Biographie de F. Scott Fitzgerald

F. Scott Fitzgerald was born Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald on September 24, 1896, in St. Paul, Minnesota. His father had opened a furniture business in St Paul, and, when it failed, he took a job as a salesman that took his family to Buffalo in upstate NY. When, Scott Fitzgerald was 12, the family moved back to St. Paul.

He attended the St Paul Academy, and when he was 13, he saw his first piece of writing appear in print : a detective story published in the school newspaper.

After graduating from the Newman School in 1913, Fitzgerald decided to stay in NJ to continue his artistic development at Princeton University. In, 1917, he dropped out of school to join the U.S. Army.

Fitzgerald was commissioned a second lieutenant in the infantry & assigned to Camp Sheridan outside of Montgomery, Alabama. It was there that he met & fell in love with a beautiful 18-year-old girl named Zelda Sayre, the daughter of an Alabama Supreme Court judge.

His first novel, This Side of Paradise, a largely autobiographical story about love and greed, was centered on Armory Blaine, an ambitious Midwesterner who falls in love with, but is ultimately rejected by, 2 girls from high-class families. This novel was published in 1920 &, almost overnight, turn Fitzgerald, at the age of 24, into one of the county’s most promising young writers. One week after the novel’s publication, he married Zelda Sayre in NY.

F supported himself financially by writing great numbers of short stories for popular publicat° such as The Saturday Evening Post and Esquire. The most notable story is “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”.

In 1922, F published his second novel, The Beautiful and Damned, the story of the troubled marriage of Anthony & Gloria Patch.

In 1924, F moved to France, & it was there, in Valescure, that F wrote what would be credited as his greatest novel, The Great Gatsby. Published in 1925, The Great Gatsby is narrated by Nick Carraway, a Midwesterner who moves into the town of West Egg on Long Island, next door to a mansion owned by the wealthy and mysterious Jay Gatsby.

Always a heavy drinker, he progressed steadily into alcoholism & suffered long periods of writer block.

In 1934, F finally published his fourth novel, Tender is the Night, about an American psychiatrist in Paris.

After another 2 years lost to alcohol & depress°, in 1937 F attempted to revive his career as a screenwriter & freelance storywriter in Hollywood. He died of a heart attack on December 21, 1940, at the age of 44, in Hollywood, California.

F has gained a reputat° as one of the pre-eminent authors in the history of American literature due almost entirely to the enormous posthumous success of The Great Gastby.  

...