The Great Gatsby

and the life of

F. Scott Fitzgerald

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Fitzgerald’s Early LifeBorn in St. Paul, Minnesota in September

1896.Scott was a distant relative of Francis

Scott Key, the composer of our national anthem.

His father, Edward Fitzgerald was a failure in business & the family lived on the mother’s money; her name was McQuillen & she had inherited money from her father.

Fitzgerald’s Early Life

The Fitzgeralds were never poor, but Scott was well aware of the ups & downs of his father’s business career and of the family’s dependency on the McQuillen money.

He grew up in the shadow of colossal mansions & great wealth

From an early age, Fitzgerald was aware of the gap between himself and the very wealthy.

Surrounded by Wealth

Because of the his mother’s family money, he was able to attend private schools where he was painfully reminded that he was not quite as well off as his classmates

He attended Princeton where he once again was in the company of young men who were much better situated in life

Princeton

At Princeton, Fitzgerald wrote plays & articles for school magazines

He neglected his studies & failed to make the football team

He told one of his professors that he was torn between writing work that would last & writing work that would be popular

“The Golden Girl”

He met Ginevra King, his college sweetheart, who jilted him

Ginevra’s father is said to have told Scott, “Rich girls do not marry poor boys.”

Scott is said to have kept over 100 letters from Ginevra

Life after Princeton

Fitzgerald withdrew from Princeton in his senior year and joined the Army in 1917

He was stationed at Camp Sheridan near Montgomery, Alabama

There he fell in love with a celebrated belle, 18 year-old Zelda Sayre, the daughter of an Alabama Supreme Court judge.

The Influence of Zelda Sayre

Scott wanted to marry Zelda immediately, but she had reservations

She had many boy friends and Scott’s future was uncertain

Zelda Sayre

Scott had submitted a novel for publication and it had twice been rejected

The war ended just before he was to be sent overseas

Unwilling to wait for Scott to succeed in the advertising business & unwilling to live on his small salary, Zelda broke their engagement

Success at LastFitzgerald was

devastated; he quit his job & went on a drinking binge

He rewrote his novel and submitted it once again and it was accepted

The publication of This Side of Paradise on March 26, 1920 made the 24-year old Fitzgerald rich & famous almost overnight

A week after the publication of This Side of Paradise, Fitzgerald married

Zelda Sayre in New York.

Zelda & Scott in the Jazz Age

The Fitzgeralds embarked on an extravagant life as young celebrities

They drank too much & spent too muchScott endeavored to earn a solid literary

reputation but was attracted to the glitter of celebrity life

He was aware of the incompatibility of constant partying & serious writing, but could not give up the life

Fitzgerald’s Ambivalence

Ambivalence: having simultaneous conflicting feelings

Scott was fascinated by the rich and lived a lavish lifestyle with Zelda

In his best work, however, the ideal of wealth & the American pursuit of wealth, is ruthlessly scrutinized

Often, what appears to be a gorgeous dream turns out to be a nightmare

Fitzgerald’s Ambivalence

Fitzgerald could glamorize wealth & yet stand away from the people who had it and look at their values with utter detachment, and sometimes with horror

His heroes were often people who sold out, for one reason or another, on their talent, their souls—as he himself in his middle years felt that he had sold out

Fitzgerald the ExpatriateThe Fitzgeralds spent much of their time

abroad during the 20s in London, Rome & Paris, particularly in the French Riviera.

Scott wrote The Great Gatsby in a villa at San Raphael; it was published in 1925

The Fitzgeralds became part of the expatriate crowd of the Paris bars & Riviera beaches

Fitzgerald and Hemingway

Scott became a friend and rival of Ernest Hemingway

Signs of TroubleFor a time after the publication of Gatsby, Scott,

Zelda & their daughter “Scottie” (born in 1921) seemed to live an idyllic existence

The failure of a play coupled with Scott’s increased drinking resulted in frequent domestic disputes; Zelda’s affair with a French naval aviator damaged their marriage

Scott was an alcoholic & his reputation as a nasty drunk inspired the myth that he was an irresponsible writer

He wrote sober, however, and he was a painstaking reviser, whose fiction went through layers of drafts.

The Beginning of the End

The Great Gatsby received critical praise, but sales of the novel were disappointing.

The Fitzgeralds returned to America in 1927.Zelda was showing signs of a nervous disorder;

in 1930 she suffered her first breakdown; she was in & out of mental hospitals

Fitzgerald continued writing—mostly short pieces for magazines—to pay the bills for Zelda’s psychiatric treatment

The Downfall of Fitzgerald

The Fitzgeralds moved to Switzerland (for Zelda’s treatment) and back to the U.S. in 1931

Zelda published an autobiographical novel which created bitterness between her & Scott

By 1937 Scott was sick, alcoholic, in debt, no longer earning royalties & unable to write commercial stories

Hollywood & The End

In 1937 Scott went to Hollywood alone to try scriptwriting for movies

In California, he had an affair with movie columnist Sheilah Graham

He lost his screenwriting job and began to drink heavily again and had violent mood swings.

The End of Paradise

F. Scott Fitzgerald died of a massive heart attack in Sheila Graham’s apartment on December 21, 1940; he was 44 years old

Zelda Fitzgerald perished in a fire in Highland Hospital in North Carolina in 1948

Fitzgerald’s Legacy

When Fitzgerald died in 1940, the obituaries were condescending and he seemed destined for literary obscurity

His work was rediscovered in the mid 1940s and by 1960, he had achieved a secure place among America’s enduring writers

The Great Gatsby defines the classic American novel

The Great Gatsby

To understand Gatsby (& Fitzgerald) one must look at the novel through the lens of alcohol; alcohol is the drug of possibility

The theme of “time” is central to the novel; for Gatsby, time is non-existent; he believes he can repeat the past

The juxtaposition of East & West is an important part of the novel as well

The American Dream

The American Dream: the idea that in America one might hope to satisfy every material desire & thereby achieve happiness.

Fitzgerald believed the American Dream to be deceptive: proposing the satisfaction of all desire as an attainable goal, and equating desire with material acquisitions only leads to dissatisfaction

The Novel

The Great Gatsby tells the story of a self-made young man whose dream of success, personified in a rich and beautiful young woman named Daisy, turns out to be a fantasy in every sense: Daisy belongs to a corrupt society, Gatsby corrupts himself in the quest for her, and above all, the rich have no intention of sharing their privileges.

The Novel

The novel shows wealth as a numbing, dehumanizing force that can destroy the heart.

It explores the ambiguities of the American Dream.

It shows Fitzgerald’s fascination with & growing distrust of the wealthy society he had embraced.

Fitzgerald’s Works

1920 This Side of Paradise1925 The Great Gatsby1934 Tender is the Night1941 The Last Tycoon

Fitzgerald wrote over 160 short stories

Bibliography

The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Second Edition. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1985.

“Scott Fitzgerald”. Filmstrip Script. Peoria: Thomas S. Klise Co., 1970.