F scott fitzgerald biography sparknotes lord

Nonetheless, the general view of his affluence is distorted. Fitzgerald was not among the highest-paid writers of his time; his novels earned comparatively little, and most of his income came from magazine stories. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald did spend money faster than he earned it; the author who wrote so eloquently about the effects of money on character was unable to manage his own finances.

The Fitzgeralds returned to America in the fall of and rented a house in Montgomery. Fitzgerald made a second unsuccessful trip to Hollywood in She spent the rest of her life as a resident or outpatient of sanitariums. Her autobiographical novel generated considerable bitterness between the Fitzgeralds, for he regarded it as pre-empting the material that he was using in his novel-in-progress.

Published in , his most ambitious novel was a commercial failure, and its merits were matters of critical dispute. Set in France during the s, Tender Is the Night examines the deterioration of Dick Diver, a brilliant American psychiatrist, during the course of his marriage to a wealthy mental patient. Ill, drunk, in debt, and unable to write commercial stories, he lived in hotels in the region near Asheville, North Carolina, where in Zelda Fitzgerald entered Highland Hospital.

After Baltimore, Fitzgerald did not maintain a home for Scottie. When she was fourteen she went to boarding school, and the Obers became her surrogate family. His trips East to visit his wife were disastrous. In California Fitzgerald fell in love with movie columnist Sheilah Graham. Their relationship endured despite his benders. After MGM dropped his option at the end of , Fitzgerald worked as a freelance script writer and wrote short-short stories for Esquire.

Zelda Fitzgerald perished at a fire in Highland Hospital in On 21 December he died of a heart attack in Hollywood. He is buried in Rockville Union Cemetery in Maryland. Zelda died in a fire at the hospital in which she was receiving treatment in She was buried with F. Scott Fitzgerald. Contact Us Register Sign In. Toggle navigation.

Basket 0. English Literature Study Guides Advanced. English Literature Advanced Companion. Privacy Policy. It was regarded as a rare glimpse into the morality and immorality of America's youth, and it made Fitzgerald famous. Suddenly, the author could publish not only in prestigious literary magazines such as Scribner's but also high-paying, popular publications including The Saturday Evening Post.

Flush with his new wealth and fame, Fitzgerald finally married Zelda. The celebrated columnist Ring Lardner christened them "the prince and princess of their generation. This novel, The Beautiful and Damned , was published two years later, and tells the story of a handsome young man and his beautiful wife, who gradually deteriorate into careworn middle age while they wait for the young man to inherit a large fortune.

In a predictable ironic twist, they only receive their inheritance when it is too late. To escape this grim fate, the Fitzgeralds together with their daughter, Frances, who was born in moved in to the Riviera, where they became part of a group of wealthy American expatriates whose style was largely determined by Gerald and Sara Murphy. Fitzgerald described this society in his last completed novel, Tender is the Night , and modeled its hero on Gerald Murphy.

Meanwhile, Fitzgerald's reputation as a heavy drinker tarnished his reputation in the literary world; he was viewed as an irresponsible writer despite his painstaking revisions numerous drafts of his work. Shortly after their relocation to France, Fitzgerald completed his most famous and respected novel, The Great Gatsby Fitzgerald's own divided nature can be seen in the contrast between the novel's hero, Jay Gatsby, and its narrator, Nick Carraway.

The former represents the naive Midwesterner dazzled by the possibilities of the American dream; the latter represents the compassionate Princeton gentleman who cannot help but regard that dream with suspicion. The Great Gatsby may be described as the most profoundly American novel of its time; Fitzgerald connects Gatsby's dream, his "Platonic conception of himself," with the aspirations of the founders of America.

This book marks the end of the most productive period of Fitzgerald's life; the next decade was full of chaos and misery. Fitzgerald began to drink excessively, and Zelda began a slow descent into madness. In , she suffered her first mental breakdown. Work on The Great Gatsby slowed while the Fitzgeralds sojourned on the French Riviera , where a marital crisis developed.

After six weeks, Zelda asked for a divorce. Following this incident, the Fitzgeralds relocated to Rome, [ ] where he made revisions to the Gatsby manuscript throughout the winter and submitted the final version in February Eliot , and Edith Wharton praised Fitzgerald's work, [ ] and the novel received generally favorable reviews from contemporary literary critics.

