F. Scott Fitzgerald | Biography, Education, Books, & Facts (2024)

American writer

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Also known as: Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald

Written by

Arthur Mizener Mellon Foundation Professor of Humanities, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York. Author of The Far Side of Paradise: A Biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald and others.

Arthur Mizener

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The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica Encyclopaedia Britannica's editors oversee subject areas in which they have extensive knowledge, whether from years of experience gained by working on that content or via study for an advanced degree. They write new content and verify and edit content received from contributors.

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Quick Facts

In full:
Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald
Born:
September 24, 1896, St. Paul, Minnesota, U.S.
Died:
December 21, 1940, Hollywood, California (aged 44)
Notable Works:
“Tales of the Jazz Age”
“Tender Is the Night”
“The Beautiful and Damned”
“The Crack-Up”
“The Diamond as Big as the Ritz”
“The Great Gatsby”
“The Last Tycoon”
“This Side of Paradise”
Notable Family Members:
spouse Zelda Fitzgerald

See all related content →

Top Questions

Who was F. Scott Fitzgerald?

F. Scott Fitzgerald was a 20th-century American short-story writer and novelist. Although he completed four novels and more than 150 short stories in his lifetime, he is perhaps best remembered for his third novel, The Great Gatsby (1925). The Great Gatsby is today widely considered “the great American novel.”

The Great GatsbyRead more about Fitzgerald’s third and most famous novel, The Great Gatsby.

When and where was F. Scott Fitzgerald born?

Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was born on September 24, 1896, in St. Paul, Minnesota, to parents Edward and Mary (“Mollie”) McQuillan Fitzgerald. Notably, Fitzgerald shares a birthplace with two of his most famous fictional characters: Amory Blaine of This Side of Paradise (1920) and Nick Carraway of The Great Gatsby (1925).

St. PaulLearn about the birthplace of F. Scott Fitzgerald.

What was F. Scott Fitzgerald’s family like?

F. Scott Fitzgerald married Zelda Sayre on April 3, 1920. Scott and Zelda had a tumultuous relationship, characterized by excessive drinking, partying, and fighting. The pair had just one child, named Frances (or “Scottie”). The Fitzgeralds’ troubled family life has inspired numerous biographies, novels, movies, and TV series.

Zelda FitzgeraldRead more about the marriage of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald.

What did F. Scott Fitzgerald write about?

Fitzgerald is famous for his depictions of the Jazz Age (the 1920s), especially in his novel The Great Gatsby. Fitzgerald conveyed in The Great Gatsby the sense of hope America promised to its youth and the disappointment its youth felt when America failed to deliver. This—the promise and failure of the American Dream—is a common theme in Fitzgerald’s work. Other common themes in his work include society and class, wealth and materialism, and romantic idealism.

Tales of the Jazz AgeRead about Tales of the Jazz Age (1922), a collection of short works by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

The Great GatsbyLearn more about Fitzgerald’s most-celebrated novel, The Great Gatsby.

How did F. Scott Fitzgerald die?

Fitzgerald struggled with alcoholism throughout his life. It’s likely that his heavy drinking contributed to his early death: Fitzgerald died of a heart attack on December 21, 1940, in Hollywood, California, at age 44. He had not yet completed his fifth novel, The Last Tycoon.

The Last TycoonRead about Fitzgerald’s final novel, The Last Tycoon, published posthumously in 1941.

F. Scott Fitzgerald (born September 24, 1896, St. Paul, Minnesota, U.S.—died December 21, 1940, Hollywood, California) was an American short-story writer and novelist famous for his depictions of the Jazz Age (the 1920s), his most brilliant novel being The Great Gatsby (1925). His private life, with his wife, Zelda, in both America and France, became almost as celebrated as his novels.

Fitzgerald was the only son of an unsuccessful, aristocratic father and an energetic, provincial mother. Half the time he thought of himself as the heir of his father’s tradition, which included the author of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” Francis Scott Key, after whom he was named, and half the time as “straight 1850 potato-famine Irish.” As a result he had typically ambivalent American feelings about American life, which seemed to him at once vulgar and dazzlingly promising.

Britannica QuizAmerican Writers Quiz

He also had an intensely romantic imagination, what he once called “a heightened sensitivity to the promises of life,” and he charged into experience determined to realize those promises. At both St. Paul Academy (1908–10) and Newman School (1911–13), he tried too hard and made himself unpopular, but at Princeton University he came close to realizing his dream of a brilliant success. He became a prominent figure in the literary life of the university and made lifelong friendships with Edmund Wilson and John Peale Bishop. He became a leading figure in the socially important Triangle Club, a dramatic society, and was elected to one of the leading clubs of the university. He fell in love with Ginevra King, one of the beauties of her generation. Then he lost Ginevra and flunked out of Princeton.

