Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald (September 24, 1896 – December 21, 1940) is widely regarded as one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century! The Great Gatsby is described as 'a work that seriously examines the theme of aspiration in an American setting, defines the classic American novel.'
Besides, Great Gatsby, his three most famous books are 'This Side of Paradise', 'The Beautiful and Damned' and 'Tender Is the Night.' He also wrote a few short stories that feature themes such as youth and promise along with despair and age. Another major theme was mutability or loss. As a social historian Fitzgerald became identified with the Jazz Age: “It was an age of miracles, it was an age of art, it was an age of excess, and it was an age of satire,” he wrote in “Echoes of the Jazz Age.”
However, some say that 'Fitzgerald died believing himself a failure. The obituaries were condescending, and he seemed destined for literary obscurity.' Overall, his celebrity status was pretty high as he lived in Hollywood for the later part of his life before he died at the gae of 44 from a heart attack.
F. Scott Fitzgerald : Biography Francis Scott Fitzgerald was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, on September 24, 1896. He was educated at Princeton University and served in the U.S. Army from 1917 to 1919, attaining the rank of second lieutenant. In 1920 Fitzgerald married Zelda Sayre, a young woman of the upper class, and they had a daughter, Frances. Fitzgerald is well known for his short stories and novels. Ernest Hemingway had been influenced by Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald unfortunately died of a heart attack on December 21 1940. His first novel The Beautiful and Damned failed to get notable attention but from this novel Fitzgerald formed the major themes of his novels and short stories. The book featured themes of the nature of youthfulness and innocence, unattainable love, and middle-class aspiration for wealth and respectability. His most renowned book, The Great Gatsby features themes of middle-class aspirations for wealth. The Great Gatsby is considered to be the greatest American novel, written in 1925. Fitzgerald was intrigued by the roaring twenties and towards the end of his illustrious yet unfulfilled life (as he had never had a bestselling book) he contributed scripts for popular films, Winter Carnival and Gone with the Wind. Fitzgerald's work is inseparable from the Roaring 20s.’ Berenice Bobs Her Hair’ and ‘A Diamond as Big as the Ritz’, are two short stories included in his collections, Tales of the Jazz Age and Flappers and Philosophers. Legacy Fitzgerald is a 2009 inductee of New Jersey’s Hall of Fame Other Fitzgerald books: This Side of Paradise (1920) Tender Is the Night The Last Tycoon http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=KVnyOwAACAAJ&dq=f+scott+fitzgerald+biography&hl=en&ei=Zf9STYD-KYq3hQeHkLDlCA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=3&ved=0CD0Q6AEwAg
Early years: Born in 1896 in Minnesota, in the mid-west of the US, born after his siblings died in infancy, hence the protection emitted by his mother towards her only child, also caused by his susceptibility to cold and fevers. His first word was 'up', possibly reflecting on his goal throughout life. His father filled his head with legends of the family's history and tales of the Civil War, which they escaped from in moving to St Paul, Minnesota. He was known to possess endless desire to be popular, which stayed with him as he grew older.
Fitzgerald met Zelda Sayre at a dance in Montgomery. She was a popular Southern girl, whom he was attracted to because of her status (as well as her charms).
Fitzgerald is closely associated with the optimism and excesses of that era's "Jazz Age." Fitzgerald's stories often featured people like himself: middle-American types infatuated with the wealth and status of upper-crust society. In the mid-1920s he lived in Paris where he was friends with Ernest Hemingway. Fitzgerald was a popular celebrity of the day and he and his wife, Zelda, became famous for their extravagant lifestyle, drinking bouts and (eventually) erratic behavior.
At 26, Fitzgerald was in Who’s Who. His politics was Socialist.
His major published novels include This Side of Paradise (1920), The Great Gatsby (1925), and Tender Is the Night (1934).
Fitzgerald died of two heart attacks at the age of 44, after Zelda was hospitalized, due to psychological problems.
Name: Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald Life:(September 24, 1896 – December 21, 1940) Occupation: Writer Works:
Benediction
Bernice Bobs Her Hair
Dalyrimple Goes Wrong
Head and Shoulders
The Cut-Glass Bowl
The Four Fists
The Great Gatsby
The Ice Palace
The Offshore Pirate
This Side of Paradise
Fitzgerald started to write at St. Paul Academy. His first published story, 'The Mystery of the Raymond Mortgage' appeared in 1909 in Now and Then.
Quotes:
At 18 our convictions are hills from which we look; At 45 they are caves in which we hide.
In a real dark night of the soul it is always three o'clock in the morning, day after day.