After wintering in Italy, the Fitzgeralds returned to France, where they alternated between Paris and the French Riviera until During this period, he became friends with writer Gertrude Stein , bookseller Sylvia Beach , novelist James Joyce , poet Ezra Pound and other members of the American expatriate community in Paris, [ ] some of whom would later be identified with the Lost Generation.

In contrast to his friendship with Scott, Hemingway disliked Zelda and described her as "insane" in his memoir, A Moveable Feast. Hemingway alleged that Zelda sought to destroy her husband, and she purportedly taunted Fitzgerald over his penis' size. In , film producer John W. Considine Jr. While attending a lavish party at the Pickfair estate, Fitzgerald met year-old Lois Moran , a starlet who had gained widespread fame for her role in Stella Dallas Jealous of Fitzgerald and Moran, an irate Zelda set fire to her own expensive clothing in a bathtub as a self-destructive act.

The Fitzgeralds rented "Ellerslie", a mansion near Wilmington, Delaware , until In April , when the psychiatric clinic allowed Zelda to travel with her husband, Fitzgerald took her to lunch with critic H. Mencken, by then the literary editor of The American Mercury. During this time, Fitzgerald rented the "La Paix" estate in the suburb of Towson, Maryland , and worked on his next novel, which drew heavily on recent experiences.

Fitzgerald's own novel debuted in April as Tender Is the Night and received mixed reviews. At one time he understood it no more than the butterfly did and he did not know when it was brushed or marred. Later he became conscious of his damaged wings and of their construction and he learned to think and could not fly any more because the love of flight was gone and he could only remember when it had been effortless.

Amid the Great Depression , Fitzgerald's works were deemed elitist and materialistic. Scott Fitzgerald as an age rather than a writer, and when the economic stroke of began to change the sheiks [ i ] and flappers into unemployed boys or underpaid girls, we consciously and a little belligerently turned our backs on Fitzgerald. He relied on loans from his agent, Harold Ober , and publisher Perkins.

As he had been an alcoholic for many years, [ j ] [ ] Fitzgerald's heavy drinking undermined his health by the late s. Bruccoli contends Fitzgerald did in fact have recurring TB. Fitzgerald's deteriorating health, chronic alcoholism, and financial woes made for difficult years in Baltimore. His friend H. Mencken wrote in a June diary entry that "the case of F.

Scott Fitzgerald has become distressing. He is boozing in a wild manner and has become a nuisance. His wife, Zelda, who has been insane for years, is now confined at the Sheppard-Pratt Hospital, and he is living in Park Avenue with his little daughter, Scottie". By that same year, Zelda's intense suicidal mania necessitated her extended confinement at the Highland Hospital in Asheville, North Carolina.

Fitzgerald's dire financial straits compelled him to accept a lucrative contract as a screenwriter with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer MGM in that necessitated his relocation to Hollywood. In an effort to abstain from alcohol, Fitzgerald drank large amounts of Coca-Cola and ate many sweets. Estranged from Zelda, Fitzgerald attempted to reunite with his first love Ginevra King when the wealthy Chicago heiress visited Hollywood in Soon after, a lonely Fitzgerald began a relationship with nationally syndicated gossip columnist Sheilah Graham , his final companion before his death.

Fitzgerald had to climb two flights of stairs to his apartment, while Graham lived on the ground floor. Throughout their relationship, Graham claimed Fitzgerald felt constant guilt over Zelda's mental illness and confinement. Scott Fitzgerald. You've read my books. You've read The Great Gatsby, haven't you? During this last phase of his career, Fitzgerald's screenwriting tasks included revisions on Madame Curie and an unused dialogue polish for Gone with the Wind —a book which Fitzgerald disparaged as unoriginal and an "old wives' tale".

Director Billy Wilder described Fitzgerald's foray into Hollywood as like that of "a great sculptor who is hired to do a plumbing job". This is my immediate duty—without this I am nothing. Fitzgerald achieved sobriety over a year before his death, and Graham described their last year together as one of the happiest times of their relationship.

The following day, as Fitzgerald annotated his newly arrived Princeton Alumni Weekly , [ ] Graham saw him jump from his armchair, grab the mantelpiece, and collapse on the floor without uttering a sound. On learning of her father's death, Scottie telephoned Graham from Vassar and asked she not attend the funeral for social propriety.

