F. Scott Fitzgerald
Writer F. Scott Fitzgerald, best known for his classic American novel The Great Gatsby, was born on September 24, 1896, in St. Paul, Minnesota. Named for his distant cousin Francis Scott Key, author of the “The Star-Spangled Banner,” Fitzgerald was descended, on his father’s side, from a long line of Marylanders. His mother, Mary McQuillan, was the daughter of an Irish immigrant who made his fortune as a wholesale grocer in St. Paul.
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby. New York, C. Scribner’s sons, 1925.
Fitzgerald achieved fame almost overnight with the 1920 publication of his first novel, This Side of Paradise. The novel, which draws heavily upon his years at Princeton, tells the story of a young man’s quest for fulfillment in love and career. The success of this novel enabled Fitzgerald to marry Zelda Sayre, whom he had met while stationed at Camp Sheridan, near Montgomery, Alabama. Over the course of the next decade and a half, while struggling to cope with the demons of his alcoholism and her emerging mental illness, the Fitzgeralds enjoyed a life of literary celebrity among the American artists and writers who had expatriated to Paris after the First World War. The American artistic community in Europe included such notable figures as Ernest Hemingway, Archibald MacLeish, John Dos Passos, and Gertrude Stein.
In 1924, Fitzgerald wrote The Great Gatsby, considered his greatest work. Although it initially met with little commercial success, the novel about the American aspiration for material success has become one of the most popular, widely read, and critically acclaimed works of fiction in the nation’s literature.
Fitzgerald continued to publish novels and stories during the 1920s and 1930s. By 1936, however, both his marriage and his health were deteriorating. He spent the years 1936-1937 in the vicinity of Asheville, North Carolina, where his wife was receiving psychiatric treatment for recurrent schizophrenic episodes. For the last years of his life, Fitzgerald lived in Hollywood, earning his living as a screenwriter. Fitzgerald died on December 21, 1940 at the age of forty-five, leaving his final novel, The Last Tycoon, unfinished.
Learn More
- Watch Maureen Corrigan discuss her new book So We Read On: How the Great Gatsby Came to Be and Why It Endures, which explores F. Scott Fitzgerald’s masterpiece and investigates its influence on the American people.
- Browse the collection of essays in the Introduction to Prosperity and Thrift section of the Calvin Coolidge Papers. Learn more about the economic background of the era between the two World Wars as well as the nation’s transition to a mass-consumer economy, the growth of merchandising and advertising, the rise of consumer activism, and the role of African Americans in a consumer economy. The 1920s were a decade of profound social change and intense debate, but Gertrude Stein dubbed the Fitzgeralds and their artist friends as the “Lost Generation.”
- Search Today in History on writer, poet, or playwright to read more about the lives and works of such illustrious American authors as Eugene O’Neill, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, and Zora Neale Hurston. Also visit the Today in History feature on legendary jazz pianist and composer Jelly Roll Morton, whose career flourished in the twenties.
- The collections of the Library’s Manuscript Division represent all areas of American studies, including our country’s rich cultural and literary legacy. The letters and drafts of several American poets and writers, including Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Langston Hughes are among those showcased online.
- Search across the digital collections on the keyword Irish to explore materials chronicling the experience of the Irish in America. You may wish to start with Irish American Resources at the Library of Congress and Free to Use and Reuse: Irish Americans.