"The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function."
“ Sometimes it is harder to deprive oneself of a pain than of a pleasure"
I read an extract on google books on F.Scott Fitzgerald's other works and found that 'Flappers and Philosophers' was the first collection of short stories written by him. When I read through these short stories I recognised Fitzgeralds familiar use of adverbs and the way he carefully chooses his adjectives to create a intricate story. The rich descriptive way Fitzgerald writes immerses the reader into the world of the story. Here is the link for the extracts from the book - http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=R0cJYmpGAj8C&printsec=frontcover&dq=fitzgerald&hl=en&ei=LuZTTZv3G8e7hAeG0anoCA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=8&ved=0CE4Q6AEwBzgK#v=onepage&q&f=false
F. Scott Fitzgerald strongly believed that in order to be a proper writer, you have to be able to “sell your heart” to the reader by writing things that you have an emotional connection to. He believed there was plenty to learn from all great writers but it was more important to write in your own voice. Fitzgerald adopted a wild lifestyle which was typical of the 1920s behaviour, yet still managed to produce some of the most insightful and enduring fiction ever published in America. I found this book (F. Scott Fitzgerald: voice of the jazz age)on Google books and read the foreword and introduction which were really interesting, there are also some pictures of Fitzgerald when he was young.
Hello everyone, here are just some interesting things I found out about FSF;
-He first met Hemingway in May 1925 in a bar in Paris. They became very good friends, but problems started occurring later as FSF became annoyed by Hemingway's increasing success -his marriage with Zelda wasn't smooth, especially as he was frequently away, meaning a lack of communication between the two -their failing marriage was portrayed differently by each of them through pieces that they wrote; Zelda wrote 'Save me the last Waltz' which had a different version of their marriage in comparison to 'Tender is the Night' which Fitzgerald wrote himself. -as a child, Fitzgerald attended exclusive schools, so he was educated to a high standard. However, he wasn't the best student and his grades weren't particularly high. He was also said to have been a boastful student and it could have been the fact that his family was so wealthy that caused him to be fascinated by the entrapping nature of wealth which can be seen in many of his works.
So I guess some people in class were right, Fitzgerald might of has some kind of homosexual relationship with Hemingway(OMG!) But his wife was going mad in her later years and started accusing him for not being 'man enough'. Because of his insecurities, Fitzgerald occasionally went to see his dear friend Hemingway for man-to-man advice. Meanwhile, his wife then got the idea that he was having a homosexual affair with his friend because he spent so much time with him. Fitzgerald claimed that amongst all the hurtful things she had ever said, this was the most hurtful. However, in the link, you can see some of the things his wife heard in his sleep when came home drunk after he had his meetings with Hemingway...I'll leave you guys to read it yourselves ;)
I found this information about fitzgerald in an obituary and thought it was really self analytical and interesting: - In 1936, in a magazine article, Mr. Fitzgerald described himself as “a cracked plate.” - He said “Now the standard cure for one who is sunk is to consider those in actual destitution or physical suffering,” he wrote. “This is an all-weather beatitude for gloom in general, but at 3 o’clock in the morning the cure doesn’t workòand in a real dark night of the soul it is always 3 o’clock in the morning.”
- A reporter once asked him what he thought had become of the jazz-mad, gin-drinking generation he wrote of in “This Side of Paradise.” - His answer was: “Some became brokers and threw themselves out of windows. Others became bankers and shot themselves. Still others became newspaper reporters. And a few became successful authors.”
These replies show his quick wit, views of the people in the 1920's which feature in Great Gatsby and show perhaps he was a jazz mad gin drinker perhaps...
American short-story writer and novelist, known for his depictions of the Jazz Age (the 1920s). With the glamorous Zelda Sayre (1900-48), Fitzgerald lived a colorful life of parties and money-spending. At the beginning of one of his stories Fitzgerald wrote the rich "are different from you and me". This privileged world he depicted in such novels as THE BEAUTIFUL AND DAMNED (1922) and THE GREAT GATSBY (1925), which is widely considered Fitzgerald's finest novel.
"It was my first inkling that he was a writer. And while I like writers - because if you ask a writer anything, you usually get an answer - still it belittled him in my eyes. Writers aren't people exactly. Or, if they're any good, they're a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person. It's like actors, who try so pathetically not to look in mirrors. Who lean backward trying - only to see their faces in the reflecting chandeliers." (from The Last Tycoon, 1941)
F. Scott Fitzgerald was born in St Paul, Minnesota of mixed Southern and Irish descent. He was given three names after the writer of The Star Spangled Banner, to whom he was distantly related. His father, Edward Fitzgerald, was a salesman, a Southern gentleman, whose furniture business had failed. Mary McQuillan, his mother, was the daughter of a successful wholesale grocer, and devoted to her only son. The family moved regularly, but settled finally in 1918 in St. Paul. At the age of 18 Fitzgerald fell in love with the 16-year-old Ginevra King, the prototype of Daisy Buchanan of The Great Gatsby.