Zelda eulogized Fitzgerald in a letter to a friend: "He was as spiritually generous a soul as ever was It seems as if he was always planning happiness for Scottie and for me. Books to read—places to go. Life seemed so promising always when he was around. Scott was the best friend a person could have to me". Fitzgerald was buried instead with a simple Protestant service at Rockville Cemetery.

It has been the greatest credo in my life that I would rather be an artist than a careerist. I would rather impress my image upon the soul of a people I would as soon be as anonymous as Rimbaud if I could feel that I had accomplished that purpose. At the time of his death, Fitzgerald believed that his life was a failure and his work was forgotten.

Surveying these posthumous attacks, John Dos Passos opined that many literary critics in popular newspapers lacked the basic discernment about the art of writing. Within one year after his death, Edmund Wilson completed Fitzgerald's unfinished fifth novel The Last Tycoon using the author's extensive notes, [ l ] [ ] and he included The Great Gatsby within the edition, sparking new interest and discussion among critics.

By the 21st century, The Great Gatsby had sold millions of copies, and the novel is required reading in many high school and college classes. If you want to know about the South, you read Faulkner. If you want to know what America's like, you read The Great Gatsby. Fitzgerald is the quintessential American writer. The Great Gatsby ' s popularity led to widespread interest in Fitzgerald himself.

Seven years later, Fitzgerald's friend Edmund Wilson remarked that he now received copious letters from female admirers of Fitzgerald's works and that his flawed alcoholic friend had posthumously become "a semi-divine personage" in the popular imagination. Decades after his death, Fitzgerald's childhood Summit Terrace home in St. Paul became a National Historic Landmark in More so than most contemporary writers of his era, F.

Scott Fitzgerald's authorial voice evolved and matured over time, [ ] and his each successive novel represented a discernible progression in literary quality. For his first novel, Fitzgerald used as his literary templates H. Wells ' work Tono-Bungay and Sir Compton Mackenzie 's novel Sinister Street , [ ] which chronicled a young college student's coming-of-age at Oxford University.

Although critics praised This Side of Paradise as highly original, they criticised its form and construction.

F scott fitzgerald biography sparknotes lord

For his sophomore effort, Fitzgerald discarded the trappings of collegiate bildungsromans and crafted an "ironical-pessimistic" [ sic ] novel in the style of Thomas Hardy 's oeuvre. Although critics deemed The Beautiful and Damned to be less ground-breaking than its predecessor, [ ] [ ] many recognized that the vast improvement in literary form and construction between his first and second novels augured great prospects for Fitzgerald's future.

Weaver predicted in that, as Fitzgerald matured as a writer, he would become regarded as one of the greatest authors of American literature. When composing The Great Gatsby , Fitzgerald chose to depart from the writing process of his previous novels and to fashion a conscious artistic achievement. With the publication of The Great Gatsby , Fitzgerald had refined his prose style and plot construction, and the literati now hailed him as a master of his craft.

The realization that Fitzgerald had improved as a novelist to point that Gatsby was a masterwork was immediately evident to certain members of the literary world. Eliot believed it represented a turning point in American literature. By this time, the field of literature had greatly changed due to the onset of the Great Depression , and once popular writers such as Fitzgerald and Hemingway who wrote about upper-middle-class lifestyles were now disparaged in literary periodicals whereas so-called " proletarian novelists " enjoyed general applause.

Due to this change, although Fitzgerald showed a mastery of "verbal nuance, flexible rhythm, dramatic construction and essential tragi-comedy" in Tender Is the Night , [ ] many reviewers dismissed the work for its disengagement with the political issues of the era. After Fitzgerald's death, writers such as John Dos Passos assayed Fitzgerald's gradual progression in literary quality and posited that his uncompleted fifth novel The Last Tycoon could have been Fitzgerald's greatest achievement.

In contrast to the discernible progression in literary quality and artistic maturity represented by his novels, [ ] Fitzgerald's short stories displayed the opposite tendency and attracted significant criticism. Although a dazzling extemporizer, Fitzgerald's short stories were criticized for lacking both thematic coherence and quality.

Commenting upon this tendency in Fitzgerald's short stories, Dos Passos remarked that "everybody who has put pen to paper during the last twenty years has been daily plagued by the difficulty of deciding whether he's to do 'good' writing that will satisfy his conscience or 'cheap' writing that will satisfy his pocketbook