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F.Scott Fitzgerald: A&E Biography Video Guide

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F. Scott Fitzgerald

(1896-1940)

Who Was F. Scott Fitzgerald?

F. Scott Fitzgerald was a short story writer and novelist considered one of the pre-eminent authors in the history of American literature due almost entirely to the enormous posthumous success of his third book, The Great Gatsby . Perhaps the quintessential American novel, as well as a definitive social history of the Jazz Age, The Great Gatsby has become required reading for virtually every American high school student and has had a transportive effect on generation after generation of readers.

At the age of 24, the success of his first novel, This Side of Paradise , made Fitzgerald famous. One week later, he married the woman he loved and his muse, Zelda Sayre. However by the end of the 1920s Fitzgerald descended into drinking, and Zelda had a mental breakdown. Following the unsuccessful Tender Is the Night , Fitzgerald moved to Hollywood and became a scriptwriter. He died of a heart attack in 1940, at age 44, his final novel only half completed.

Family, Education and Early Life

Fitzgerald's mother, Mary McQuillan, was from an Irish-Catholic family that made a small fortune in Minnesota as wholesale grocers. His father, Edward Fitzgerald, had opened a wicker furniture business in St. Paul, and, when it failed, took a job as a salesman for Procter & Gamble. During the first decade of Fitzgerald's life, his father’s job took the family back and forth between Buffalo and Syracuse in upstate New York. When Fitzgerald was 12, Edward lost his job with Procter & Gamble, and the family moved back to St. Paul in 1908 to live off of his mother's inheritance.

Fitzgerald was a bright, handsome and ambitious boy, the pride and joy of his parents and especially his mother. He attended the St. Paul Academy. When he was 13, he saw his first piece of writing appear in print: a detective story published in the school newspaper. In 1911, when Fitzgerald was 15 years old, his parents sent him to the Newman School, a prestigious Catholic preparatory school in New Jersey. There, he met Father Sigourney Fay, who noticed his incipient talent with the written word and encouraged him to pursue his literary ambitions.

After graduating from the Newman School in 1913, Fitzgerald decided to stay in New Jersey to continue his artistic development at Princeton University. At Princeton, he firmly dedicated himself to honing his craft as a writer, writing scripts for Princeton's famous Triangle Club musicals as well as frequent articles for the Princeton Tiger humor magazine and stories for the Nassau Literary Magazine.

However, Fitzgerald's writing came at the expense of his coursework. He was placed on academic probation, and, in 1917, he dropped out of school to join the U.S. Army. Afraid that he might die in World War I with his literary dreams unfulfilled, in the weeks before reporting to duty, Fitzgerald hastily wrote a novel called The Romantic Egotist . Though the publisher, Charles Scribner's Sons, rejected the novel, the reviewer noted its originality and encouraged Fitzgerald to submit more work in the future.

Fitzgerald was commissioned a second lieutenant in the infantry and assigned to Camp Sheridan outside of Montgomery, Alabama. The war ended in November 1918, before Fitzgerald was ever deployed. Upon his discharge, he moved to New York City hoping to launch a career in advertising lucrative enough to convince his girlfriend, Zelda, to marry him. He quit his job after only a few months, however, and returned to St. Paul to rewrite his novel.

'This Side of Paradise' (1920)

This Side of Paradise is a largely autobiographical story about love and greed. The story was centered on Amory Blaine, an ambitious Midwesterner who falls in love with, but is ultimately rejected by, two girls from high-class families.

The novel was published in 1920 to glowing reviews. Almost overnight, it turned Fitzgerald, at the age of 24, into one of the country's most promising young writers. He eagerly embraced his newly minted celebrity status and embarked on an extravagant lifestyle that earned him a reputation as a playboy and hindered his reputation as a serious literary writer.

'The Beautiful and Damned' (1922)

In 1922, Fitzgerald published his second novel, The Beautiful and Damned , the story of the troubled marriage of Anthony and Gloria Patch. The Beautiful and Damned helped to cement Fitzgerald’s status as one of the great chroniclers and satirists of the culture of wealth, extravagance and ambition that emerged during the affluent 1920s — what became known as the Jazz Age. "It was an age of miracles," Fitzgerald wrote, "it was an age of art, it was an age of excess, and it was an age of satire."

'The Great Gatsby' (1925)

The Great Gatsby is considered Fitzgerald's finest work, with its beautiful lyricism, pitch-perfect portrayal of the Jazz Age, and searching critiques of materialism, love and the American Dream. Seeking a change of scenery to spark his creativity, in 1924 Fitzgerald had moved to Valescure, France, to write. 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. The novel follows Nick and Gatsby's strange friendship and Gatsby's pursuit of a married woman named Daisy, ultimately leading to his exposure as a bootlegger and his death.

Although The Great Gatsby was well-received when it was published, it was not until the 1950s and '60s, long after Fitzgerald's death, that it achieved its stature as the definitive portrait of the "Roaring Twenties," as well as one of the greatest American novels ever written.

'Tender Is the Night' (1934)

In 1934, after years of toil, Fitzgerald finally published his fourth novel, Tender is the Night , about an American psychiatrist in Paris, France, and his troubled marriage to a wealthy patient. The book was inspired by his wife Zelda’s struggle with mental illness. Although Tender is the Night was a commercial failure and was initially poorly received due to its chronologically jumbled structure, it has since gained in reputation and is now considered among the great American novels.

'The Love of the Last Tycoon' (unfinished)

Fitzgerald began work on his last novel, The Love of the Last Tycoon , in 1939. He had completed over half the manuscript when he died in 1940.

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Short Stories

Beginning in 1920 and continuing throughout the rest of his career, Fitzgerald supported himself financially by writing great numbers of short stories for popular publications such as The Saturday Evening Post and Esquire . Some of his most notable stories include "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz," "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," "The Camel's Back" and "The Last of the Belles."

Fitzgerald’s Wife Zelda

F. Scott Fitzgerald married Zelda Sayre on April 3, 1920, in New York City. Zelda was Fitzgerald’s muse, and her likeness is prominently featured in his works including This Side of Paradise , The Beautiful and the Damned , The Great Gatsby and Tender Is the Night . Fitzgerald met 18-year-old Zelda, the daughter of an Alabama Supreme Court judge, during his time in the infantry. One week after the publication of Fitzgerald’s first novel, This Side of Paradise , the couple married. They had one child, a daughter named Frances “Scottie” Fitzgerald, born in 1921.

Beginning in the late 1920s, Zelda suffered from mental health issues, and the couple moved back and forth between Delaware and France. In 1930, Zelda suffered a breakdown. She was diagnosed with schizophrenia and treated at the Sheppard Pratt Hospital in Towson, Maryland. That same year was admitted to a mental health clinic in Switzerland. Two years later she was treated at the Phipps Psychiatric Clinic at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. She spent the remaining years before her death in 1948 in and out of various mental health clinics.

Later Years

After completing his masterpiece, The Great Gatsby , Fitzgerald's life began to unravel. Always a heavy drinker, he progressed steadily into alcoholism and suffered prolonged bouts of writer's block. After two years lost to alcohol and depression, in 1937 Fitzgerald attempted to revive his career as a screenwriter and freelance storywriter in Hollywood, and he achieved modest financial, if not critical, success for his efforts before his death in 1940.

Fitzgerald died of a heart attack on December 21, 1940, at the age of 44, in Hollywood, California. Fitzgerald died believing himself a failure, since none of his works received more than modest commercial or critical success during his lifetime.

QUICK FACTS

• Name: F. Scott Fitzgerald
• Birth Year: 1896
• Birth date: September 24, 1896
• Birth State: Minnesota
• Birth City: St. Paul
• Birth Country: United States
• Gender: Male
• Best Known For: American short-story writer and novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald is known for his turbulent personal life and his famous novel 'The Great Gatsby.'
• World War I
• Fiction and Poetry
• Astrological Sign: Libra
• St. Paul Academy
• Newman School
• Princeton University
• Interesting Facts
• Fitzgerald’s namesake (and second cousin three times removed on his father's side) was Francis Scott Key, who wrote the lyrics to the "Star-Spangled Banner."
• Fitzgerald died believing himself a failure, since none of his works received more than modest commercial or critical success during his lifetime.
• Although 'The Great Gatsby' was well-received when it was published, it was long after Fitzgerald's death that it was regarded as one of the greatest American novels ever written.
• Death Year: 1940
• Death date: December 21, 1940
• Death State: California
• Death City: Hollywood
• Death Country: United States

We strive for accuracy and fairness.If you see something that doesn't look right, contact us !

CITATION INFORMATION

• Article Title: F. Scott Fitzgerald Biography
• Author: Biography.com Editors
• Website Name: The Biography.com website
• Url: https://www.biography.com/authors-writers/f-scott-fitzgerald
• Access Date:
• Publisher: A&E; Television Networks
• Last Updated: July 9, 2020
• Original Published Date: April 3, 2014
• What little I've accomplished has been by the most laborious and uphill work, and I wish now I'd never relaxed or looked back—but said at the end of The Great Gatsby: 'I've found my line—from now on this comes first.'
• Often I think writing is a sheer paring away of oneself leaving always something thinner, barer, more meager.
• In a real dark night of the soul, it is always three o'clock in the morning, day after day.
• 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.
• Having once found the intensity of art, nothing else that can happen in life can ever again seem as important as the creative process.
• My characters are all Scott Fitzgerald.
• I didn't know till 15 that there was anyone in the world except me, and it cost me plenty.
• I never at any one time saw [Gatsby] clear myself—for he started as one man I knew and then changed into myself—the amalgam was never complete in my mind.
• Show me a hero and I'll write you a tragedy.
• There are no second acts in American lives.
• Riding in a taxi one afternoon between very tall buildings under a mauve and rosy sky; I began to bawl because I had everything I wanted and knew I would never be so happy again.
• I left my capacity for hoping on the little roads that led to Zelda's sanitarium.
• Isn't Hollywood a dump—in the human sense of the word. A hideous town ... full of the human spirit at a new low of debasement.
• I was in love with a whirlwind and I must spin a net big enough to catch it.

