How did Francis Scott Fitzgerald live and work? The writer’s books have much in common with his biography, and the brilliant flowering and tragic ending really makes him look like the hero of one of the novels “The Age of Jazz”.
Childhood and youth
Francis Scott Fitzgerald was born in 1896 in the city of St. Paul, Minnesota. His parents were an unsuccessful businessman from Maryland and the daughter of a wealthy emigrant. There was a family largely due to funds from wealthy parents of the mother. The future writer studied at the hometown academy, then at a private Catholic school in New Jersey and at Princeton University.
Francis Scott Fitzgerald was not interested in the academic successes. At the university, his attention was primarily attracted to the good football team and the Triangle club, where students who were passionate about the theater met.
Due to poor performance, the future writer did not even study for a semester. He left the school, speaking ill, and later joined the army as a volunteer. As adjutant to General J. A. Ryan, Francis made a good military career, but in 1919 he was discharged.
First success
What kind of person was Scott Fitzgerald? The biography of the writer becomes especially interesting when he meets his future wife Zelda Sayre. The girl came from an influential and wealthy family and was an enviable bride. However, her parents opposed the marriage of her daughter with a former military man. In order for the wedding to take place, the young man needed to get on his feet and get a stable source of income.
After retiring from the army, Scott Fitzgerald went to New York and began working at an advertising agency. He does not leave his dream to earn a living as a writer and actively sends manuscripts to various publishers, but receives a refusal after a refusal. Deeply experiencing a series of setbacks, the writer returns to his parental home and proceeds to redo the novel, which was written during his military service.
This novel, The Romantic Egoist, was rejected by the publisher not with a final refusal, but with a proposal to make corrections. In 1920, Fitzgerald's first book, entitled “On This Side of Paradise,” which was a revised “Romantic Egoist,” was published. The novel gains immense popularity and the doors of all publishing houses open before the young writer. Financial success allows you to marry Zelda.
Heyday of fame
Scott Fitzgerald burst into the literary world like a hurricane. "Beautiful and Damned," his second novel, released in 1922, made a splash and became a bestseller. The collections of short stories “Libertines and Philosophers” (1920) and “Tales of the Age of Jazz” (1922) helped to stay on top. The writer earned articles for fashion magazines and newspapers and was one of the highest paid authors of the time.
Francis and Zelda
"The Age of Jazz" - this is the name that the twenties received from the light hand of the writer. And Francis and Zelda became the king and queen of this era. Money and fame simply fell upon them at one moment, and young people quickly became regular heroes of the socialite chronicle.
The couple constantly shocked the public with their eccentric behavior. In their biography there are enough acts that did not go down from the pages of newspapers for a long time and were heatedly discussed. Once in a restaurant, Zelda painted peonies on napkins and made more than three hundred drawings. This event has become a topic of social talk for a long time. But there were reasons and more substantial. For example, a couple swept through Manhattan on a taxi roof.
The mysterious disappearance of the spouses for 4 days was widely discussed. They were found drunk in a cheap motel, and not one remembered how they ended up there. At the premiere of the play “Scandals,” Francis stripped naked. Zelda in public bathed in a fountain.
Drunk Scott Fitzgerald threatened to jump out of the window, as the greatest book has already been written - "Ulysses" by James Joyce. Zelda in public threw herself into a flight of stairs in a restaurant, jealous of her husband for Isadora Duncan. Because of such tricks, the family was in the spotlight, they were condemned, they were admired.
Europe
With this lifestyle, Fitzgerald could not fully work. The couple sells his mansion and in 1924 moves to France, where he will live until 1930. In the Riviera in 1925, Francis ends his most advanced novel, The Great Gatsby, which today is considered one of the masterpieces of American classics. In 1926 a storybook “All These Sad Young People” was published.
Since 1925, the collapse in the life of the writer begins. He is increasingly abusing alcohol, scandalous and depressed. Zelda’s behavior is becoming more and more strange, with her clouding of the mind. Since 1930 she has been treated for schizophrenia in various clinics, but this does not bring any result.
Hollywood
In 1934, Scott Fitzgerald published the novel Night is Tender, but it does not bring success. Then the writer goes to Hollywood. He is bewildered and dissatisfied with himself, that he wasted his youth and talent. The writer works as an ordinary screenwriter and tries to earn enough money to support his daughter and treat his wife. In 1939, he begins to write his last novel about the life of Hollywood, which he will not be able to finish.
In 1940, aged 44, Francis died of a heart attack. His savings are barely enough for repatriation and burial. Zelda dies in a psychiatric hospital nine years later as a result of a fire.
After the death of the writer, his last unfinished novel was published, and earlier his work was rethought. Fitzgerald was recognized as a classic of literature, who perfectly described his time, The Age of Jazz.
Novels
“This Side of Paradise” is a book about finding yourself. The main character walks a path repeating the life of Fitzgerald himself, a short training at Princeton, military service, meeting with a girl whom he cannot marry because of poverty.
The book "Beautiful and Damned" tells the story of the life of a married couple, and again the writer turns to his life experience. “The Lost Generation” is about children from wealthy families who cannot find themselves and some purpose and lead an idle lifestyle.
The Great Gatsby did not become popular during the writer's life; this novel was only appreciated in the fifties. The book tells about the son of a poor farmer who is in love with a girl from high society. To win the heart of the beauty, Gatsby earns a lot of money and settles in the neighborhood with her lover and her husband, and to enter into their circle, throws gorgeous parties. The book details the life of the rich in the “roaring twenties” and the decline of morality. It was in such a society that Francis Scott Fitzgerald revolved. Reviews from critics put the book in second place among the best English-language novels of the twentieth century.
Like the rest of the novels, “The Night is Tender”, although it does not repeat, but strongly echoes the life of the writer. The main character, a psychiatrist, marries his patient from a wealthy family. They live on the banks of the Riviera, where a man has to combine the role of her husband with the role of the attending physician.
"The Last Tycoon" talks about the world of American cinema. The book was not finished.