Fitzgerald started to write at St. Paul Academy. His first published story, 'The Mystery of the Raymond Mortgage' appeared in 1909 in Now and Then. Fitzgerald entered in 1913 Princeton University, where he failed to become a football hero. He left his studies in 1917 because of his poor academic records, and took up a commission in the US Army. His experiences during World War I were more peaceful than Hemingway's - he never saw action and even did not go to France. The Romantic Egoist, a novel started in Princeton, was returned from Scribner's with an encouraging letter.
Demobilised in 1919, Fitzgerald worked briefly in New York for an advertising agency. His first story, 'Babes in the Wood,' was published in The Smart Set. Fitzgerald received from it thirty dollars and bought with the money a pair of white flannels. The turning point in his life was when he met in 1918 Zelda Sayre, herself as aspiring writer, and married her in 1920. In the same year appeared Fitzgerald's first novel, THIS SIDE OF PARADISE, in which he used material from The Romantic Egoist. Its hero, Amory Blaine, studies in Princeton, serves in WW I in France. At the end of the story he finds that his own egoism has been the cause of his unhappiness. The book gained success which the Fitzgeralds celebrated energetically in parties. Zelda danced on people's dinner tables. Doors opened for Fitzgerald into literary magazines, such as Scribner's and The Saturday Evening Post, which published his stories, among them 'The Diamond as Big as the Ritz.'
F. Scott Fitzgerald Dies at 44; Chronicler of ‘Lost Generation’ Author of ‘This Side of Paradise’ and ‘The Great Gatsby,’ Who Voiced the Growing Disillusion of the Jazz Age, Passed in Hollywood
No one has written more elegiacally about America than F. Scott Fitzgerald. As a young man, when the writing life stretched before him like an ocean of discovery and he was experiencing the first flush of early success, Fitzgerald remained oppressed by feelings of inauthenticity. He felt powerfully that something important was missing from his life, and spoke repeatedly of the "hauntedness" of The Great Gatsby.
It is not difficult to understand what he meant: a sense of lost time and the irretrievability of the past gave much of his work - indeed, his life - an ineradicable undertone of mourning. "All the stories that came into my head had a touch of disaster in them," he reflected in the autobiographical essay "Early Success", written in 1937 when he had already entered the long twilight of his short career.
Paradise was published when Fitzgerald was 24, amiably recasting the wasted promise of his Princeton years as a frivolous romance elevated by flights of transcendence. Within five years came the slight The Beautiful and the Damned, about the excesses of the idle rich he'd met there; and then, improbably, in 1925, The Great Gatsby, perhaps the most perfect short novel in the English language. It is on this - along with Tender is the Night, the unfinished The Last Tycoon and some of the more accomplished stories - that his reputation rests.
From there, it seemed Fitzgerald had nowhere else to go. Once past 30, his descent into alcoholism was swift. His subsequent struggles make for a familiar story; indeed, an overfamiliar one. Scott Donaldson, who has been writing about Fitzgerald and Hemingway for more than 40 years, diligently chronicles this narrative of decline all over again: the intense, difficult relationship Fitzgerald had with his unstable wife, Zelda; the ambivalent self-positioning; the aimless wandering in Europe; the last wretched years as a hack writer in Hollywood before his fatal heart attack in 1940.
In one sense, Fitzgerald willed himself into decline. His father was a failed businessman from Maryland, and as a child Scott was encouraged to nurture a wistful romanticism about the American South, with its faded elegance, genteel old families and confederate honour. He nurtured, too, a cult of doomed youth, whereby to be young and beautiful (and certainly rich) was to be most fully alive, and to be old was nothing.
As Hemingway once told him: "You put so much damned value on youth it seemed to me that you confused growing up with growing old." Above all, the young Fitzgerald nurtured the idea of falling in love - preferably painfully, which he did soon enough when, before leaving for Princeton, he met a girl called Ginerva King, who would become the model for all those rich, lovely, careless women in his stories and novels.