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F. Scott Fitzgerald - The Great American Dreamer

erinfrithkihs

Apr 19, 2017

21708 views

Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, the famous writer and the prettiest southern Belle, glittering icons of the roaring 20s. They lived their lives with wild abandon and were hailed as king and queen of the jazz age. But the good times didn't last. By 40 Fitzgerald was washed out and alcoholic. His books no longer in print, his name forgotten, and his glamorous wife locked away in an insane asylum. Fitzgerald's rise and fall was dramatic, even shocking. But as he once wrote, give me a hero, and I'll write you a tragedy. It was the story of his life, the story of a great American dreamer. The start of the 20th century was an exciting time in America as the industrial revolution gave way to a more modern era. The country was alive with new forms of transportation and communication, and a new hope for the future. Like many Americans born near the turn of the century, Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald had great hopes and aspirations. He wanted to be a rich and famous writer, admired the world over. This was a big goal for a little Irish Catholic boy who was born on September 24th, 1896 in the small Midwestern town of St. Paul, Minnesota. Named after Francis Scott Key, a distant relation who wrote The Star-Spangled Banner, young Scott was his parents pride and joy. His father, Edward Fitzgerald, doted on his young son, teaching him all the finer points of acting and addressing like a gentleman. But Edward, for all his fancy clothes, was not much of a businessman. In 1908 he was fired from a sales job. He came home a completely broken man, said Scott, and he was a failure. The rest of his days. This experience left a deep impression on young Scott who resolved that he would never be a failure like his father. Fortunately, his mother, Molly Fitzgerald, came from an affluent St. Paul family, so the fitzgeralds were never quite destitute. Mali would borrow money from her relatives to send Scott to all the right, prep schools. But as a poor boy amongst a lot of rich classmates, young Scott always felt like an outsider, until eventually he discovered that he had a special gift that would help him fit in. He found it was easy for him to write poems and stories and plays. Where it was not easy for others, even very bright. Young children, he was aware of this gift early on. And then he used it to win acceptance. All through prep schools got relished the attention he got from his classmates when his stories like this murder mystery appeared in the school paper. He also wrote plays and staged big productions. He took the starring role, and surrounded himself with people whom he wanted to be friends with. So in the simplest and most direct way, he found that he could write the lines and all of these people he knew would follow his script. It was like magic. Young Francis Scott Fitzgerald had found a way to impress people and win social acceptance. From then on there was no question. He would be a writer. In 1913, Fitzgerald was accepted at Princeton, an Ivy League college with a beautiful campus in New Jersey. Before he had even arrived, Scott worked out in elaborate fantasy. He would be a big man on campus admired by all his classmates. Blinded by visions of glory as soon as he got to Princeton, Scott tried out for the football team. But at just under 5 8 and a 138 pounds he was far too small and was cut the very first day of practice. Better Scott decided to stick with what he did best. So he wrote for the university's literary magazines and joined the triangle club. Princeton's most prestigious theatrical group. Just as he had as a boy, Fitzgerald used his writing skills to impress his peers. He wrote lyrics for the group's musical comedies and cast himself as the star. Since Princeton was an all male school, it was expected that men play the female roles. But few looked as good dressed in drag as Scott did in this publicity photo, which caused quite a sensation when it appeared around campus. Fitzgerald was having a wonderful time, writing musicals and partying with friends. But even in college, Scott showed early signs of a drinking problem. His diary includes notes about getting so drunk, he passed out at dinner. He spent more time writing plays than studying and was eventually placed on academic probation. But rather than buckle down and study, Scott went to a dance with sophomore year where he spotted a beautiful 16 year old debutante. She never king was the top girl. She was the one all the boys wanted to dance to the stag line when she came by, which sway and anticipation, and one boy braver than the rest would go out and cut in. Fitzgerald was brave. And he said his cap for her. Scott and Jennifer dated for a time in exchange love letters. But Scott was supposedly told by Geneva's father that poor boys don't marry rich girls, and she broke off the relationship. She went on to someone more suitable to her social standing, but the story, which I think is probably true, is that till the day he died, he kept all the letters that she wrote to him wrapped up in a little package with a ribbon tied around it. To Fitzgerald, ginevra would always represent the kind of golden girl who appeared later in his novels. She was the one all the boys wanted, but could never fully possess. By junior year, Scott was failing so many classes he decided to withdraw from Princeton, as he wrote, there were to be no badges of pride, no medals, after all. The young man who wanted so much to succeed had flunked out of school and failed at love. He was feeling pretty discouraged in 1917 when suddenly the United States entered World War I. And Fitzgerald, happily headed off to boot camp and another chance at glory. In June 1918, as the war to end all wars raged in Europe, second lieutenant F. Scott Fitzgerald reported to camp Sheridan and Montgomery, Alabama. Just as in college, he had dreamed of being a big man, Scott now imagined himself a war hero. As he waited to be sent overseas, got attended a dance at a local country club, where he saw a young girl who, as he said, made everything inside him melt. He was looking at 17 year old Zelda sayer, the daughter of an Alabama Supreme Court judge, who often had that effect on man. I don't think pictures of Zelda do her justice. I think she had an aura about her. I mean, there was something about the way she dressed, something right about the way she presented herself. And the people who knew her all say that she was just a beautiful woman. That's something made Zelda one of the most sought after bells in the south. As one rival recalled, when Zelda sayer came to dances, the Birmingham girls just went on home. But though Zelda came from a prominent family, she was not your typical southern Belle. For as everyone in Montgomery knew Zelda was wild. When she was ten she telephoned the fire department to say a child was stranded on the sayer's roof. Then she climbed up there and waited to be saved. At 17, she was already smoking, drinking, and driving men to distraction. And Zelda was a young girl. She loved diving off high platforms into the water, she used to delight and outraging the expectations of their elders, chaperones, and dances. She'd go by him a flipper back skirts at him and she was that kind of girl. She knew how to have fun and she knew how she was that kind of girl. She knew how to have fun and she knew how to flout convention. Scott had found his golden girl, the one all the other men wanted. I fell in love, he said, with her courage, her sincerity and her flaming self respect. Zelda in turn enjoyed the attentions of this dashing young lieutenant in the uniform he bought at Brooks brothers. November 11th, 1918, Fitzgerald's regiment was about to leave for France when the armistice was declared ending the war. Once again, Scott had missed his chance at glory. He would always consider his lack of combat experience one of the greatest regrets of his life. The moment Scott was discharged from the army, he proposed to Zelda, and was thrilled when she accepted. But before they could make it official, Scott needed to get a job. So he moved to New York City, where he used his writing talent to get a job at an advertising agency, writing copy for $35 a week. Fitzgerald hated the work. Nevertheless, he sent Zelda and exuberant telegram. Darling Hart, ambition, enthusiasm and confidence. I declare everything glorious. I am in the land of ambition and success, and my only hope is that you will be with me soon. But Zelda was already having second thoughts. $35 a week could hardly support the kind of lifestyle she wanted, so in June 1919, she broke off the engagement. Fitzgerald was so devastated he went on a three week drinking binge until finally in a last ditch effort to win back Zelda. He returned to his parents home in St. Paul and began working on a book he'd begun drafting in college. He moved into the third floor of spare bedroom of his parents row house on summit avenue. He lived on nothing he had no money. He borrowed a little here and there to buy cigarettes and he pinned the chapters of his novel to the curtains of the bedroom, and he rewrote it in great bursts of 16 hour days. With his whole future riding on it, Scott sent the book off to a New York publisher and waited anxiously for a reply. In postman rang the doorbell. And he got the news that it had been accepted for publication. And he ran out into the street. And he stopped everyone he knew to tell them that the young man who had promised great things in the past had now delivered. Scott's novel which he called this side of Paradise was a highly romanticized account of his college days. In his beautifully lyrical style he captured the hopes and fears of his post war generation. Here was a new generation, shouting the old cries, learning the old creeds, a generation dedicated more than the last to the fear of poverty and the worship of success. Grown up to find all God's dead, all wars fought. All faiths in man shaken. This side of Paradise was released on March 26th, 1920, and by the end of the day it was completely sold out. One of the reasons it was a big success is it was considered very risque. I mean, people actually were saying, here's a novel that exposes what our young people are doing today. They're actually kissing. And going to petting parties. And of course, he dared to write about that. So there was a certain sensational angle to it. The book was a runaway success and a 23 Scott was an instant celebrity at last he had achieved the kind of fame he always dreamed of. And best of all, he could now marry Zelda. For as he had hoped, she changed her mind when she learned of his success. April 3rd, 1920, a week after this side of Paradise was published, Scott and Zelda were married in the rectory of Saint Patrick's cathedral in New York City. They made a lovely couple, the promising young author and his beautiful bride. They were happy and carefree, eager to take on the world. America was riding high and so were the fitzgeralds. It was a time of extravagance and self indulgence. Scott called it the jazz age and was hailed as its king, and Zelda was crowned queen of the flappers. They were the toast of the town, no party was complete without this glamorous pair, supremely confident and often inebriated their crazy exploits are legendary. Like the time they rode on top of a taxi down Fifth Avenue. And danced on the tables of the Waldorf hotel. The Fitzgerald's egged each other on, they were both creative and daring, and they knew very well what they were doing. They were creating a myth, a myth that has continued to grow in ways that probably they couldn't have anticipated. The Fitzgerald's briefly interrupted their revelries in February 1921, when Zelda discovered she was pregnant. Their baby girl, Francis Scott Fitzgerald, was born on October 26th, 1921. As an only child, Scotty, as she was called, was showered with love. My mother felt that she had a golden childhood. Some people felt sorry for her because she had a nanny. But nannies were normal then. So she was sheltered from some of the antics and drinking and her father was imaginative about the things he did with her. So I believe she probably did have a wonderful first ten years. But even parenthood couldn't slow the fitzgeralds down. They kept moving around, never living in one place for more than a year at a time. To pay for their increasingly extravagant lifestyle, Scott had to keep turning out work. He wrote dozens of short stories for mass market magazines, like the Saturday evening post, esquire, and red book, which all paid him top dollar. Fitzgerald saw it as easy money, but he hated taking time away from what he considered his real work, writing novels. In March 1922 he published his second novel the beautiful and damned. The book which sold well charted the decline of a happy couple who drank and fought and finally self destructed. As Scott wrote, things had been slipping perceptibly. There was the money question, increasingly annoying, increasingly ominous. There was the realization that liquor had become a practical necessity to their amusement. Many of their friends thought the book reflected the downward drift of Scott and Zelda's own marriage. For by now they were living in great neck Long Island, where they threw drunken parties that went on for days. By 1924 their lives had become as Zelda described it very alcoholic and very chaotic. They looked for a way out, and finally, in the spring of 1924, the fitzgeralds decided to move to Europe, where Scott could concentrate on a new novel he had begun, a book he was convinced would be his greatest masterpiece. He would call it The Great Gatsby. The French Riviera in the 1920s was home to a glittering crowd of artists and writers. A lost generation of American expatriates escaping prohibition. Enjoying a place where the dollar was strong and life was easy. Scott and Zelda seen here on the Riviera, were soon caught up in a new social scene. Two of their closest friends were Gerald and Sarah Murphy, a fashionable American couple who knew everyone from Pablo Picasso to Cole Porter. The Murphy's daughter honoria was 8 when she first met Zelda and Scott. They were always quite fun. We would look forward to coming for dinner because I couldn't wait to see what Zelda would be wearing. She was always very cheerful and she might get up on a table and saw dancing, apparently she did in a nightclub. She got carried away. If Fitzgerald's often got carried away, like the time Scott got drunk at a party at the murphys and began tossing their highly prized crystal glasses over the garden wall. While I was quite upset, and my father said, this won't this would have not do. You may leave Scott. And not come back for three weeks. But my mother and father never really got furious. You know, they just got exasperated. And they would worry about his drinking, of course, because there were so fond of them. In July 1924, Fitzgerald finally settled down and began working in earnest on The Great Gatsby. It was a time consuming process, for whenever Scott worked on a novel, he wrote many drafts of each chapter. If you read Fitzgerald's writing, you get the sense that he wrote in the same way that the birds sing that it came to him very naturally, and that's not true. The way that the birds sing that it came to him very naturally, and that's not true. His first drafts are often undistinguished. And it was only through that laborious revision and the testing of the prose again and again against that marvelous ear that he had that he was able to achieve the beautiful effects that we so much admire him for. With Scott busy scribbling away Zelda grew restless. She began spending long afternoons at the beach, where she met a handsome French aviator named edouard Jose. In her four years of marriage, Zelda had flirted with other men, but he was the first, she is said to have slept with. Scott was terribly upset when he found out, and though Zelda immediately ended the affair, he never forgave her betrayal. He seems to have felt that he and Zelda had a contract somehow or an understanding that though she might be attractive to other men, but she would never allow herself actually to become involved with Warren. But this had happened, and it created a sort of sadness in Fitzgerald that he never really recovered from. Still reeling from the Jose Anne affair that Fitzgerald went to Paris in the spring of 1925 for the publication of The Great Gatsby. A book that was later made into a big, multi-million dollar movie. The story was set in Long Island at the height of the roaring 20s. Jay Gatsby, the hero, was a man trying to recapture his past. And win the love of wealthy, beautiful daisy Buchanan, the golden girl of his dreams. As with so many of his works, Fitzgerald incorporated his own yearnings and lost hopes into The Great Gatsby. Why didn't you wait for me? Because rich girls don't marry poor boys Jared Gatsby. Haven't you heard? Rich girls don't marry poor boys. But in the end, the hero had to pay a price for his idealism. For no reality could ever match Gatsby's fantasy. Fitzgerald had such high hopes for his new novel, he was deeply disappointed when it failed to sell as well as his first two novels. Gatsby, when it came out, did not get great reviews. It got some good reviews. But it was a slightly different