Born September 24, 1896: F. Scott Fitzgerald in St. Paul, Minnesota. He was named Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald after the author of The Star-Spangled Banner, a distant relative of his mother’s.
It was an age of miracles, it was an age of art, it was an age of excess, and it was an age of satire.
In his work and his life, F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) captured the spirit of the Roaring Twenties. Against a backdrop of bright lights, jazz and liquor (lots of liquor), such novels as This Side of Paradise (1920) and The Great Gatsby (1925) follow Fitzgerald’s bright-eyed protagonists as they chase the American Dream—usually to disillusionment. In the early twenties, Fitzgerald’s life seemed charmed: his novels brought financial success, he married his Southern Belle sweetheart, Zelda Sayre, and the couple soon had a daughter. But by the end of the decade, everything crashed. Fitzgerald drank more and more heavily, his income could not pay for the family’s decadent lifestyle, and in 1930, Zelda checked into a sanatorium during the first of many breakdowns. Fitzgerald died of a heart attack at the age of 44 in Hollywood, where he was struggling as a screenwriter, in 1940.
Here is Fitzgerald’s New York Times obituary.
http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/bday/0924.html
If you think you know what’s great about Gatsby, take this quiz about Fitzgerald’s fiction. Answers below–NO PEEKING
1. What novel, originally titled The Romantic Egoist, made Fitzgerald a celebrity practically overnight?
2. What phrase, frequently used to describe the nineteen-twenties, is Fitzgerald credited with coining?
3. What 1922 novel fictionalized the romance between F. Scott and Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald?
Excerpted from Don’t Know Much About Literature
Answers
1. This Side of Paradise, his first book.
2. “The Jazz Age.” Fitzgerald published a story collection called Tales of the Jazz Age in 1922.
3. The Beautiful and Damned.