As Fitzgerald sickened, becoming less productive and more detached from reality as he entered his 30s, so Hemingway flourished, even as his own fiction became formulaic and tired. And as he flourished, he came to loathe his former mentor. In private he referred to Fitzgerald as "poor old Scott", mocking his clumsy drinking and reliance on Zelda. After Fitzgerald's death, he wrote: "What a lovely writer he was within his ignorance and lack of education, and his adoration of the rich. He should have been a spaniel."
Fitzgerald, who died aged 44, never matched the achievements of his early precocity. His last years, spent stumbling around Hollywood, were particularly wretched. His only consolation was the memory of his talent: he had always known he was good. "I feel I have an enormous power in me now," he told Perkins while revising Gatsby. We still feel that power today, 75 years after the first publication of a novel that is the verbal equivalent of perfect pitch.
The above was written by Amelia, taking excerpts from the brilliant Jason Cowley article: 'Beautiful but damned, 75 years after The Great Gatsby, Jason Cowley remembers F. Scott Fitzgerald's doomed youth'
I found this about Fitzgerald's personal life and influences:
Fitzgerald's own tempestuous relationship with his wife Zelda would be reflected in his many short stories and novels, first serialised in such literary journals as Scribner's and the Saturday Evening Post. Their lives are a classic study of the American Dream in all its highs, lows, excesses, and joys. Highly lauded as a writer, Fitzgerald was often mired in debt because of his and Zelda's lavish lifestyle, living beyond their means. The Great Gatsby and Fitzgerald's characters Daisy and Tom Buchanan, Myrtle, Jay Gatsby, and Nick Carraway epitomise the Jazz Age but is has also remained timeless in its examination of man's obsessions with and need for money, power, knowledge, and hope.
Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald (named after Francis Scott Key, author of the United States' national anthem "The Star Spangled Banner") was born into an upper-middle class family on 24 September 1896 in St. Paul, Minnesota. He was the only son of Edward Fitzgerald (1853-1931) and Mary 'Mollie' McQuillan (1860-1936), but had one sister, Annabel, born in 1901. In 1898 the Fitzgeralds moved to Buffalo, New York where Edward obtained a job as salesman with Proctor and Gamble after his furniture-making company foundered. It was the first move of many that Francis would make during his lifetime. When Edward lost his job in 1908 they were back in St. Paul. That same year, young Francis was enrolled in the St. Paul Academy. Early on he showed a love of the theatre and writing--his first work to appear in print was a detective story The Mystery of the Raymond Mortgage (1909) in the Academy's student paper Now and Then.
Fitzgerald He was born on the 24th of September 1896 and died in 1940. He was born to a second generation Irish-American family and went to Princeton University. He spent most of his adult years in Pairs where he was friends with Ernest Hemingway and married Zelda) – who he met in Alabama, and then based the novel tender is the night on her. F. Scott Fitzgerald has been attributed for the zeitgeist of the 1920s because of his novels This Side of Paradise, The Beautiful and Damned, Tender is the Night. He was one of the “Lost generation” which also included Ernest Hemingway, T.S. Eliot, Waldo Peirce, Alan Seeger, Gertrude Stein and Erich Maria Remarque. They were all expatriates in Paris who flourished on the low cost of living, liberal sexual codes, great bars and restaurants and many publications willing to publish their work. Along with the economy and the standard of living in the 20s, Fitzgerald’s work flourished in the “jazz age” (which he named himself). However, after the 1920s Fitzgerald’s work and personal life took a hit as he published far less works and Zelda spent most of the time in various mental institutions. Fitzgerald became an alcoholic and remained thus until he died.
Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald (September 24, 1896 – December 21, 1940) is widely regarded as one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century! The Great Gatsby is described as 'a work that seriously examines the theme of aspiration in an American setting, defines the classic American novel.'
ReplyDeleteBesides, Great Gatsby, his three most famous books are 'This Side of Paradise', 'The Beautiful and Damned' and 'Tender Is the Night.'
He also wrote a few short stories that feature themes such as youth and promise along with despair and age.
Another major theme was mutability or loss. As a social historian Fitzgerald became identified with the Jazz Age: “It was an age of miracles, it was an age of art, it was an age of excess, and it was an age of satire,” he wrote in “Echoes of the Jazz Age.”
However, some say that 'Fitzgerald died believing himself a failure. The obituaries were condescending, and he seemed destined for literary obscurity.'
Overall, his celebrity status was pretty high as he lived in Hollywood for the later part of his life before he died at the gae of 44 from a heart attack.
An obituary written about Fitzgerald:
http://www.nytimes.com/books/00/12/24/specials/fitzgerald-obit.html
Maeve
Maeve, this website needs a subscription to the New York Times to access - is this the website you used? Please find another if not.