story. I mean, they were deaths. There was a murder. These were not the things that Scott Fitzgerald was supposed to write about. Just two weeks after The Great Gatsby was published, Scott was sitting in a bar in Paris when he met another up and coming American writer, named Ernest Hemingway. Almost immediately the two men became drinking buddies. Though there was always an edge to their friendship. Hemingway was a far more commercially successful writer in the 20s and 30s than Fitzgerald was. On the other hand, Hemingway, I think envied Fitzgerald style. So they both envied in the other what they didn't have in themselves. Their rivalry was intense, and Hemingway, on more than one occasion, would try to promote himself if Fitzgerald's expense. Like the time Hemingway, at lunch with his editor in another writer named Mary column, started talking about his fascination with rich people. He said, the rich are different from you and me. And Mary call him, said wittily, yes, they have more money. And everyone laughed at this put down. Hemingway then turned this entirely around. And had Fitzgerald say the first line, and then had himself Hemingway. Say the good line, yes, they have more money. And made it into a sort of flag that was attached to Fitzgerald's shoe and that he never was able to get rid of this canard that he was a kind of suck up. To the rich. October 29, 1929, the U.S. stock market crashed, bringing an end to the high flying 20s. Scott's jazz age was finished, as he and Zelda entered the worst phase of their lives. For Scott the next few years were like a horrible nightmare, as he watched Zelda, gradually lose her mind. The trouble began when she decided at 28 she wanted to be a professional ballet dancer. She practiced for hours on end until finally she was hospitalized for nervous exhaustion. After her release, Zelda's mental state continued to deteriorate. Her behavior became increasingly irrational, reaching a crisis one day when she grabbed the wheel when Scott was driving and tried to steer them over a cliff. This time, doctors diagnosed her as schizophrenic. Over the next 6 years, Scott would take his wife to a series of clinics, desperately searching for a cure. Initially, he probably didn't know how to react. He didn't know what to do. During the first period of her troubles, we see them groping around trying to find the best treatment for her. But as the years went on, I think he came to understand that she would never entirely be well or whole again. Some people later claimed that Zelda was merely eccentric, not so, said Scotty, who visited her mother in the sanitariums. My mother said the first day of visiting Zelda would be lucid and fun. And Zelda would be. And then within a day or two, Zelda would get vague in a kind of veil would come between them and my mother witnessed firsthand that Zelda was truly schizophrenic. They're revisionists now who'd like to think that Zelda was misdiagnosed, but my mother said, but she was crazy. Throughout this difficult time, Scott had been struggling with his fourth novel, tender is the night. A book he spent 9 years writing and revised 17 times. The final version was made into a movie in 1962. The story was about a psychiatrist named dick diver who marries one of his patients. The very wealthy but mentally disturbed Nicole. The brilliance, the versatility of madness, Scott wrote, is akin to the resourcefulness of water, seeping over and around a dike. It requires the united front of many people to work against it. Once again, Fitzgerald had drawn on his own life for material. He was counting on tender as the night to restore his reputation and his bank account. But the book released in April 1934 didn't sell. It was the 1930s and the depression had hit. People weren't interested so much in hearing about people having parties and going to the Riviera because most of them couldn't even get a square meal. And so in many ways, the subject matter was a little outdated. The failure of his latest novel was a tremendous setback for Fitzgerald, who was trying to support his wife at expensive sanitariums. This would have been difficult enough, but Scott was now drinking more than ever. It said he regularly consumed as much as 30 bottles of beer or a quart of gin a day. He was an alcoholic who would go for long periods, drinking very carefully, would go for long, dry periods. And then was capable of binges of drinking that he was helpless to bring to an end, drinking that is that continued until the man had to be taken to a hospital when he was no longer sensate. Even at this low point, Fitzgerald used his pain as inspiration and continued to reflect his own life in his work. In 1936 he wrote the crack up, a startling three part series that ran in esquire magazine, in which he announced to the world that he was emotionally bankrupt. My life looked like a hopeless mess there for a while, Scott wrote. And the point was, I didn't want it to be better. I had completely ceased to give a good goddamn. This public confession hurts Scott's reputation. But the final blow came on his 40th birthday, September 24th, 1936. When the New York Post published a front page profile that depicted him as a pathetic has been who had squandered his talent. But just when he hit rock bottom, Fitzgerald got an offer from metro Goldwyn mayor to work as a screenwriter. With renewed hope he left for the West Coast in the summer of 1937. Ready to take on Hollywood. In the summer of 1937, when Scott arrived in Hollywood, Shirley Temple was the top box office draw in the world, and the movie industry was ruled by the big students office draw in the world, and the movie industry was ruled by the big studios which were turning out films in greater quantities than ever. To keep churning out movies, the studios would assign different riders to work on the same script. All of them competing for that most important measure of success, a screen credit. Scott joined that assembly line when he was asked to rewrite a yank at Oxford. A comedy about an American Rhodes scholar and his adventures in England. Well, I'm restraining myself as best I can. Are you wicked? But like so many films Fitzgerald would work on the script went through endless revisions and he did not end up with a screen credit. On first arriving in Hollywood, Scott made an effort to curb his drinking. When he did attend parties, he would sit quietly in a corner drinking soda. That's where Sheila Graham, a young Hollywood gossip columnist, first saw him. My mother saw this ghostly looking man. He was absolutely pale his sitting in under a lamp, smoking a cigarette, and he was the palest shade of white. She had ever seen. But rather fascinating looking, there was something about this man that really struck her imagination. Scott was also quite taken with Sheila, who had beautiful green eyes and a lovely smile. He asked her out on a date, and though Scott was an older married man, she couldn't resist his charm. Women loved him. He was a very, very charming man to women that men didn't like him, actually. I mean, he was not a man's man and the way you think of Ernest Hemingway. He was not a man of business, not. He was not a man of the world and that kind of sense, but women found him very charming. Scott and Sheila became a steady couple. However, Fitzgerald was Frank about the arrangement. He was a married man and had no plans of divorcing Zelda. The fact that he was having an affair with Sheila was another part of his life, but had nothing to do with his loyalty. And devotion to Zelda. They had a communication that was rare among couples. Of his love for Zelda, Scott wrote. It was one in a century. Life ended for me when Zelda and I crashed. If she would get well, I would be happy again and my soul would be released. But Zelda now in a hospital in North Carolina showed no signs of getting better. When her old friend Sarah and honoria Murphy stopped in for a visit, they found her in a sad state. She had a very severe haircut and she had a black suit and a white blouse. And she had to make conversation. And it was so sad to see my mother and her making conversation. My mother would say, do you remember the hemingways? Oh, I think I do. He was very nice or something. She didn't really remember them. And she was just out of it. It was very sad to see. In the fall of 1937, Fitzgerald was assigned to work on a film called three comrades, the movie was about three German officers who compete for the love of one woman. To us. Upon its release, three comrades was hailed as one of the best films of 1938. But Fitzgerald hated it. He felt his script had been ruined by Joseph mankiewicz, the film's producer, who rewrote much of the dialog. In a now famous letter Fitzgerald protested the changes for 19 years, I've written bestselling entertainment, and my dialog is supposedly right up at the top, but I learned from the script that you've suddenly decided it isn't good. Oh, Joe, can't produce as ever be wrong. I'm a good writer. Honest. Three comrades was the first and last time Fitzgerald got a screen credit. In December 1938, MGM did not renew his contract, and he had to scramble for freelance work. At one point he was brought in to polish the dialog of Gone with the Wind. David selznick replaced him after just two weeks. As he grew more frustrated, Fitzgerald began to revert to his old pattern of drinking gin all day. Sheila Graham, who did not drink, was appalled by his drunken behavior. My mother often described him as doctor chuck lind mister Hyde. One minute here is this charming man, quite fastidious about his appearance. As soon as he started drinking, there'd be a total change in personality. Please. Scott's drinking led to some terrible fights with Sheila. Fights that were depicted in a movie based on Sheila's autobiography, starring Gregory Peck and Deborah Carr. They wrestled over a loaded gun, screaming at each other, horrible things. Finally, she just had enough. She actually threw the gun across the room and said rather dramatically. Fitzgerald was always so remorseful after these fights that Sheila forgave him. But he was getting a bad reputation in Hollywood. By 1939 he was lucky to get a job collaborating on a script with bud schulberg. A young writer who was thrilled to be working with one of his idols. It was enormously in honor of him. I couldn't imagine that I'd be in the same room with Scott Fitzgerald much less being paired with him as a fellow writer, and I looked at him. And my first impression of him was almost everything about him looked pale, and faded seemed old. Seemed tired, really. Scott and Budd had been hired to write a film about Dartmouth college's annual winter carnival. On a fact finding trip to the school, schulberg was asked by the movie's director to watch Scott and make sure he didn't drink. We got on the winter carnival special. I thought I was watching him, but by this time Scott was really getting seriously smashed. And he had with him a little bottle of gin. I don't know where he found it. When I was with him, I thought we were practically embedded on where we found that damage in. Eventually, schulberg gave up and joined Scott on his binge. The film's director arrived to find his two riders weaving their way through campus. We were like two drunken falling down bums. And he said, I don't know what the next train out of here is, but you two are going to be on it. After getting fired, no one wanted to hire Fitzgerald. So in the fall of 1939 he went back to writing novels. Drawing on his latest experiences in Hollywood, he began a book called the last tycoon. And though alcoholism had begun to take its toll on Scott's health, he was excited about his new project. You read his letters to Zelda and discarding. Telling them how he's taken up with this book, how it's like the old days again how every day he looks forward to sitting down and working on the last tycoon. It breaks your heart to realize that this man only has a few more months to live. By October 1939, Fitzgerald was deeply engrossed in writing the last tycoon. After his experience in Hollywood, he was happy to be writing novels again. But at 44, Scott was not in good health. For years he had been abusing his body. And in November he suffered a mild heart attack that frightened him so much, he stopped drinking altogether. From that point on, Scott seemed almost in a race to finish his novel. December 21st, 1940, Scott and Sheila Graham were enjoying a quiet afternoon together, listening to classical music. He suddenly stood up from the chair and grabbed the mantle piece and collapsed on the floor. And my mother just rushed to him and thought that he'd fainted. But the problem was far more serious. Scott had suffered a massive heart attack. The door was open, and there he was sprawled on the floor. I didn't know what happened. Thought he had fainted, moved closer and realized he was dead, and it was an absolute shock. F. Scott Fitzgerald, the man who came to symbolize the jazz age with its celebration of youth, was dead at the very young age of 44. His death came as a terrible blow to his friends and family. Because she wanted to talk to somebody who had been there so that she could believe that he was dead. And that was terribly sad. December 27th, 1940, F. Scott Fitzgerald was buried in union cemetery in Rockville, Maryland, where his father's family had lived. Few people came to his funeral, not even Zelda, who was too ill to travel. She would spend the next 8 years in to travel. She would spend the next 8 years in and out of mental hospitals. In March, 1948, she was staying in the highland hospital in Asheville, North Carolina when a fire broke out, trapping 9 female patients, including Zelda. All 9 women perished in that midnight fire. Which was said to have been caused by faulty electrical wiring. It was a terrible end for Zelda, who was only 48. She is now buried beside Scott in Rockville, Maryland. It's only fitting that this couple who went through so much together in life should rest in peace side by side. The story of their marriage is one of the great love stories of our times. I mean, we should all be so lucky as to stay so in love through so many tragedies. The tragedies were there, but the love survived it. Just before his death, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote a letter to an aspiring writer warning the young man that the price for doing professional work was extremely high. You've got to sell your heart, your strongest reactions. All his life Fitzgerald had been doing just that. Using his life as material for his fiction. After giving so much of himself it was hard for Scott to reach the end. Only to find his books no longer in print and his name forgotten. It wasn't until the 1950s that readers rediscovered his books and critics began to rank Fitzgerald among the best writers of his generation. His books now sell hundreds of thousands of copies a year. I think Gatsby alone sells over 300,000 copies a year. It's probably among the most popular if you go by sales of any American novel. Over the years, Fitzgerald's reputation has continued to grow. Today, his place among America's literary legends is secure, and he is widely admired by many modern writers. I've been interested in Fitzgerald ever since I was a teenager and read his novel a Great Gatsby. It taught me a lot. And it fortified my own ambition to become a writer of affection. It also taught me not to try to become a writer of fiction like Fitzgerald because he has a connection with the English language which I knew even then. I would not possess. In my mind, he stands out because he is not like Hemingway mailer, some of the big foot male authors that were his contemporaries. He's got a different sensibility. He's more interested in love and desire and domestic life. And suffer women writers, he's an accessible male writer. As part of the continuing rehabilitation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's reputation, in 1996, the country celebrated his 100th birthday. Commemorative stamps in his hometown of St. Paul, he was honored with a commemorative stamp. And hundreds of people turned out on a cold September day to see the unveiling of a life sized statue of their favorite son. Scott Fitzgerald, a man who wanted so much to be a success, is more famous today than he possibly could have dreamed. And he was one of America's greatest dreamers. He did not live to see himself immortalized, but there are some who say he knew all along that he had left a lasting legacy. He knew. At some very important place in his heart that this would happen some day. He knew he was good. He knew how good his books were. He knew in a way as if they had been written by somebody else. He was a very cool assessor of his own work. He did not believe that his bad work was good, but he knew his good work was really good. It was this tremendous faith in his own talent that enabled F. Scott Fitzgerald to keep writing. No matter how many personal tragedies he suffered. I think there's a certain heroic quality, so we'll just go Fitzgerald at the end that he really conquered his demons in many ways. He really reached a hard won maturity. He redeemed himself the only way a writer can, and that is through his own work at the end of his life, he was fully and deeply engaged in the writing of a novel to which he was passionately committed, and so he died in saddle. With his boots on, very much looking looking forward to the future.

