In 1924, the couple spent time in France, where Fitzgerald wrote his best-known novel, The Great Gatsby (1925). Then in 1922, Fitzgerald had two more books published: The BeautifulĪnd Damned, a novel, and Tales of the Jazz Age, his second collection of short stories, which includes "A Diamond as Big as the Ritz."įitzgerald's relationship with his wife Zelda was a tempestuous one, even during their courtship, and the combination of their extravagant lifestyle, Fitzgerald's heavy drinking, and Zelda's gradually deteriorating mental health took a toll on their marriage. In October 1921, Zelda Fitzgerald gave birth to the couple's first and only child, a girl named Frances Scott Key Fitzgerald, whom the couple called Scottie. He was especially known for his stories featuring flappers, young women exploring the new social and fashion freedoms and rebelling against the restrictive mores of the past. These two books established Fitzgerald's reputation as the official chronicler of the Jazz Age, the name used for the 1920s. That same year, Fitzgerald's first collection of short stories was published, entitled Flappers and Philosophers. Also during this time, he wrote the first draft of his first novel, This Side of Paradise.įitzgerald was discharged from the army in 1919 in March 1920, This Side of Paradise was published. One of the most significant results of Fitzgerald's military service was that, while stationed in Alabama, he fell in love with Zelda Sayre, the daughter of a judge on the Alabama Supreme Court. In 1917, he entered the army but was disappointed that in his fifteen months' service, he was never sent overseas. He spent so much of his time writing stories and plays for college publications, however, that his academics suffered, and in 1916, he withdrew from Princeton due to low grades. In 1913, Fitzgerald entered Princeton, where he made important friendships that would last for years to come. He continued his writing at the Newman School.
After the academy, he went on to the Newman School in Hackensack, New Jersey, a Catholic prep school. Paul Academy, he wrote stories for the school magazine and performed in school plays. Though Fitzgerald's family was by no means poor, they were not nearly as wealthy as most of the families that sent their sons to the academy, and it was here that Fitzgerald's lifelong fascination with the lives of the extremely wealthy began. Paul, Fitzgerald was twelve years old, and his parents enrolled him at St. In 1898, the family moved to upstate New York, where Edward worked as a salesman for Procter and Gamble.
Paul, Minnesota, on September 24, 1896, to Edward and Mary ("Mollie") Fitzgerald. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHYįrancis Scott Key Fitzgerald was born in St. The cataclysmic ending, in which the family and their home are destroyed, shows the result of their single-minded pursuit. The carelessness and immorality of the vastly wealthy and the American fascination with wealth are personified by Braddock Washington and his narcississtic family, who seem to believe that all others have been put on Earth for their amusement. In this story, Fitzgerald begins to explore many of the themes he used later when writing his best-known work, The Great Gatsby. Gradually, Unger learns the sinister origins of his host's wealth and the frightening lengths to which he will go to preserve it. It tells of young John Unger, who is invited to visit a classmate at his impossibly lavish home in Montana. The story was inspired by Fitzgerald's 1915 visit to the Montana home of a Princeton classmate, Charles Donahoe, and was one of Fitzgerald's few forays into the realm of fantasy. In September 1922, the story appeared in his second collection, Tales of the Jazz Age. Fitzgerald had attempted to sell it to the Saturday Evening Post, which had published many of his other stories, but its harsh anticapitalistic message was rejected by the conservative magazine. Scott Fitzgerald's story "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz" first appeared in the June 1922 issue of The Smart Set, a popular magazine of the 1920s.
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