ReplyDeleteF. Scott Fitzgerald : Biography
ReplyDeleteFrancis Scott Fitzgerald was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, on September 24, 1896. He was educated at Princeton University and served in the U.S. Army from 1917 to 1919, attaining the rank of second lieutenant. In 1920 Fitzgerald married Zelda Sayre, a young woman of the upper class, and they had a daughter, Frances. Fitzgerald is well known for his short stories and novels. Ernest Hemingway had been influenced by Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald unfortunately died of a heart attack on December 21 1940. His first novel The Beautiful and Damned failed to get notable attention but from this novel Fitzgerald formed the major themes of his novels and short stories. The book featured themes of the nature of youthfulness and innocence, unattainable love, and middle-class aspiration for wealth and respectability. His most renowned book, The Great Gatsby features themes of middle-class aspirations for wealth. The Great Gatsby is considered to be the greatest American novel, written in 1925. Fitzgerald was intrigued by the roaring twenties and towards the end of his illustrious yet unfulfilled life (as he had never had a bestselling book) he contributed scripts for popular films, Winter Carnival and Gone with the Wind. Fitzgerald's work is inseparable from the Roaring 20s.’ Berenice Bobs Her Hair’ and ‘A Diamond as Big as the Ritz’, are two short stories included in his collections, Tales of the Jazz Age and Flappers and Philosophers.
Legacy
Fitzgerald is a 2009 inductee of New Jersey’s Hall of Fame
Other Fitzgerald books:
This Side of Paradise (1920)
Tender Is the Night
The Last Tycoon
http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=KVnyOwAACAAJ&dq=f+scott+fitzgerald+biography&hl=en&ei=Zf9STYD-KYq3hQeHkLDlCA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=3&ved=0CD0Q6AEwAg
By Clarence
Early years:
ReplyDeleteBorn in 1896 in Minnesota, in the mid-west of the US, born after his siblings died in infancy, hence the protection emitted by his mother towards her only child, also caused by his susceptibility to cold and fevers. His first word was 'up', possibly reflecting on his goal throughout life.
His father filled his head with legends of the family's history and tales of the Civil War, which they escaped from in moving to St Paul, Minnesota.
He was known to possess endless desire to be popular, which stayed with him as he grew older.
Fitzgerald met Zelda Sayre at a dance in Montgomery. She was a popular Southern girl, whom he was attracted to because of her status (as well as her charms).
Fitzgerald is closely associated with the optimism and excesses of that era's "Jazz Age." Fitzgerald's stories often featured people like himself: middle-American types infatuated with the wealth and status of upper-crust society. In the mid-1920s he lived in Paris where he was friends with Ernest Hemingway. Fitzgerald was a popular celebrity of the day and he and his wife, Zelda, became famous for their extravagant lifestyle, drinking bouts and (eventually) erratic behavior.
At 26, Fitzgerald was in Who’s Who. His politics was Socialist.
His major published novels include This Side of Paradise (1920), The Great Gatsby (1925), and Tender Is the Night (1934).
Fitzgerald died of two heart attacks at the age of 44, after Zelda was hospitalized, due to psychological problems.
Name: Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald
ReplyDeleteLife:(September 24, 1896 – December 21, 1940)
Occupation: Writer
Works:
Benediction
Bernice Bobs Her Hair
Dalyrimple Goes Wrong
Head and Shoulders
The Cut-Glass Bowl
The Four Fists
The Great Gatsby
The Ice Palace
The Offshore Pirate
This Side of Paradise
Fitzgerald started to write at St. Paul Academy. His first published story, 'The Mystery of the Raymond Mortgage' appeared in 1909 in Now and Then.
Quotes:
At 18 our convictions are hills from which we look; At 45 they are caves in which we hide.
In a real dark night of the soul it is always three o'clock in the morning, day after day.
"The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function."
