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.'
Fitzgerald's debts started to grow, and Zelda discovered that she was pregnant - the baby was born in 1921. Fitzgerald met in Paris Joyce who said: "That young man must be mad - I'm afraid he'll do himself some injury." The Beautiful and Damned, Fitzgerald's second novel, depicted Anthony Patch, an intelligent, sensitive but weak man. He spends his grandfather's money in drinking. In the end of the novel he has lost with his wife, Gloria, illusions of beauty and truth. The work was less well received and in 1924 Fitzgerald moved to Europe. There he associated with such writers as Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway. The Great Gatsby received excellent reviews but the book did not make the money Fitzgerald expected. He was drunk long periods. Dramatized version of the book opened at the Ambassador Theatre in New York on February 2, 1926. The play's success made possible the sale of Gatsby to the movies. The first film adaptation was made in the same year, directed by Herbert Brenon.
The setting of The Great Gatsby is New York City and Long Island during the 1920s. Nick Carraway, the narrator, works as a bond broker in Manhattan. He becomes involved in the life of his neighbor at Long Island , Jay Gatsby, shady and mysterious financier, who is entertaining hundreds of guests at lavish parties. Gatsby reveals to Nick, that he and Nick's cousin Daisy Fay Buchanan, had a brief affair before the war. However, Daisy married Tom Buchanan, a rich but boring man of social position. Gatsby lost Daisy because he had no money, but he is still in love with her. He persuades Nick to bring him and Daisy together again. "You can't repeat the past," Nick says to him. Gatsby tries to convince Daisy to leave Tom, who, in turn, reveals that Gatsby has made his money from bootlegging. "They're a rotten bunch," Nick shouts to Gatsby. "You're worth the whole damn bunch put together." Daisy, driving Gatsby's car, hits and kills Tom's mistress, Myrtle Wilson, unaware of her identity. Gatsby remains silent to protect Daisy. Tom tells Myrtle's husband it was Gatsby who killed his wife. Wilson murders Gatsby and then commits suicide. Nick is left to arrange Gatsby's funeral, attended only Gatsby's father and one former guest.
During the next five years the Fitzgeralds travelled between Europe and America several times. Louis Bromfield wrote about their apartment in Paris: "... it represented to some degree the old aspirations and a yearning for stability, but somehow it got only half-way and was neither one thing or the other." Years later Fitzgerald explained to his daughter that "I decided to marry your mother after all, even though I knew she was spoiled and meant no good to me.'' He once said that she was well known in Montgomery, Alabama for being a drunk at 17. To support his expensive life style with Zelda, he frequently interrupted his work on his novels to write short stories and brought high fees from the popular magazines. Fitzgerald's stormy relationship with Zelda is told in his novel THE CRACK UP (1945). For a few months in 1927, and then again in 1931 and 1932, Fitzgerald worked in Hollywood as a screenwriter. Between TENDER IS THE NIGHT (1934), and 'The Crack-Up' (1936) Fitzgerald wrote little. In the middle thirties he had lost his illusions and believed he had not produced first-rate books.
"I have cut myself off from the respect of my fellow men, but I am aware of a compensatory cirrhosis of the emotions. And because my sensitivity, my pity, no longer has direction, but fixes itself on whatever is at hand, I have become an exceptionally good fellow - much more so than when I was a good doctor." (Dr. Janney in 'Family in the Wind', 1933)Fitzgerald's alcoholism and Zelda's mental breakdown attracted wide publicity in the 1930s. Fitzgerald learned that each breakdown made her final recovery less likely. His dependence on alcohol increased, In a letter to a friend he wrote: "A short story can be written on a bottle, but for a novel you need mental speed that enables you to keep the whole pattern in your head and ruthlessly sacrifice as Ernest did in "Farewell to Arms." If a mind is slowed up ever so little it lives in the individual part of a book rather than in a book as a whole; memory is dulled." He returned to Hollywood in 1937, where he met Sheilah Graham, a gossip columnist, with whom he lived for the rest of his life. Fitzgerald worked on various screenplays, but completed only one, THREE COMRADES (1938), before he was fired because of his drinking. The screenplay was based on Erich Maria Remarque's novel. When the young writer Budd Schulberg heard that he would cooperate with Fitzgerald in a film project, he said: "I thought he was dead." In a letter to his daughter from Hollywood in 1938 Fitzgerald revealed the "what I am doing here is the last tired effort of a man who once did something finer and better". In 1939 Fitzgerald began a novel about Hollywood, THE LAST TYCOON, loosely based on the life of Irving Thalberg. Fitzgerald died on December 21, 1940, in Hollywood, in Graham's apartment, before the book was finished. Zelda Sayre died in a hospital fire in 1948. Their tragedy was basis Fitzgerald's novel Tender is the Night, which he revised repeatedly. His tortuous marriage was commented upon by Hemingway in A Moveable Feast (1964). In Tender is the Night a brilliant psychiatrist, Dick Diver, falls in love with a rich, beautiful mental patient, Nicole Warren. He marries her, and loses his idealism and potential for a great career, but Nicole, having battened on Dick's strength and love for ten years, emerges victorious. Fitzgerald's novel Trimalchion, which appeared in 1999, was partly based on Petronius' (died AD 66) Satyricon. The vulgar and rich Trimalchio, whose banquet Petronius satirized in his work, was the literary prototype of Jay Gatsby. The Great Gatsby was originally to be entitled Trimalchio's Banquet.
Several of Fitzgerald's stories have been filmed. The The Great Gatsby was adapted into screen first time in 1926, but the most famous version, starring Robert Redford and Mia Farrow, was made in 1974. Henry King's Tender is the Night (1962) is considered a thoughtful and absorbing romantic drama. The Last Tycoon (1976), adopted by Harold Pinter and directed by Elia Kazan, was characterized in the New Yorker so enervated "it's like a vampire movie after the vampires have left." Richard Brooks's The Last Time I Saw Paris (1954), starring Elizabeth Taylor and Van Johnson, was based on the short story 'Babylon Revised'.