He returned to Princeton the next fall, but he had now lost all the positions he coveted, and in November 1917 he left to join the army. In July 1918, while he was stationed near Montgomery, Alabama, he met Zelda Sayre, the daughter of an Alabama Supreme Court judge. They fell deeply in love, and, as soon as he could, Fitzgerald headed for New York determined to achieve instant success and to marry Zelda. What he achieved was an advertising job at $90 a month. Zelda broke their engagement, and, after an epic drunk, Fitzgerald retired to St. Paul, Minnesota, to rewrite for the second time a novel he had begun at Princeton. In the spring of 1920 it was published, he married Zelda, and

riding in a taxi one afternoon between very tall buildings under a mauve and rosy sky; I began to bawl because I had everything I wanted and knew I would never be so happy again.

This Side of Paradise was a revelation of the new morality of the young; it made Fitzgerald famous. This fame opened to him magazines of literary prestige, such as Scribner’s, and high-paying popular ones, such as The Saturday Evening Post. This sudden prosperity made it possible for him and Zelda to play the roles they were so beautifully equipped for, and Ring Lardner called them the prince and princess of their generation. Though they loved these roles, they were frightened by them, too, as the ending of Fitzgerald’s second novel, The Beautiful and Damned (1922), shows. The Beautiful and Damned describes a handsome young man and his beautiful wife, who gradually degenerate into a shopworn middle age while they wait for the young man to inherit a large fortune. Ironically, they finally get it, when there is nothing of them left worth preserving.

F. Scott Fitzgerald | Biography, Education, Books, & Facts (5)

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To escape the life that they feared might bring them to this end, the Fitzgeralds (together with their daughter, Frances, called “Scottie,” born in 1921) moved in 1924 to the Riviera, where they found themselves a part of a group of American expatriates whose style was largely set 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. Shortly after their arrival in France, Fitzgerald completed his most brilliant novel, The Great Gatsby (1925). All of his divided nature is in this novel, the naive Midwesterner afire with the possibilities of the “American Dream” in its hero, Jay Gatsby, and the compassionate Yale gentleman in its narrator, Nick Carraway. The Great Gatsby is the most profoundly American novel of its time; at its conclusion, Fitzgerald connects Gatsby’s dream, his “Platonic conception of himself,” with the dream of the discoverers of America. Some of Fitzgerald’s finest short stories appeared in All the Sad Young Men (1926), particularly “The Rich Boy” and “Absolution,” but it was not until eight years later that another novel appeared.

The next decade of the Fitzgeralds’ lives was disorderly and unhappy. Fitzgerald began to drink too much, and Zelda suddenly, ominously, began to practice ballet dancing night and day. In 1930 she had a mental breakdown and in 1932 another, from which she never fully recovered. Through the 1930s they fought to save their life together, and, when the battle was lost, Fitzgerald said, “I left my capacity for hoping on the little roads that led to Zelda’s sanitarium.” He did not finish his next novel, Tender Is the Night, until 1934. It is the story of a psychiatrist who marries one of his patients, who, as she slowly recovers, exhausts his vitality until he is, in Fitzgerald’s words, un homme épuisé (“a man used up”). This is Fitzgerald’s most moving book, though it was commercially unsuccessful.

With its failure and his despair over Zelda, Fitzgerald was close to becoming an incurable alcoholic. By 1937, however, he had come back far enough to become a scriptwriter in Hollywood, and there he met and fell in love with Sheilah Graham, a famous Hollywood gossip columnist. For the rest of his life—except for occasional drunken spells when he became bitter and violent—Fitzgerald lived quietly with her. (Occasionally he went east to visit Zelda or his daughter Scottie, who entered Vassar College in 1938.) In October 1939 he began a novel about Hollywood, The Last Tycoon. The career of its hero, Monroe Stahr, is based on that of the producer Irving Thalberg. This is Fitzgerald’s final attempt to create his dream of the promises of American life and of the kind of man who could realize them. In the intensity with which it is imagined and in the brilliance of its expression, it is the equal of anything Fitzgerald ever wrote, and it is typical of his luck that he died of a heart attack with his novel only half-finished. He was 44 years old.

Arthur Mizener The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica

F. Scott Fitzgerald | Biography, Education, Books, & Facts (2024)

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