“ Sometimes it is harder to deprive oneself of a pain than of a pleasure"
http://www.enotes.com/twentieth-century-criticism/great-gatsby-f-scott-fitzgerald
I read an extract on google books on F.Scott Fitzgerald's other works and found that 'Flappers and Philosophers' was the first collection of short stories written by him. When I read through these short stories I recognised Fitzgeralds familiar use of adverbs and the way he carefully chooses his adjectives to create a intricate story. The rich descriptive way Fitzgerald writes immerses the reader into the world of the story. Here is the link for the extracts from the book -
ReplyDeletehttp://books.google.co.uk/books?id=R0cJYmpGAj8C&printsec=frontcover&dq=fitzgerald&hl=en&ei=LuZTTZv3G8e7hAeG0anoCA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=8&ved=0CE4Q6AEwBzgK#v=onepage&q&f=false
http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=HABKH7i-7UUC&printsec=frontcover&dq=f.+scott+fitzgerald&hl=en&ei=OxVTTdWGN9-ShAeW49GjCQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=5&ved=0CEcQ6AEwBA#v=onepage&q&f=false
ReplyDeleteF. Scott Fitzgerald strongly believed that in order to be a proper writer, you have to be able to “sell your heart” to the reader by writing things that you have an emotional connection to. He believed there was plenty to learn from all great writers but it was more important to write in your own voice. Fitzgerald adopted a wild lifestyle which was typical of the 1920s behaviour, yet still managed to produce some of the most insightful and enduring fiction ever published in America. I found this book (F. Scott Fitzgerald: voice of the jazz age)on Google books and read the foreword and introduction which were really interesting, there are also some pictures of Fitzgerald when he was young.
Hello everyone, here are just some interesting things I found out about FSF;
ReplyDelete-He first met Hemingway in May 1925 in a bar in Paris. They became very good friends, but problems started occurring later as FSF became annoyed by Hemingway's increasing success
-his marriage with Zelda wasn't smooth, especially as he was frequently away, meaning a lack of communication between the two
-their failing marriage was portrayed differently by each of them through pieces that they wrote; Zelda wrote 'Save me the last Waltz' which had a different version of their marriage in comparison to 'Tender is the Night' which Fitzgerald wrote himself.
-as a child, Fitzgerald attended exclusive schools, so he was educated to a high standard. However, he wasn't the best student and his grades weren't particularly high. He was also said to have been a boastful student and it could have been the fact that his family was so wealthy that caused him to be fascinated by the entrapping nature of wealth which can be seen in many of his works.
ooh here are the links..I forgot to put them in before..
ReplyDeletehttp://www.amazon.co.uk/Some-Sort-Epic-Grandeur-Fitzgerald/dp/1570034559/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1297524333&sr=1-1
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zelda_Fitzgerald
So I guess some people in class were right, Fitzgerald might of has some kind of homosexual relationship with Hemingway(OMG!) But his wife was going mad in her later years and started accusing him for not being 'man enough'. Because of his insecurities, Fitzgerald occasionally went to see his dear friend Hemingway for man-to-man advice. Meanwhile, his wife then got the idea that he was having a homosexual affair with his friend because he spent so much time with him. Fitzgerald claimed that amongst all the hurtful things she had ever said, this was the most hurtful. However, in the link, you can see some of the things his wife heard in his sleep when came home drunk after he had his meetings with Hemingway...I'll leave you guys to read it yourselves ;)
ReplyDeleteLINK: http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=G5EXJ_m2n10C&pg=PA275&dq=f+scott+fitzgerald+homosexual&hl=en&ei=RzRYTeOjM9S0hAedupG6DA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=3&ved=0CDMQ6AEwAg#v=onepage&q=f%20scott%20fitzgerald%20homosexual&f=false
Sir, I found a really good video of Gatsby's party if you'd like to watch it in class,heres the link. Cecilia J
ReplyDeletehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=II1PmhWCzDs
I found this information about fitzgerald in an obituary and thought it was really self analytical and interesting:
ReplyDelete- In 1936, in a magazine article, Mr. Fitzgerald described himself as “a cracked plate.”
- He said “Now the standard cure for one who is sunk is to consider those in actual destitution or physical suffering,” he wrote. “This is an all-weather beatitude for gloom in general, but at 3 o’clock in the morning the cure doesn’t workòand in a real dark night of the soul it is always 3 o’clock in the morning.”
- A reporter once asked him what he thought had become of the jazz-mad, gin-drinking generation he wrote of in “This Side of Paradise.”
- His answer was: “Some became brokers and threw themselves out of windows. Others became bankers and shot themselves. Still others became newspaper reporters. And a few became successful authors.”
These replies show his quick wit, views of the people in the 1920's which feature in Great Gatsby and show perhaps he was a jazz mad gin drinker perhaps...
LINK-
http://www.sc.edu/fitzgerald/obituaries.html
ReplyDeleteAmerican short-story writer and novelist, known for his depictions of the Jazz Age (the 1920s). With the glamorous Zelda Sayre (1900-48), Fitzgerald lived a colorful life of parties and money-spending. At the beginning of one of his stories Fitzgerald wrote the rich "are different from you and me". This privileged world he depicted in such novels as THE BEAUTIFUL AND DAMNED (1922) and THE GREAT GATSBY (1925), which is widely considered Fitzgerald's finest novel.
