F Scott Fitzgerald

F Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940), Jazz Age novelist

Born Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald on September 24, 1896 in Saint Paul, Minnesota, as a young man and aspiring writer, he would become friends with the noted critic Edmund Wilson[?] while both were students at Princeton University. Wilson was well-read, and when Fitzgerald told him that Fitzgerald hoped to become one of the great writers, Wilson was shocked and thought he meant to be as good as Homer and Dante and Shakespeare. Actually, Fitzgerald was thinking of Booth Tarkington.

His wife, Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald[?] (1900-1948), was also a writer.

F. Scott Fitzgerald spent time with other greats of his era in the Montparnasse Quarter of Paris, France. He was close friends with Ernest Hemingway and Morley Callaghan and it was at "La Closerie des Lilas" in Montparnasse, Hemingway's favorite café, where in 1925 Fitzgerald asked Hemingway to read his latest manuscript, The Great Gatsby.

Constantly filled with self-doubt about his abilities, the number of books he wrote were limited. During the latter part of his life, he had to deal with financial worries and his wife's severe mental illness added to his problems. As a result, he took work as a screenwriter in Hollywood, California, a job he hated, but one he was forced to undertake in order to pay for his wife's expensive care in a sanitorium.

F. Scott Fitzgerald died on December 21, 1940 in Hollywood. He and his wife are interred in Saint Mary's Cemetery, in Rockville, Maryland.

In 2001, two of his books, The Great Gatsby and Tender is the Night[?], would be named to the list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century by the editorial board of the American Modern Library.

Novels

• This Side of Paradise[?] 1913
• The Beautiful and the Damned[?] 1922
• The Great Gatsby 1925
• Tender is the Night[?] 1934
• The Last Tycoon[?] (unfinished, published 1941)