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F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Biography

With his good looks, his swift success, his love of parties , and his incredible spending. F. Scott Fitzgerald was the personification of “the jazz age. After his novel of Princeton , This Side of Paradise, which gained him immediate popularity, he went on to write The Great Gatsby, the almost perfect expression of the Prohibition Era. But it was Fitzgerald’s tragedy that he did not mature to carry out the still bigger books which he saw in his mind. ARTHUR MIZENER has been working on a biography of Fitzgerald since 194 5: in his research he has had the help of people like Edmund Wilson and Ernest Hemingway, and a Houghton Mifflin Fellowship enabled him to take a leave of absence from his teaching at Carleton College and to settle for an intense period at Princeton, where he was given access to Fitzgerald’s personal papers.

by ARTHUR MIZENER

F. SCOTT FITZGERALD’S life was at once representative and dramatic, at moments a charmed and beautiful success to which he and his wife, Zelda, were brilliantly equal and at moments disastrous beyond the invention of the most macabre imagination. The forces of flawed character and of chance are revealed in Fitzgerald’s life with remarkable fullness, both because it was a dramatic life lived with all the lack of caution w hich characterized Fitzgerald and because he spent his life representing what he understood of it. Just as his life illuminates his work, so his work does his life.

He was born at three-thirty in the afternoon of September 24, 1896, in a house on Laurel Avenue in St. Paul, Minnesota. He weighed ten pounds and six ounces: it was the only period in his life when he was the physical superior of his contemporaries.

His father, Edward Fitzgerald, had been born in 1853 on a farm named Glenmary near Rockville in Montgomery County, Maryland, and was descended, on his mother’s side, from Scotts and Keys who had been in this country since the early seventeenth century and had regularly serv ed in the colonial legislatures. Francis Scott Key was a remote cousin of his mother. At the close of the Civil War, Edward Fitzgerald, then no more than twelve or fifteen, went west. Ev entually he arrived in St. Paul, where, by the eighties, he was running a small wicker furniture business. In one of the panics of the nineties this business failed and he went to work as a salesman for Procter and Gamble, lie was a small, quiet, ineffectual man with beautiful Southern manners, “very much the gentleman,” as his contemporaries said, “but not much get up and go.” He was, in any event, no match for his wife.

