F. Scott Fitzgerald: An American Dreamer

"'Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone," he told me, "just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had.'" Fitzgerald was born in 1896 to middle class parents and educated in private schools, so many literary critics wondered whether Fitzgerald was relaying autobiographical advice.

The Great Gatsbyis one of Fitzgerald's best known works and the subject of scores of literary criticism. Gatsbyis a tragic story about an American dreamer who strives to achieve the impossible-winning social status and the girl that got away. Much speculation has been whether Jay Gatsby and Fitzgerald were one and the same. Fitzgerald wrote once, "Gatsby started out as one man I knew then changed into myself."

Fitzgerald was twenty-eight when The Great Gatsby was published in 1925. He was already a celebrity with two published novels, This Side of Paradise and The Beautifuland the Damned, and numerous short stories published in prestigious magazines like Scribner's and The Saturday Evening Post. Though wealthy from his writing, he had not attained the literary standing he wanted. His Princeton friend and mentor Edmund Wilson told him, "I believe you might become a very popular trashy novelist without difficulty." Like Jay Gatsby, Fitzgerald was not one of "them."

His life was a cycle of successes and failures often mirrored in his works. At Princeton he became a prominent figure in the Triangle Club and drama society, but he flunked out his first year. He returned the next year, but he had lost his social status. In 1917 he joined the army. The following summer, he met belle Zelda Sayre at a country club dance in Montgomery, Alabama. They fell in love, but Zelda was reluctant to commit to marriage. Fitzgerald knew the only way he could win her was if he could provide her with an extravagant lifestyle. So after his discharge from the army in 1919, he moved to New York City with the hopes of achieving instant success. He worked at an advertising agency for ninety dollars a month. But that was not enough for Scott or Zelda. Six months later he returned to St. Paul to rewrite This Side of Paradise, a novel about career and love aspirations and disappointments of a Princeton student. With its publication, he attained instant celebrity and earned enough money and status to marry Zelda.

The Fitzgeralds moved to New York City where they gained notoriety for their partying lifestyle. Though he lived recklessly, he made known through his work he thought the 1920's was morally bankrupt. He wrote in his journal that society was "driving on toward death through the cooling twilight."

In his second novel, The Beautiful and the Damned (1922), he portrays a handsome artist and beautiful wife who become ruined. Fearing they would be brought to the same end as his characters if they stayed amongst the "Lost Generation," Fitzgerald moved his wife and baby daughter "Scottie" to the Riviera. There they continued their glittering, reckless lifestyle with other expatriate writes including Ernest Hemingway. It is there he began The Great Gatsby.

During the summer of 1924 Fitzgerald wrote Scribner's editor Max Perkins, "I've been unhappy but my work hasn't suffered from it. I am grown at last." In Gatsby Jay states he was ruined by falling in love. Fitzgerald's friend Ernest Hemingway feared Zelda's recklessness and her jealousy of his work, their friendship, would ruin Scott. Soon the Fitzgeralds' marriage would become a cycle of battles, mental breakdowns, and reconciliations. Fitzgerald could not write when his wife was present, and when she was out of his sight, he worried what she would do. A few weeks after his letter to Perkins, Zelda attempted suicide.

The years that followed were tumultuous. The Great Gatsby was Fitzgerald's first commercial failure. Zelda was in and out of sanitariums. Scott's alcoholism worsened. He managed to finish Tender is the Night, a story about a psychiatrist who marries one of his wealthy patients. While she slowly recovers, he becomes spiritually dead. This final, completed novel was also a commercial failure and was criticized for being technically flawed. Years later Hemingway wrote their mutual editor Max Perkins, "Scott died inside himself at around the age of thirty to thirty-five, and his creative powers died somewhat later."

By 1937 Fitzgerald had mounting debt. Zelda was in a sanitarium and his daughter, "Scottie," needed tuition. He moved to Hollywood to become a scriptwriter. He worked briefly on Gone With the Wind and a screenplay for Shirley Temple, but he received only one screenwriting credit for Three Comrades. His letters to his daughter are filled with anxiety and advice. He lectured her about discipline, duty, and sobriety and told her how to be a better writer. Once he confessed, "When I was your age I lived with a great dream, then the dream divided one day when I decided to marry your mother . . . even though I knew she was spoiled and meant no good to me. I was sorry immediately I had married her."

He began The Last Tycoonin 1939. In his journal, he wrote that it was his "final attempt to create a dream of the promises of American life and of the type of man who could realize them." But Fitzgerald never completed it. He died of a heart attack in 1940 at the age of 44 in his girlfriend Sheilah Graham's apartment. Max Perkins considered having another writer complete Tycoon. He asked John O'Hara who declined because, "Fitzgerald was a better just plain writer than all of us put together."

Fitzgerald died broke and thinking he was a failure. Most of the second printing copies of The Great Gatsbywere still in the Scribner's warehouse. In 1941 it was republished, and now it sells more copies in one month than were ever sold in Fitzgerald's lifetime.

References

The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald (New York: Scribner 1925)

Scott Fitzgerald, Andrew Turnbull (New York: Random House 1962)

Fitzgerald and Hemingway: A Dangerous Friendship, Matthew J. Bruccoli (New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, Inc. 1994)