Fitzgerald, Francis Scott - Life

Francis Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940)

Born at the end of the 19th century, Fitzgerald belonged to the generation which lived in the so-called "Golden Age", the roaring Twenties. He is at best in the description of the period, when wealth and success were the main goals of the age, often leading to corruption, hedonism, alienation and solitude. Francis Scott Fitzgerald was born in 1896, in Saint Paul, Minnesota, in the Mid west of the United States.

Though a mediocre student in childhood and boyhood, he managed to enroll at Princeton University, but he never graduated and enlisted in the Army in 1917, when World War I was near the end.
While he was in Montgomery, Alabama, he met and fell in love with a seventeen - year - old beauty, Zelda Sayre. She agreed to marry him, but, led by her overpowering wish for wealth and leisure, she delayed the wedding until he could become a successful man. In 1920 Fitzgerald published his first novel. The Side of Paradise, which was a best-seller and launched him as a writer. This allowed him to earn enough money and fame to convince Zelda to marry him. The couple threw themselves into a hectic social life requiring enormous sums of money, which Fitzgerald desperately tried to earn to please his wife. But in the period of the Great Depression the old lifestyle was no longer possible. Zelda suffered a series of nervous breakdowns; the marriage degenerated into a violent and embittered relationship, with Zelda finally being hospitalized as a schizophrenic in 1934. Fitzgerald turned to writing for Hollywood, producing screenplays for films, while succumbing to alcoholism, which hampered his writing. He died suddenly of a heart attack in 1940, at the age of forty-four.
Fitzgerald's fame rests on some novels and collections of short stories such as:
-This Side of Paradise;
-The Great Gatsby;
-Tender Is the Night;
-Tales of the Jazz Age;
-All the Sad Young men;
-The Pat Hobby stories (1962).