Mary McQuillan, Scott’s mother, was the oldest of the four children of Philip McQuillan, an Irish immigrant who, after a start in Galena, Illinois, w here he married his employer’s daughter, came on to St. Paul. Here, as a wholesale grocer, he eventually “reared a personal fortune estimated at from three to four hundred thousand dollars,” the St. Paul papers reported, before he died at the age of forty-four of Bright’s disease. Fitzgerald’s Grandmother McQuillan’s imposing Victorian mansion represented the solidity and permanence of wealth to a boy whose childhood was spent moving from apartment to apartment and hotel to hotel at the rate of better than one move a year, largely because of his father’s economic insufficiency. But the McQuillans did not represent breeding, for in addition to being “straight 1850 potato famine Irish” (as Fitzgerald once put it) they were eccentric, and their eldest daughter added to this eccentricity a directness which was also marked in her only son. “Whatever came into her head,” one of her in-laws remarked, “came right out of her mouth.” Fitzgerald’s contemporaries remember her from their childhood as a witchlike old lady who carried an umbrella, rain or shine, and seemed always to be walking back and forth to the lending library with an armful of books. She was devoted to her only son and she spoiled him in a way that was bad for a precocious and imaginative boy.

As a small boy Fitzgerald lived, he said later, “with a great dream,” and his object was always to try to realize that dream. When he was four or five, for instance, he described his pony to his Grandmother McQuillan in minute detail; she was horrified that so small a child should have a pony, and it was not easy, after Scott’s persuasive description, to convince her that the pony was quite imaginary. With his gift for imagining games and his energy in executing them, he sought to be the leader wherever he went. As a child he had a hard time understanding that other children did not exist simply as material for his uses, and when they asserted their own egos with the brutal directness of children, he was always unprepared for it and deeply wounded.

It is a consequence of this habit of projecting his wishes that he retained all his life the important emotional commitments of his growing up. It is partly because, as Americans, we all have similar commitments, and because it never occurred to Fitzgerald, as it does to us, that he ought to pretend to have outgrown these commit ments, that his work has such remarkable immediacy for us. He never buried his past because he was too naive to realize that you are supposed to believe it is dead

Given Fitzgerald’s capacity for hero-worship, for identifying himself with some person he admired and then imagining himself as that person, he was bound to make a heroic image for himself of the athlete, and the process by which he did so can be traced step by step. The hero was a prep-school or college boy, a male Cinderella, small and discriminated against, who by some dramatic and unlikely display of pluck won the big game for St. Regis or Princeton. This dream w as only gradually modified and never wholly uprooted by the hard realities of prep-school and college life. If put him on the Newman football team despite his dislike of the game and sent him out for freshman football at Princeton — at one hundred and thirty-eight pounds. Every so often the ideal would achieve a new personification: Sam White in the Princeton-Harvard game of 1911; Hobey Baker, Princeton football captain of 1913, “slim and defiant”; “the romantic Buzz Law whom I had last seen one cold tall twilight in 1915, kicking from behind his goal line with a bloody bandage round his head,”the mere sight of whom, “a slender, dark-haired young man with an indolent characteristic walk,” could make “something stop inside” Fitzgerald when they passed on the Champs Elysées ten years after they had left college. In these figures he found, as he put it once about Hobey Baker, “an ideal worthy of everything in my enthusiastic admiration, yet consummated and expressed in a human being who stood within ten feet of me.”

This is a characteristic instance of the process by which Fitzgerald’s imagination took hold of—or was taken hold of by — the concrete particulars of American experience and gradually made out of them symbols for the whole of human experience.

SUMMIT AVENUE is St. Paul’s show street, “a museum,” as Fitzgerald later called it, “of American architectural failures.” As Fitzgerald grew up, his family moved gradually around the periphery of St. Paul’s finest residential district, settling finally at the end of its best street. The symbolism is almost too neat, and Fitzgerald was acutely aware of it.

At the top — he once wrote of St. Paul — came those whose grandparents had brought something with them from the East, a vestige of money and culture; then came the families of the big self-made merchants, the “old settlers” of the sixties and the seventies, American-English-Scotch, or German or Irish, looking down somewhat in the order named — upon the Irish less from religious difference — French Catholics were considered rather distinguished— than from their taint of political corruption in the East. After this came certain well-to-do “new people”— mysterious, out of a cloudy past, possibly unsound.

This was the world Fitzgerald grew up in, desiring with all the intensity of his nature to succeed according to its standards and always conscious of hovering socially on the edge of it, alternating between assertion and uncertainty because of his acute awareness that his foothold was unsure. None of the things that bothered him would have made a serious impression on him had it not been for his already established insecurity.

I am — Fitzgerald wrote long afterward — half black Irish and half old American stock with the usual exaggerated ancestral pretensions. The black Irish half of the family had the money and looked down upon the Maryland side of the family who had, and really had, that . . . series of reticences and obligations that go under the poor old shattered word “breeding”. ... So being born in that atmosphere of crack, wise crack and countercrack I developed a two cylinder inferiority complex.

Very conscious of a dubious gentility and an inadequate family income, Fitzgerald set out to make his way in St. Paul and at St. Paul Academy. He w as a small, handsome, blue-eyed boy, full of energy and invention and so determined to make a success that the school magazine, Now and Then, quickly tagged him as the man who knew exactly “ How to Run the School,” and asked rather quarrelsomely if there were not someone who would “poison Scotty or find some means to shut his mouth.” “He wasn’t popular with his schoolmates,” said his headmaster. “He saw through them too much and wrote about it.”

On the long, wonderful summer visits at White Bear Lake with his friends Cecil Reed and Robert Clark — whose families could afford places at White Bear — he was constantly being beaten at games, even by girls. Nonetheless, as he was to do all his life, he stuck grimly to it.

But if his athletic career was an unbroken series of unadmitted defeats, he had some success in an extracurricular way and as a literary man. He was the leader and idea man for a club, known first as the Scandal Detectives and later as the Goosrah, which had its headquarters in the loft of his friend Cecil Reed’s barn on Holly Avenue and later in the attic of the Reeds’ new house on Summit. Here, when Fitzgerald was reading The Three Musketeers, they were taught by him to fence and, when he read Arsènc Lupin , to be detectives: everything he read had to be lived. Under the stimulus of romances about the Ku Klux Klan, the Goosrah also organized “adventures.” One of these was an attack on another boy of their own age, Reuben Warner, who had captured the affections of the girl Fitzgerald admired. Their skillfully conceived piece of terrorization, which ended with Mr. Warner’s calling out the police, was used by Fitzgerald in his story “The Scandal Detectives” in Taps at Reveille.

Meanw hile he had begun to w rite and had become St. Paul Academy’s star debater (no one had found a means to shut him up). Having had to read Sir Walter Scott in school, he turned out a complicated story of knights and ladies called “Elavo”; and having become an expert on the detective story on his own initiative, he wrote “The Mystery of the Raymond Mortgage.” This story was printed in Now and Then in September, 1909, when he was thirteen, and it was his first published work. It is, for a schoolboy, a skillfully plotted little murder story and, in its sedulous imitation of the style of such works, often unconsciously very funny. “Through some oversight,” Fitzgerald remarked later, “I neglected to bring the [mortgage] into the story in any form”; but no one seemed to notice. This success was followed by two romantic Civil War stories, “A Debt of Honor” and “The Room with the Green Blinds,” and a football story called “Reade, Substitute Right Half.”

His multifarious extracurricular activities had seriously affected Fitzgerald’s school work. He was incapable of learning anything which did not appeal to his imagination, and always depended on his wealth of scattered information about American history and certain areas of literature to distract attention from his failure to have prepared the day’s assignment. But since he had become a writer he had taken to scribbling on the blank pages of his textbooks throughout his classes, and it became apparent that drastic measures would have to be taken. A family conference was held and it emerged that Aunt Annabel, his mother’s sister and his champion, was prepared to foot the bill for a boarding school, provided it was a good Catholic school. Plans were therefore laid to send Fitzgerald to Newman in the fall of 1911.

He faced this prospect with his usual burst of imaginative fervor. All his knowledge of boarding school life, as he had learned about it from Ralph Henry Barbour and others, was summoned to the task of providing an adequate dream of social and athletic success in this glittering Eastern world.

FITZGERALD’s two years at Newman were a repetition on a larger scale of his experience at St. Paul Academy. He set off for Newman when he was fifteen, full of dreams of success and popularity and yet acutely aware of his divided nature. He once recalled in detail his judgment of himself at this time.

. . . Physically — I marked myself handsome; of great athletic possibilities, and an extremely good dancer. . . . Socially ... I was convinced that I had personality, charm, magnetism, poise, and the ability to dominate others. Also I was sure that I exercised a subtle fascination over women. Mentally ... I was vain of having so much, of being talented, ingenious and quick to learn. To balance this, I had several things on the other side: Morally — I thought I was rather worse than most boys, due to a latent unserupulousness and the desire to influence people in some way, even for evil . . . lacked a sense of honor, and was mordantly selfish. Psychologically ... I was by no means the “Captain of my fate.” ... I was liable to be swept off my poise into a timid stupidity. I knew I was “fresh” and not popular with older boys, . . . Generally — I knew that at bottom I lacked the essentials. At the last crisis, I knew I had no real courage, perseverance or self respect.

Fitzgerald arrived at Newman, and, repeating his mistakes at St. Paul Academy, made himself the most unpopular boy in the school. His extreme good looks — even four years later he collected a painful number of votes as the prettiest member of his class at Princeton — helped to win him a quick reputation as a sissy. Within a month of his arrival he had had several lights forced on him, with the crowd always against him, and had been lectured on his freshness by a fellow student named Herbert Agar. His roommate remembered him years later as having had “the most impenetrable egotism I’ve ever seen”: he was constantly aware that “he was one of the poorest boys in a rich boys’ school.” He had the faculty as well as the students against him: he was never on time for classes or meals, and he could not be prevented from reading after lights; he was constantly on bounds.

His second year at Newman was happier than his first. He made the football team, though not as a regular, and was even commended for his “fine running with the ball” in the Newman News’s account of the Kingsley game. But he was still without enthusiasm for the game and, on one occasion during the Newark Academy game, he avoided an open-field tackle so obviously that the quarterback, Donahoe, came over to him and said, “You do that again and I’ll beat you up my self.”With his wonderful Irish sense of the absurd and his ability to see it in his own experience, Fitzgerald loved to repeat this story about himself, and usually concluded his narration by remarking that he was so much more scared of Donahoe than of any ball carrier that he played a brilliant defensive game the rest of the afternoon. He made a good friend of Donahoe, and all his life admired with his characteristic generosity Donahoe’s possession of the persistence and selfcontrol which he imagined —often quite wrongly — that he himself lacked. Respect for Donahoe’s modesty made him omit his name when he said in “Handle with Care” that he “represented my sense of the ‘good life,’ though I saw him once in a decade . . . in a difficult situation I . . . tried to think what he would have thought, how he would have acted.”

