F Scott Fitzgerald

The ‘poet laureate of the Jazz Age’ F Scott Fitzgerald published over 160 short stories as well as four novels, including his two key modernist books The Great Gatsby (1925) and Tender is the Night (1934). Now associated with the glamour and progressive nature of the 1920s, his life was troubled and critical acclaim was slow to come. ...

Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was born in Minnesota in 1896 to a Catholic family with Irish roots. His father’s alcoholism and financial insecurity were to have a profound effect on Fitzgerald – as an 18-year-old he was in love with Chicago socialite Ginevra King and although she returned his feelings her father did not approve of her having a relationship with someone so socially inferior and they were forced apart. A heartbroken Fitzgerald dropped out of university in 1917 and enlisted in the army, hurrying to write The Romantic Egoist so that something of his literary ambition might survive his almost-certain death during the First World War.

Following the armistice he proposed to a new love, Zelda Sayre, but his lack of money meant that she too rejected him. This snub forced him to revise The Romantic Egoist, and as This Side of Paradise it was finally accepted for publication in 1920. An instant success, it established his career and Zelda agreed to marry him. By now the love they had felt for each other had diminished – tellingly perhaps, it is Ginevra who is credited as the model for Isabelle Borgé in This Side of Paradise and Daisy Buchanan in The Great Gatsby – but their celebrity status and apparently carefree lifestyle in New York City epitomized the hedonism of the era.

Fitzgerald and Zelda’s relationship soon began to suffer, compounded by his alcoholism and her insanity, and the spectre of financial trouble re-emerged in the 1930s when the Great Depression made his work feel dated. By the middle of the decade Zelda was hospitalized and Fitzgerald’s health was poor. He died suddenly in 1940 believing himself to have been a failure but, with the distance of time, his novels achieved widespread literary acclaim.