Francis_S cott_Fitzgerald

In order to keep earning money for an extravagant life, he wrote short stories for magazines and a second novel entitled The Beautiful and Damned(1922). They all sold extremely well. People admired him for his spendthrift life and for his great literary production because this was the ideal the young Americans pursued in the 1920s. With perpetual parties, Scott found himself continually in debt and pressed to write for money. In desperation he and Zelda moved to France in 1924 where they joined the young American artists and writers known as the lost generation. In France, in spring, 1925, he met Hemingway. Fitzgerald was far the better known, but he admired Hemingway’s
talent and persuaded his publishers to publish Hemingway’s next book. But the latter resented owing favors to anyone and despised Fitzgerald’s dissipation of his gifts. In 1925, he wrote his best novel The Great Gatsby which deals symbolically with the frustration and despair resulting from the failure of the American dream. It is a story of an idealist who tries to recapture his lost love but in vain and is finally destroyed by the influence of the wealthy people around him. The Fitzgerald stayed in Europe for two and a half years. In 1930 Zelda suffered several nervous breakdowns and was later diagnosed as schizophrenia. This was repeated
and she was placed in a sanitarium in 1932. During this Period Fitzgerald wrote some fine short stories and the novel Tender Is the Night(1934). His fiction grew significantly deeper and more tragic as his money troubles increased, as his wife’s madness became more destructive, and as he felt himself heading toward the crack-up. However, they were coldly received then because, with the Jazz Age over, readers seemed to regard his fiction as dated and irrelevant. From 1935 to 1937 he was beset by debts and illness, and discouraged by the failure of his ambitious novel, he attempted suicide twice.
As soon as he left the army in 1919, he went to New York to work in advertising, but the job paid him little. When Zelda learned this, she broke their engagement. Fitzgerald sold his first story ”Babes in the Wood” to The Smart Set magazine and returned home in St. Paul to wrote several drafts of This Side of Paradise which he had started writing when he studied at Princeton. He became a writer with only one motivation: to earn enough money to marry Zelda. In 1920 his first novel This Side of Paradise reached the reading public with its thoroughly modern sensibility. It was an immediate success.
He was so depressed that his health broke down, physically and spiritually. He drank too much and became incurably alcoholic. Not till at the age of 39 he realized that he had wasted his life. In 1937 he recovered enough to work as a scriptwriter for films in Hollywood. Sheilah Graham, a woman journalist, showed great care for him and also acquainted him with the life of film makers and film stars. So he began writing The Last Tycoon, a novel about Hollywood and the film industry. He finished the sixth chapter when he died of a heart attack on December21, 1940. Zelda was killed in a fire at the sanitarium in 1948.
Francis Scott Fitzgerald and The Great Gatsby
1. Life and Literary Career Francis Scott Fitzgerald was born in St.Paul, Minnesota on September 24, 1896, the only son of an unsuccessful upper class father and an energetic mother of an Irish background.His family was socially prominent and genteelly poor.
After his failure in the love affairs with Ginevra, a rich girl from Chicago known as “the belle of the ball,” Scott fell ill, failed his examinations, and left Princeton without graduating in 1917. He decided to fight as a soldier in the First World War, but he was sent for training to Montgomery, Alabama in the South in 1918. Although he failed to materialize his strong desire, he met Zelda Sayre, the beautiful, light-hearted daughter of a State Supreme Court judge. He fell violently in love again, but Zelda would marry him on the condition that he must become rich.
His grandfather on his mother’s side had a small fortune in the business. This gave Scott some advantages in a money-oriented society, and eventually gave him his expensive education first in a fashionable Catholic preparatory school in New Jersey and then at Princeton University in 1913. At Princeton University he was surrounded by people richer, more sophisticated and superficially cleverer than he was. He felt inferior to his classmates from the East Coast. But he cut a 来自百度文库igure on the football field and made a place for himself in the university literary groups.
It reflects the new norms of the 1920s which was also known as the “roaring 20s”, “Jazz Age,” and “Dollar Decade.” He became rich and famous and married Zelda a week later. His life with Zelda furnished his greatest happiness as well as his greatest misery and pain. The young couple came to epitomize the kind of Jazz Age style that his fiction portrays---young, glamorous people who try to live live the American dream of money, success, and happiness, only to have their lives touched by sadness and even tragedy. He recognized the sad and frightened side of his merry, dancing, gambling, and liberated life.