In May of his second year at Newman he took his examinations for Princeton and “did a little judicious cribbing and never forgot it afterwards.”Even so he did not do well enough to assure his admission. Aunt Annabel was still financing his schooling and did not want him to go to a Protestant college. She was, however, eventually talked around.

During this summer the youthful bottle of drugstore sherry began to give w ay to more adult drinks, and twice during the year Fitzgerald was drunk enough to remember the occasions as special ones, He began to be known around St. Paul as “a man who drank,” a reputation which gave him a certain romantic interest w hich he undoubtedly enjoyed.

TIZGERALD came on to Princeton in the middle of September of 1913 to take the examinations which would determine whether he was to be admitted. On the twenty-fourth he w as able to w ire his mother: ADMITTED SEND FOOTBALL PADS AND SHOES IMMEDIATELY PLEASE WAIT THUNK. He settled for his freshman year into the rambling stucco warren at 15 University Place.

The Princeton to which he was then admitted was a very different place from the present Princeton. It was essentially an undergraduate college, though the Graduate School was dedicated the fall Fitzgerald arrived. Its enrollment was around 1500; it had a good undergraduate library of about 300,000 volumes; it had just begun to feel the effect of the preceptorial system and the four-course honors plan introduced under President Wilson, who had recently escaped from an unhappy situation at the University into the governorship of New Jersey and had been replaced by John Grier Hibben.

Physically Princeton still centered in the old campus above the transverse line set by McCosh Walk, though some of the new dormitories on the lower campus such as Little, Patton, and Cuyler had been built. The railroad station still stood at the foot of Blair steps, and the old Casino, where the Triangle Club rehearsed, stood not far off. The rickety but partly eighteenth-century façade of Nassau Street had not yet been replaced by faked Georgian; Nassau Street itself was unpaved. The modern undergraduate commons on the corner of University Place and Nassau Street would not be built for two more years; Palmer Stadium was under construction and would first be used for the Dartmouth game in the fall of Fitzgerald’s sophomore year.

Football was a deadly serious affair; the Big Three were still really big, so that football, it could be felt, was a game conducted by gentlemen in a kind of Tennysonian Round-Table spirit. No editorial writer on the Daily Princetonian ever questioned the idea that the success or failure of a university year depended on the results of the Yale and Harvard games.

Football was the best means to social distinction on the campus, and social distinction was the main preoccupation of the first two years of an undergraduate’s career. The competition was no less fierce because its most inviolable requirement was that the contestants should appear quite unconcerned with social prestige. Beneath this pretense of indifference the game of becoming a Big Man was carried on day in and day out by everyone w ho had, by local standards, good sense. “From the day when, wild-eyed and exhausted [from the rush], the . . . freshmen sat in the gymnasium and elected some one from Hill School class president . . . up until the end of sophomore year it never ceased, that breathless social system, that worship, seldom named, never really admitted, of the bogey ‘Big Man.’”

“ . . . all the petty snobbishness within the prep-school, all the caste system of Minneapolis, all were here magnified, glorified and transformed into a glittering classification.”

There were besides football other, though less powerful, means of becoming a Big Man; other sports which drew crowds counted, though, as John Peale Bishop noted, “Closet athletics, such as wrestling and the parallel bars, are almost a disadvantage.” After football the most powerful organization socially was the Triangle Club, which, by an incredible consumption of undergraduate time and energy, produces annually a commonplace musical comedy. After the Triangle Club, the Daily Princetonian was the most reputable pursuit for an undergraduate, and after that what Bishop called “the Y.M.C.A. in a Brooks suit”—the Philadelphian Society — and The Tiger , the comic weekly.

All this energetic pursuit of extracurricular activities received its reward at the time of club elections in the middle of the sophomore year. The Princeton clubs come as near to being purely social institutions as such organizations ever can. A Princeton club, apart from providing a place to eat, to play billiards, and to take a girl on week-ends (and nowadays, though not in Fitzgerald’s day, a bar and a television set), does not even pretend to offer anything. The function of the Princeton clubs is to provide a system of grading people according to social distinction at the middle of the sophomore year. For the last two years of an undergraduate’s life the club then provides him with a gathering place patterned on the best country-club models, where he eats and enjoys the wonderful leisure of undergraduate years in luxurious surroundings with congenial companions — if in the scramble of other considerations he has been lucky enough to fall among friends.

But if this was the dominant world of the University, Princeton was also a place in which Scott Fitzgerald, going out for dinner during the September examination period before commons were open, could sit down at the Peacock Inn next to an aristocratic-looking boy, and while “in the leafy street outside the September twilight faded [and] the lights came on against the paper walls, where tiny peacocks strode and trailed their tails among the gayer foliations,” he and Bishop could talk and talk about books, about Stephen Phillips and Shaw and Meredith and the Yellow Book.

It is true that as they talked Fitzgerald appears to have worried for fear the “St. Paul’s crowd at the next table would . . . mistake him for a bird, too . . .”and he would injure his social standing. Still, that intellectually admirable world was there. It had been built up through two college generations under the leadership of T. K. Whipple and Edmund Wilson and it was, before the war broke its tradition, to include, besides Bishop, the versatile Stanley Dell, John Biggs, Jr., and Hamilton Fish Armstrong. Fitzgerald was going to turn to this group at the end of his college career and to say many years later, without qualification and undoubtedly with some exaggeration: “I got nothing out of my first two years [in college] — in the last I got my passionate love for poetry and historical perspective and ideas in general (however superficially), that carried me full swing into my career.”

But if this is an oversimplified v iew of his career it is a tribute to what this group did for him which is deserved; they gave him the only education he ever got, and, above all, they gave him a respect for literature which was more responsible than anything else for making him a serious man. The voice of conscience which had taken form under these pressures spoke when Fitzgerald wrote sadly to his old friend, John Biggs, about Biggs’s appointment to the Second C ircuit Court of Appeals as the youngest judge in the history of that court: “I hope you’ll be a better judge than I’ve been a man of letters.” This was a professional conscience. If Princeton was a place of provincial social competition for two years and of charming relaxation for two more, and if it was academically a place where, as Fitzgerald himself remarked, too often “in the preceptorial rooms . . , mildly poetic gentlemen resented any warmth of discussion and called the prominent men of the class by their first names,” it was also a place where people with intellectual interests could educate themselves.

These people were committed to high standards and maturity of judgment; they wrote for each other as best they could without embarrassment or inhibition. They belonged, these young writers, as Edmund Wilson remarked long after, to a kind of professional group. . . . [They] saw in literature a sphere of activity in which they hoped themselves to play a part. You read Shakespeare, Shelley, George Meredith, Dostoevsky, Ibsen, and you wanted, however imperfectly and on however infinitesimal a scale, to learn their trade and have the freedom of their company. I remember Scott Fitzgerald’s saying to me, not long after we got out of college: “I want to be one of the greatest writers who have ever lived, don’t you?” I had not myself really quite entertained this fantasy because I had been reading Plato and Dante. Scott had been reading Booth Tarkington, Compton Mackenzie, H. G. Wells and Swinburne; but when he later got to better writers, his standards and achievements went sharply up, and he would always have pitted himself against the best in his own line that he knew. I thought his remark rather foolish at the time, yet it was one of the things that made me respect him; and I am sure that his intoxicated ardor represented the healthy way for a young man of talent to feel.

However far this world was, in its essential values, from the ordinary social world of Princeton, the two of course overlapped; Princeton was a small place. The two worlds thus lived together with only the occasional strain of a rebellion against the club system to mar their sympathy, and many undergraduates doubtless lived out their college careers according to the ostensible conventions of the society largely unaware of how a man really becomes Big. It was a perfectly healthy society set in an old and homogeneous small town.

Fitzgerald plunged eagerly into the life of Princeton. His first impulse was to accept its standards, to admire its heroes, to use his imagination to make his participation in it seem even more dazzling than it otherwise would have. His acceptance of Princeton did not, of course, prevent the shrewd, observing part of his mind from seeing what the forces which made for success were; but neither did his almost Machiavellian grasp of the political realities of the system and the worth of some of its big men affect his admiration of it or his determination “to become one of the gods of the class. All his life he made this kind of approach to a new world.

As the telegram announcing his admission indicates, Fitzgerald began by trying to be a football hero, but at one hundred and thirty-eight pounds his chances of success were not good even had he had any natural talent or liking for the game. He lasted just one day on the freshman squad. The initial failure did not daunt him at the time, but it meant there was one kind of god he would never be and the realization left its scar, a lifelong habit of daydreaming a story which he had first written out as a student at St. Paul Academy. He described this dream in his essay on insomnia called “Sleeping and Waking.”

“Once upon a time” (I tell myself) “they needed a quarterback at Princeton, and they had nobody and were in despair. The head coach noticed me kicking and passing on the side of the field, and he cried: ‘Who is that man — why haven’t we noticed him before?’ The under coach answered, ‘He hasn’t been out,’and the response was: ‘Bring him to me.’ ”. . . we go to the day of the Yale game. I weigh only one hundred and thirty-five, so they save me until the third quarter, with the score —”

— But it’s no use — I have used that dream of a defeated dream to induce sleep for almost twenty years, but it has worn thin at last.

But there were other ways to prestige. He went out for The Tiger and had a contribution in the first issue. Most important of all, he went to the organization meeting of the Triangle Club in October and was busy for the next two months helping with suggestions for lyrics and laboring over the lights during rehearsals in the old Casino. By February he was hard at work on a libretto which he hoped would be accepted for t he next year’s Triangle show. By that date he was also deep in academic difficulties. As early as October 7 the dean had called him into consultation on this question and now the midyear examinations showed that he had failed three subjects.

