scribner's finally accepted the novel after Fitzgerald rewrote it for the third time as This Side of Paradise, and published it a year later. Fitzgerald, suddenly a rich and famous author, married Zelda a week after its publication. That same year, Scott married Zelda Sayre, and the notorious couple divided their time among New York, Paris, the Riviera, and Rome, becoming a part of the American expatriate circle that included Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, and Thomas Wolfe.
The Fitzgerald s enjoyed fame and fortune, and his novels reflected their lifestyle, describing in semi-autobiographical fiction the privileged lives of wealthy, aspiring socialites. Fitzgerald wrote his second novel The Beautiful and the Damned a year after they were married. Three years later, after the birth of their first and only child, Scottie, Fitzgerald completed his best-known work: The Great Gatsby. In 1930 Zelda suffered a nervous breakdown that required her to be institu-tional ized. Beset as he was by his wife s illness and his own drinking problems, Fitzgerald was having a difficult time writing Tender Is the Night, for which he drew on both his own experiences and Zelda s fifteen months in a Swiss sanitarium.
To accommodate the high life-style to which he was accustomed, he came to rely more and more on his commercial short story writing for The Saturday Eve-ning Post, Scribner's Magazine, and Esquire, earning, at his peak, more than $ 36, 000 a year. Zelda died due to a fire at Highland Hospital in North Carolina in 1948. This made Fitzgerald crack-up and he described this in an essay that he wrote in 1936, hopelessly in debt, unable to write, nearly estranged from his wife and daughter, and incapacitated by excessive drinking and poor physical health. Things were looking up for Fitzgerald near the end of his life he won a contract in 1937 to write for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in Hollywood and fell in love with Sheila Graham, a movie columnist. He had started writing again scripts, short-stories, and the first draft of a new novel about Hollywood when he suffered a heart attack and died in 1940 at the age of 44.
While alive he thought of himself as a failure while he was most commonly recognized only as an extravagant drunk, who epitomized the excesses of the Jazz Age, Fitzgeralds work did not earn the credibility and recognition it holds today until years after his death.
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Research essay sample on Fell In Love Zelda Sayre