"It was my first inkling that he was a writer. And while I like writers - because if you ask a writer anything, you usually get an answer - still it belittled him in my eyes. Writers aren't people exactly. Or, if they're any good, they're a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person. It's like actors, who try so pathetically not to look in mirrors. Who lean backward trying - only to see their faces in the reflecting chandeliers." (from The Last Tycoon, 1941)
F. Scott Fitzgerald was born in St Paul, Minnesota of mixed Southern and Irish descent. He was given three names after the writer of The Star Spangled Banner, to whom he was distantly related. His father, Edward Fitzgerald, was a salesman, a Southern gentleman, whose furniture business had failed. Mary McQuillan, his mother, was the daughter of a successful wholesale grocer, and devoted to her only son. The family moved regularly, but settled finally in 1918 in St. Paul. At the age of 18 Fitzgerald fell in love with the 16-year-old Ginevra King, the prototype of Daisy Buchanan of The Great Gatsby.
Fitzgerald started to write at St. Paul Academy. His first published story, 'The Mystery of the Raymond Mortgage' appeared in 1909 in Now and Then. Fitzgerald entered in 1913 Princeton University, where he failed to become a football hero. He left his studies in 1917 because of his poor academic records, and took up a commission in the US Army. His experiences during World War I were more peaceful than Hemingway's - he never saw action and even did not go to France. The Romantic Egoist, a novel started in Princeton, was returned from Scribner's with an encouraging letter.
Demobilised in 1919, Fitzgerald worked briefly in New York for an advertising agency. His first story, 'Babes in the Wood,' was published in The Smart Set. Fitzgerald received from it thirty dollars and bought with the money a pair of white flannels. The turning point in his life was when he met in 1918 Zelda Sayre, herself as aspiring writer, and married her in 1920. In the same year appeared Fitzgerald's first novel, THIS SIDE OF PARADISE, in which he used material from The Romantic Egoist. Its hero, Amory Blaine, studies in Princeton, serves in WW I in France. At the end of the story he finds that his own egoism has been the cause of his unhappiness. The book gained success which the Fitzgeralds celebrated energetically in parties. Zelda danced on people's dinner tables. Doors opened for Fitzgerald into literary magazines, such as Scribner's and The Saturday Evening Post, which published his stories, among them 'The Diamond as Big as the Ritz.'
Kiki wrote:
ReplyDeleteF. Scott Fitzgerald Dies at 44;
Chronicler of ‘Lost Generation’
Author of ‘This Side of Paradise’ and ‘The Great
Gatsby,’ Who Voiced the Growing Disillusion
of the Jazz Age, Passed in Hollywood
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2000/apr/08/ernesthemingway.classics
ReplyDeleteNo one has written more elegiacally about America than F. Scott Fitzgerald. As a young man, when the writing life stretched before him like an ocean of discovery and he was experiencing the first flush of early success, Fitzgerald remained oppressed by feelings of inauthenticity. He felt powerfully that something important was missing from his life, and spoke repeatedly of the "hauntedness" of The Great Gatsby.
It is not difficult to understand what he meant: a sense of lost time and the irretrievability of the past gave much of his work - indeed, his life - an ineradicable undertone of mourning. "All the stories that came into my head had a touch of disaster in them," he reflected in the autobiographical essay "Early Success", written in 1937 when he had already entered the long twilight of his short career.
Paradise was published when Fitzgerald was 24, amiably recasting the wasted promise of his Princeton years as a frivolous romance elevated by flights of transcendence. Within five years came the slight The Beautiful and the Damned, about the excesses of the idle rich he'd met there; and then, improbably, in 1925, The Great Gatsby, perhaps the most perfect short novel in the English language. It is on this - along with Tender is the Night, the unfinished The Last Tycoon and some of the more accomplished stories - that his reputation rests.
From there, it seemed Fitzgerald had nowhere else to go. Once past 30, his descent into alcoholism was swift. His subsequent struggles make for a familiar story; indeed, an overfamiliar one. Scott Donaldson, who has been writing about Fitzgerald and Hemingway for more than 40 years, diligently chronicles this narrative of decline all over again: the intense, difficult relationship Fitzgerald had with his unstable wife, Zelda; the ambivalent self-positioning; the aimless wandering in Europe; the last wretched years as a hack writer in Hollywood before his fatal heart attack in 1940.