Throughout the spring he continued to work hard on his Triangle show and grew intimate with Walker Ellis, a handsome and romantic junior from New Orleans who was now the president-elect of the Triangle. He also took to walking in the beautiful gardens of the Pyne estate and watching the swans in the pools. Father Fay, a converted Episcopalian who had taken Fitzgerald up when he had been a student at Newman, came to the campus from time to time during the year and took him out to dinner with a few other carefully selected undergraduates. That spring he invited Fitzgerald to his mother’s home at Deal for a week-end and Fitzgerald was dazzled by the mixture of luxury and intellectual life he found. With his usual combination of innocence and calculation he played the eager, ingenuous boy; one guest who met him at Deal called him “a prose Shelley.’ There was of course much very real naïveté in him at this point in lus career, and all his life he appeared more naïve than he was because he was so direct and effervescent. Moreover, he had had very little experience of the sophisticated Eastern rich, and Fay’s world doubtless seemed to him the perfect fulfillment of the simpler St. Paul society in which he had never felt secure. To be intimately at home in Fay’s world was really to succeed.

Father Fay was a man of taste and cultivation who, having never known anything but the life of the well-to-do, had that unconscious ease and security in it which Fitzgerald always envied and never could achieve. In addition to these qualifies he was something of an eighteen-nineties aesthete, a dandy, always heavily perfumed, and a lover of epigrams. To a schoolboy of both social and literary ambitions this combination of characteristics must have been nearly irresistible. As a convert to Catholicism Fay could sympathize with Fitzgerald’s dislike of the dreary side of his Irish Catholic youth and also show him a Catholicism which was wealthy and cultivated and yet secure in its faith. “He [Shane Leslie] and another [Fay], since dead, Fitzgerald wrote several years later, made of that church a dazzling, golden thing, dispelling its oppressive mugginess and giving the succession of days upon gray days, passing under its plaintive ritual, the romantic glamour of an adolescent dream.”

Asa man of taste and intellectual interests, Father Fay understood all Fitzgerald’s ambitions and doubts. At the same time he had a gift for getting on an intimate footing with young men of Fitzgerald’s age, and, delighting in him, exercised that talent so that Fitzgerald found him sympathetic and understanding and talked with him as an equal. Fay was presently to be a Monsignor and, as a friend of Cardinal Gibbons and the occasional diplomatic representative of the Vatican, he had already considerable position and influence in the church, He was a romantically satisfying figure. There is no doubt that Fay did a great deal for what Shane Leslie, the Irish novelist and critic, called “the crude, ambitious schoolboy” who arrived at Newman from St. Paul, and, until he died very suddenly in the influenza epidemic in 1919, Fay was probably the greatest single influence on Fitzgerald. How much Fitzgerald admired him is clear from the portrait of him as Father Darcy in This Side of Paradise and from the dedication of the book to him (even though his name is misspelled in it). Such need as there was in Fitzgerald’s nature for a father was fully satisfied by him. “The jovial, impressive prelate who could dazzle an embassy ball, and the green-eyed, intent youth . . . accepted in thenown minds a relation of father and son within a half-hour’s conversation,” says Fitzgerald of Monsignor Darcy and Amory Blaine.

The rest of his life he liked to remember that he had flunked practically everything his freshman year in order to write the Triangle show. “I spent my entire freshman year,” he said later, “writing an operetta for the ‘Triangle Club. To do this I failed in algebra, trigonometry, coördinate geometry and hygiene.”But in fact three of these four failures were in the first term and his June record, with only one failure, was a great improvement over February.

During the summer he managed to get in enough tutoring to go back to Princeton early and to pass off enough conditions to become a sophomore in precarious “good standing.” The Committee on Non-Athletic Organizations, however, found his standing too insecure to allow him to participate officially in the Triangle Club. It puzzled and angered him to find that important things like the Triangle Club and his career as a Big Man could be interfered with by the academic authorities. However, he was swept away in the excitement of having his Triangle show accepted in September. Unable to accept the part he had been cast for or to go on the Christmas trip because of his ineligibility, Fitzgerald nonetheless threw himself into the work of producing the show, pulling wires for others instead of himself when it came to parts, working to get his friends into the chorus, and devoting the better part of a solid month to rehearsals. In the intervals he worried about the club elections which would come in the spring.

At midyears he managed to pass everything except chemistry, and in March he went triumphant ly into Cottage Club as one of the important men in its section, having turned down bids from Cap and Gown, Quadrangle, and Cannon. Cottage represented the type of social success Fitzgerald had dreamed of; it was the logical climax to his social career. Years later he wrote a friend he was trying to advise for her son’s sake that “though I might have been more comfortable in Quadrangle, for instance, where there were lots of literary minded boys, I was never sorry about my choice.”

In many ways this was one of the happiest times in his whole life. In February he had been elected secretary of the Triangle and he began to look forward lo being the club’s president in his senior year with confidence. In May he was elected to the editorial board of The Tiger. He anticipated election to the Senior Council, that most select gathering of the leaders of the senior class. He was in love with Ginevra King, a beautiful and wealthy girl from Chicago, whom he had met during the Christmas vacation. There was one wonderful moment in early June when he met Ginevra in New York. They went to Nobody Home and to the Midnight Frolic. The glittering urban splendor of a metropolitan evening was the perfect setting for Ginevra and he always remembered how “for one night . . . she made luminous the Ritz Roof on a brief passage through [New York].”He was also beginning to make his way among the serious writers; before the spring was out he had appeared twice in the Nassau Lit. Because he was successful and confident of the future, he was at case about everything. Consequently he was unmoved by the first faint signals of disaster which could be seen in his term-end report. Again he failed three subjects; he had taken in the firsl term alone more than the forty-nine cuts allowed in any two successive terms.

DURING the summer vacation he went west to visit his friend Sap Donahoe at the Donahoes’ ranch near White Sulphur Springs, Montana. This visit provided the background for “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz.”While he was there he played cowboy in a Stetson, gauntlets, and puttees, won fifty dollars at poker, and on one occasion got drunk and climbed on a table to sing to the amused cowmen of White Sulphur Springs a song called “ Won’t You Come Up.”He was not hearing from Ginevra, but his anxiety was somewhat relieved when he was told that his chief rival was “poor as a church mouse.”

In the fall he returned to Princeton ready to go on to the climactic triumphs of his undergraduate career. As always, however, when he was most full of confidence, the enemy struck; he flunked make-up examinations in Latin and chemistry, and he had one of those familiar conferences with the Committee on Non-Athletic Organizations and found himself ineligible for extracurricular activities. The situation was more serious now; his academic deficit had been accumulating for two years and this was the year for the crucial elections, the final rewards of three years of labor in the Triangle Club and on The Tiger. Still, though he had moments of despair, the situation was not yet irretrievable. There was Ginevra at Westover and they dined happily at the Elton in Waterbury after the Yale-Princeton game at New Haven in October; he worked hard as the Triangle’s secretary, coaching his friends in their parts as a substitute for playing a part himself and doing much of the organizing and directing of the show while President Heyniger played football; he was secretary of the Bicker Committee in Cottage. What was in the sequel the most ironic event of the fall occurred when, in October, the Triangle had a series of photographs made of him as a Show Girl; these photographs were widely used for publicity over such captions as “Considered the Most Beautiful ‘Show Girl’ in the Princeton Triangle club’s New Musical Play ‘The Evil Eye.’ ” But Fitzgerald was of course never in the show.

In November he went to the infirmary with a high fever, got out after a week or so, and then had to return. His trouble was diagnosed as malaria, which was more or less endemic at that time in Princeton, with its swamps and mosquitoes and its Negro slums down Witherspoon Street. When, in 1929, he had what subsequently proved to have been a tubercular hemorrhage, and later investigations showed the scars of even earlier attacks, he decided that this malaria had been tuberculosis. But since t here is evidence of a mild attack of tuberculosis in 1919 also, there is little reason to suppose that there was anything more the matter with him than the malaria which he certainly had. His illness was perfectly real, and it also gave him an opportunity to leave college for a respectable reason at a time when the odds on his flunking out at midyears were prohibitive. His plan was to drop out for the rest of the year and to return the next September to start his junior year over again. On November 28 he attended his last class of the year and departed for St. Paul.

Still trying to save something from the wreckage of his social career, he persuaded Dean McClenahan to write him an official statement that “Mr. F. Scott Fitzgerald withdrew from Princeton voluntarily . . . because of ill-health and that he was fully at liberty, at that time, to go on with his class, if his health had permitted.” “Dear Mr. Fitzgerald,” said the Dean’s covering letter, “This is for your sensitive feelings. I hope you will find it soothing.” “Almost my final memory before I left,” Fitzgerald wrote later, “was of writing a last lyric on that year’s Triangle production while in bed in the infirmary with a high fever.

But the career was beyond redemption. “It took them,” he said twenty-five years later, still hating vigorously the malicious and impersonal “them,” “four months to take it all away from me - stripped of every office and on probation — the phrase was ‘ineligible for extra-curricular activities.’ ” In February he came on to Princeton for a visit: both the club elections and the Triangle eleclions were impending. But there was nothing to be done. “To me,” he wrote twenty years later, “college would never be the same. There were to be no badges of pride, no medals, after all. It seemed on one March afternoon that I had lost every single thing I wanted—and that night was the first time that I hunted down the spectre of womanhood that, for a little while, makes everything else seem unimport ant.”

For all the trivial objective content of the experience, this was one of the great blows of his life. He had committed himself imaginatively to this world — or had had his imagination committed to it by circumstances—and the occasion’s value was determined for him by what his imagination had made of it. He brought with him to Princeton for exorcism the ghosts of all his past failures. To have succeeded at Princeton would have been to triumph in a world so superior to the Middle West that he could have taken the Middle West for granted. And he had succeeded at Princeton; he had made Cottage, had every reason to believe he would be president of the Triangle, an editor of The Tiger, perhaps even a member of the Senior Council. All his life he remembered the deprivation and could not get out of his mind an extravagant sense of the value of these medals or a feeling that somehow he had never quite known what it was to be a Princeton man. When, five years later. President Hibben wrote him a letter of mild remonstrance at the impression given by This Side of Paradise “that our young men are merely liv ing for four years in a country club and spending their lives wholly in a spirit of calculation and snobbery,” Fitzgerald was still so angry that he replied: —

[This Side of Paradise] was a book written with the bitterness of my discovery that I had spent several years trying to fit in with a curriculum that is after all made for the average student. After the curriculum had tied me up, taken away the honors I’d wanted, bent my nose over a chemistry book and said, No fun, no activities, no offices, no Triangle trips — no, not even a diploma “if you can’t do chemistry” — after that I retired.

