Scott F Fitzgerald

 

Scott F Fitzgerald, American short story writer and novelist, is best known for his depiction of the ‘Jazz Age’ of the 1920s. His own reckless, excessive lifestyle came to symbolise the 'Roaring Twenties', characterised first by glitter and glamour, then by the decadence and destruction of self-indulgence,which he depicted in his novels and short stories. He, along with Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner, is now known in critical circles as one of the “Big Three” American authors of the first half of the twentieth century. The American classic The Great Gatsby is the best known and most popular of Fitzgerald's works, Written in 1925, it is a criticism of the moral emptiness and corruption of wealthy American society during the Jazz Age.

 
With the outbreak of the First World War Fitzgerald signed up for officers training, and entered the United States army as a second lieutenant. In the army he continued to pursue his literary aspirations. Convinced he would not live through the war if he saw com bat, he hurriedly wrote his first novel, The Romantic Egotist. The rejection letter from Charles Scribner's Sons praised the novel's originality and encouraged him to revise his work.

When ‘This Side of Paradise’ was published in 1920, the 24-year-old Fitzgerald became famous overnight and got married. Sudden prosperity gave them the opportunity to play roles in wealthy society. In 1920 This Side of Paradise captured the post-war disillusionment of Fitzgerald's generation and revealed the new morality of the young.

The Beautiful and Damned (1921) chronicled the decline of a beautiful and privileged couple into degeneration and damnation, foreshadowing the Fitzgeralds own downward drift. Fearing a similar end, they escaped the chaos by moving to the French Riviera in 1924. Shortly after their arrival, Fitzgerald finished his most famous novel, The Great Gatsby (1925).

The last completed novel ‘Tender is the Night’ (1934), Fitzgerald's most ambitious novel, examines the deterioration of a brilliant American psychiatrist who marries one of his wealthy patients. Through fictional alter egos, the book portrays Zelda's breakdown and Fitzgerald's decline.

 
In 1937 Fitzgerald moved to Hollywood to work as a screenwriter for Metro-Goldwyn Mayer. Sheila Graham, a famous gossip columnist, became his mistress. His Hollywood experience inspired The Last Tycoon (1941), with its hero, Monroe Stahr. based on the producer Irving Thalberg. The novel was Fitzgerald's last attempt to depict his vision of the American Dream and a character who could realise it. He died in 1940, aged 44, of a heart attack, with his novel only half finished. His brief life is a tragic, eloquent symbol of the allure and calamity of self-indulgence. Zelda Fitzgerald died in 1948 in Ashville, North Carolina, in a fire at Highland Hospital.