In one sense, Fitzgerald willed himself into decline. His father was a failed businessman from Maryland, and as a child Scott was encouraged to nurture a wistful romanticism about the American South, with its faded elegance, genteel old families and confederate honour. He nurtured, too, a cult of doomed youth, whereby to be young and beautiful (and certainly rich) was to be most fully alive, and to be old was nothing.
As Hemingway once told him: "You put so much damned value on youth it seemed to me that you confused growing up with growing old." Above all, the young Fitzgerald nurtured the idea of falling in love - preferably painfully, which he did soon enough when, before leaving for Princeton, he met a girl called Ginerva King, who would become the model for all those rich, lovely, careless women in his stories and novels.
As Fitzgerald sickened, becoming less productive and more detached from reality as he entered his 30s, so Hemingway flourished, even as his own fiction became formulaic and tired. And as he flourished, he came to loathe his former mentor. In private he referred to Fitzgerald as "poor old Scott", mocking his clumsy drinking and reliance on Zelda. After Fitzgerald's death, he wrote: "What a lovely writer he was within his ignorance and lack of education, and his adoration of the rich. He should have been a spaniel."
Fitzgerald, who died aged 44, never matched the achievements of his early precocity. His last years, spent stumbling around Hollywood, were particularly wretched. His only consolation was the memory of his talent: he had always known he was good. "I feel I have an enormous power in me now," he told Perkins while revising Gatsby. We still feel that power today, 75 years after the first publication of a novel that is the verbal equivalent of perfect pitch.
The above was written by Amelia, taking excerpts from the brilliant Jason Cowley article: 'Beautiful but damned, 75 years after The Great Gatsby, Jason Cowley remembers F. Scott Fitzgerald's doomed youth'
ReplyDeleteI found this about Fitzgerald's personal life and influences:
ReplyDeleteFitzgerald's own tempestuous relationship with his wife Zelda would be reflected in his many short stories and novels, first serialised in such literary journals as Scribner's and the Saturday Evening Post. Their lives are a classic study of the American Dream in all its highs, lows, excesses, and joys. Highly lauded as a writer, Fitzgerald was often mired in debt because of his and Zelda's lavish lifestyle, living beyond their means. The Great Gatsby and Fitzgerald's characters Daisy and Tom Buchanan, Myrtle, Jay Gatsby, and Nick Carraway epitomise the Jazz Age but is has also remained timeless in its examination of man's obsessions with and need for money, power, knowledge, and hope.
Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald (named after Francis Scott Key, author of the United States' national anthem "The Star Spangled Banner") was born into an upper-middle class family on 24 September 1896 in St. Paul, Minnesota. He was the only son of Edward Fitzgerald (1853-1931) and Mary 'Mollie' McQuillan (1860-1936), but had one sister, Annabel, born in 1901. In 1898 the Fitzgeralds moved to Buffalo, New York where Edward obtained a job as salesman with Proctor and Gamble after his furniture-making company foundered. It was the first move of many that Francis would make during his lifetime. When Edward lost his job in 1908 they were back in St. Paul. That same year, young Francis was enrolled in the St. Paul Academy. Early on he showed a love of the theatre and writing--his first work to appear in print was a detective story The Mystery of the Raymond Mortgage (1909) in the Academy's student paper Now and Then.
^ http://www.online-literature.com/fitzgerald/
ReplyDeleteFitzgerald
ReplyDeleteHe was born on the 24th of September 1896 and died in 1940. He was born to a second generation Irish-American family and went to Princeton University. He spent most of his adult years in Pairs where he was friends with Ernest Hemingway and married Zelda) – who he met in Alabama, and then based the novel tender is the night on her.
F. Scott Fitzgerald has been attributed for the zeitgeist of the 1920s because of his novels This Side of Paradise, The Beautiful and Damned, Tender is the Night.
He was one of the “Lost generation” which also included Ernest Hemingway, T.S. Eliot, Waldo Peirce, Alan Seeger, Gertrude Stein and Erich Maria Remarque. They were all expatriates in Paris who flourished on the low cost of living, liberal sexual codes, great bars and restaurants and many publications willing to publish their work.
Along with the economy and the standard of living in the 20s, Fitzgerald’s work flourished in the “jazz age” (which he named himself). However, after the 1920s Fitzgerald’s work and personal life took a hit as he published far less works and Zelda spent most of the time in various mental institutions. Fitzgerald became an alcoholic and remained thus until he died.
http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=3IPuVkxHBuoC&printsec=frontcover&dq=fitzgerald+biography&hl=en&ei=MEJhTezTMZDGtAaM55C2CA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=3&ved=0CD8Q6AEwAg#v=onepage&q&f=false