At moments all the rest of his life this feeling of helpless ragenot really at others so much as at life, for hav ing refused him what he had earned — would come back.

IN September he was back at Princeton to begin over again in his stubborn and courageous way. He was still ineligible, but Paul Nelson, who had been elected to the presidency of the Triangle Club which he had expected to get, suggested there was still hope for him, and he set to work once more to write the songs for the show; once more the Show Girl pictures were got out and printed in the newspapers, though he was not to be in this new show either. He wrote endlessly for The Tiger despite his lack of any official connection with it, and conceived and wrote most of an issue of the Nassau Lit which burlesqued Cosmopolitan. Ginevra came down for the Yale game, but they were quarreling now, and when they met again in January she was no longer interested; they quarreled, so far as she was concerned, finally. (“I have destroyed your letters,” she wrote him that summer in reply to a request from him. “. . . I’m sorry you think that I would hold them up to you as I never did think they meant anything.”)

His interests were gradually shifting from the social to the intellectual world. He began to see more of Bishop and John Biggs, who in March succeeded Bishop as editor of the Nassau Lit. He deluged the Lit with his work and before he was through the had published nine poems, five reviews, and eight short stories.

With this shift, he completed for the first time what was to be the characteristic pattern of his relation to his experience. In an article written years later Malcolm Cowley pointed out what he called Fitzgerald’s “double vision.” “It was as if.” he said, “all his novels described a big dance to which he had taken . . . the prettiest girl . . . and as if at the same time he stood outside the ballroom, a little Midwestern boy with his nose to the glass, wondering how much the tickets cost and who paid for the music.”

This is an important insight for an understanding of Fitzgerald the talented novelist. His nature was divided. Partly he was an enthusiastic, romanticyoung man. Partly he was what he called himself in the “General Plan” for Tender Is the Night, “a spoiled priest.” This division shows itself in nearly even aspect of his life. The romantic young man was full of confidence about his own ability and the world’s friendliness; the spoiled priest distrusted both himself and the world. The romantic young man wanted to participate in life and look delight in spending himself and his money without counting the cost (“All big men have spent money freely,’' he wrote his mother when she tried to caution him in 1930. “I hate avarice or even caution”); but the spoiled priest, shocked by debt and fearing the spiritual exhaustion Fitzgerald was later to call “Emotional Bankruptey,”wanted to stand aside and study life.

All his best work is a product of the tension between these two sides of his nature, of his ability to hold in balance the impulses “to achieve and to enjoy, to be prodigal and open-hearted, and yet ambit ions and wise, to be strong a nd self-controlled, yet to miss nothing to do and yet to symbolize.” Not until 1936 did he lose faith in his ability to realize in his personal life what, he called “the old dream of being an entire man in the Goethe-ByronShaw tradition, with an opulent American touch, a sort of combination of J. P. Morgan, Topham Beauclerk and St. Francis of Assisi. . . .” He never lost his conviction that “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.”

If Fitzgerald’s imagination owes its force and penetration to the spoiled priest, however, it was the kind which works successfully only when it has personal experience to deal with. Understanding was for him the awareness of a constellation of feelings and of the objects to which they attached themselves in a moment of actual experience. The direct experience of the romantic young man who plunged eagerly and unwarily into the life about him provided the novelist with his material. This material the spoiled priest struggled throughout Fitzgerald’s life to understand.

ALL through the spring of 1917 a preoccupation with the war had been growing at Princeton. A large delegation of undergraduates had gone off to join the mosquito fleet; another was, with the assistance of experienced military men like Professor Robert Root of the Fnglish Department, drilling energetically on the campus. Fitzgerald took little, part in this excitement. He never did participate in the Rotarian kind of war hysteria — “winebibbers of patriotism.” he called such people, “which, of course, I think is the biggest rot in the world.” But he noted the names of classmates he had admired who had been killed in France during the winter and spring of 1916-1917 and he tried to decide whether to enlist in the air force or the infantry. Late in July he was back in St. Paul, where he went out to Fort Snelling and took the necessary examinations for a provisional appointment as a second lieutenant in the regular army. But his commission hung fire and there was nothing to do but return to Princeton for his senior year and wait restlessly, He roomed with John Biggs. Together they sometimes produced whole issues of The Tiger and wrote a great deal of the Lit.

His commission was finally issued on October 26. His first move on receiving it was to sign the Oath (“My pay started the day I signed the Oath of Allegiance and sent it back w hich was yesterday ”); his second to go up to New York, to Brooks Brothers. and order his uniforms. Presently his orders came and he prepared to depart for Fort Leavenworth on November 20. He maintained the proper attitude, writing his mother; —

About t he army please let’s not have either tragedy or Heroics because they are equally distasteful to me. I went into this perfectly cold-bloodedly . . . and purely for social reasons. If you want to pray, pray for my soul and not that I won’t get killed — the last doesn’t seem to matter particularly and if you are a good Catholic the first ought to.

To a profound pessimist about life, being in danger is not depressing. I have never been more cheerful.

For all his dislike of conventional patriotism he was appealed to by the romantic idea of the gallant individual confronting and dominating danger and death. His not getting overseas and into action came gradually to seem to him a great deprivation. “It was as if, when he came later to read books about it,” as Edmund Wilson has said, “he decided that he had been greatly to blame for not having had any real idea of what had been going on at that time, and he suddenly produced Ins old trench helmet which had never seen the shores of France and hung it up in his bedroom at wilmington and would surprise his visitors there by showing them, as if it were a revelation, a book of pictures of horribly mutilated soldiers.”(As part of her education he required his eleven-year-old daughter to look these pictures over at La Paix in 1932, and the book was still in his library when he died.)

His departure from Princeton was, he thought, the end of youth, the end of experiments with life and fresh starts undertaken with easy confidence that there was plenty of time, the end of the period when one is irretrievably committed to nothing. Just before he left, he brought Dean Gauss the manuscript of a novel. He wanted Dean Gauss to recommend the book to his publisher, Scribner’s, Gauss, after reading it, told Fitzgerald frankly that he could not do so. Fitzgerald argued that he would probably be killed in the war and wanted it published. Dean Gauss finally talked him out of trying to publish, He remembers that the first part of this novel was much like the first part of This Side of Paradise, the remainder a series of unconnected anecdotes, satires, and verse about Princeton life.

But Fitzgerald was not through with the novel. The minute he was settled at Leavenworth, he started to rewrite his manuscript, at first by concealing a pad within his copy of Small Problems for Infantry and later, after he had been caught at this, by working week-ends amidst the smoke and conversation and rattling of newspapers at the Officers Club. “I would begin work at it every Saturday afternoon at one and work like mad until midnight. Then I would work at it from six Sunday morning until six Sunday night, when I had to report back to barracks. I was thoroughly enjoying myself.”Working in this way he wrote a novel of one hundred and twenty thousand words, twenty-three chapters, of which four were in verse, “on the consecutive week-ends of three months" - that is, while he was at Fort Leavenworth; he was transferred to Camp Taylor, Kentucky, in February, 1918. It is hardly any wonder that he was remembered at Leavenworth as “a sandy-haired youngster . . . the world’s worst second lieutenant.”

Fitzgerald’s statement that The Romantic Egotist was completed by January is a slight exaggeration; he still had five of his twenty-three chapters to go. But in spite of being on leave that month, he got the rest finished by March, doing part of the job in Cottage Club during his leave and sending the final installment to Bishop in March, He sent the book to Shane Leslie, who, after spending ten days correcting the punctuation and grammar, sent it along to Scribner’s with a recommendation and a request that, if they did not like it, they keep it any wax so that Fitzgerald “could go to France believing his book had been accepted.”

By June the book was being read by Scribner’s.

The Romantic Egotist was a very crude book, yet it was an original and striking book, too. Its worst faults were its lack of structure and, in the early parts, of concrete particulars. It should also be remembered that a great deal of what is now This Side of Paradise, including some of the best of it. such as the chapters about Princeton and the Isabelle and Eleanor episodes, was carried over into that book with only minor revisions from The Romantic Egotist.

In August Scribner’s returned the book to Fitzgerald with a long and encouraging letter. “We are,”they said, “considerably influenced by the prevailing conditions, including a governmental limitation on the number of publications . . . but we are also influenced by certain characteristics of the novel itself.”They then went on to make a number of detailed suggestions and concluded by urging him to submit the book again. Fitzgerald attempted to meet these suggestions and returned the manuscript to Scribner’s, but at the end of October they finally rejected it. Of the editors only Perkins was really for it.

At the same time he had been getting on with his career as the worst second lieutenant in the army. In February he got a leave and made a flying trip east to visit Princeton. He returned to Camp Taylor, Kentucky, where he found Bishop, who showed him around Louisville and talked poetry with him into the small hours. In April he was transferred again, to Camp Gordon, Georgia, and in June yet again, to Camp Sheridan near Montgomery, Alabama. Here, in June, ho received the news that Ginevra was to be married in September.

Then one night at the Country Club, when he was in attendance on several superior officers from Camp Sheridan, his eyes fell on a small group which had gathered near him during one of the pauses between dances. In their midst was a young girl so young that she had not put up her hair and was dressed in the frilly sort of dress which used to be reserved for young girls. As he looked at her. everything inside him, as he always recalled afterwards, seemed literally to melt, and without a thought for the officers who were supposed to be his responsibility for the evening, he walked straight up to Zelda Sayre and introduced himself. In his precise way where emotions were concerned he noted in his Ledger that he “fell in love on the 7th of September.

(To be continued)