Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald
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F. Scott Fitzgerald chronicled the Jazz Age in novels like The Great Gatsby 1925 and Tender Is the Night 1934. His first novel, This Side of Paradise 1920, made him an instant celebrity. He married Zelda Fitzgerald and later struggled with alcoholism and his wife’s mental illness. He died in Hollywood in 1940 at age 44, believing himself a failure, but critics now rank him among the 20th century’s greatest writers.
Names, aliases, and relatives of F. Scott Fitzgerald — birth name, kin, and personal ties.
F. Scott Fitzgerald by the numbers — life, work, and family.
F. Scott Fitzgerald — early life, career, personal life, and legacy.
Mary McQuillan doted on her son F. Scott Fitzgerald, born September 24, 1896, in St. Paul, Minnesota. That pampering gave him a self-assured manner. He attended St. Paul Academy, Nardin Academy, and Princeton University, but left Princeton during his junior year after Ginevra King rejected him. He joined the U.S. Army instead.
Fitzgerald’s first novel, This Side of Paradise, appeared in 1920 and made him an instant celebrity and the highest-paid writer in America. He and his wife Zelda moved to Paris in 1924, where he wrote The Great Gatsby 1925, which became his most famous novel. During the mid-to-late 1920s, he socialized with expatriates like Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, and Cole Porter. The Fitzgeralds returned to the U.S. in 1930, and Fitzgerald published Tender Is the Night 1934, drawing on his pain from Zelda’s schizophrenia. In the mid-1930s, he suffered a breakdown and documented his alcoholism in The Crack-Up essays. He moved to Hollywood to write screenplays, inspiring his unfinished novel The Last Tycoon.
Fitzgerald married Zelda Sayre on April 3, 1920, after the success of This Side of Paradise. Their daughter, Frances Scott Fitzgerald, was born in 1921. Zelda’s mental health declined; she was diagnosed with schizophrenia and spent much of her life in mental institutions. Fitzgerald turned to alcohol, becoming a clinical alcoholic. A long affair with gossip columnist Sheilah Graham ended with his death in her apartment. He achieved sobriety a year before his death.
Fitzgerald popularized the term Jazz Age and became a defining voice of the 1920s. The Great Gatsby remains a staple in American literature, inspiring film adaptations including the 1974 version and Baz Luhrmann’s 2013 film. He was posthumously inducted into the New Jersey Hall of Fame in 2008. Hofstra University established the F. Scott Fitzgerald Society in 1990. St. Mary’s Catholic Cemetery in Rockville, Maryland, holds his remains.
Browse the complete filmography of F. Scott Fitzgerald — every film, TV show, and documentary credit, ranked by popularity.
Every award, honor, and recognition received by F. Scott Fitzgerald — Grammys, hall-of-fame inductions, civic honors, lifetime achievements.
F. Scott Fitzgerald's bibliography — every authored, edited, and co-written book, ranked by edition count.
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A wall of memorable lines from F. Scott Fitzgerald — lyrics, interviews, and off-the-cuff remarks captured over a lifetime.
Let Me Tell You About the Very Rich. They Are Different from You and Me. They Possess and Enjoy Early, and It Does Something to Them, Makes Them Soft Where We Are Hard, and Cynical Where We Are Trustful, in a Way That, Unless You Were Born Rich, It Is Very Difficult to Understand. They Think, Deep in Their Hearts, That They Are Better Than We Are Because We Had to Discover the Compensations and Refuges of Life for Ourselves. Even When They Enter Deep into Our World or Sink Below Us, They Still Think That They Are Better Than We Are. They Are Different.
A Big Man Has No Time Really to Do Anything but Just Sit and Be Big.
Vitality Shows Not Only in the Ability to Persist, but in the Ability to Start Over.
What People Are Ashamed of Usually Makes a Good Story.
No Grand Idea Was Ever Born in a Conference, but a Lot of Foolish Ideas Have Died There.
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.
There Are No Second Acts in American Lives.
Joan Crawford Is Doubtless the Best Example of the Dramatic Flapper. the Girl You See at the Smartest Night Clubs Gowned to the Apex of Sophistication Toying Iced Glasses, with a Remote, Faintly Bitter Expression Dancing Deliriously Laughing a Great Deal with Wide, Hurt Eyes. It Takes Girls of Actual Talent to Get Away with This in Real Life.
With a Woman, I Have to Be Emotionally in It up to the Eyebrows, or It’s Nothing. with Me It Isn’t an Affair It Must Be the Real Thing . . . . Silly, Isn’t It? Look at All the Fun We Miss!
All I Kept Thinking About, Over and Over, Was ‘You Can’t Live Forever; You Can’t Live Forever.’
I’d Rather Have Written Conrad’s Nostromo Than Any Other Novel.
When I Was Fifteen I Went into the City from School to See Ina Claire in the Quaker Girl and Gertrude Ryan in Little Boy Blue. Confused by My Hopeless and Melancholy Love for Both of Them, I Was Unable to Choose Between Them so They Blurred into One Lovely Entity, the Girl.
Colleen Moore Represents the Young Collegiate the Carefree, Lovable Child Who Rules Bewildered but Adoring Parents with an Iron Hand. Who Beats Her Brothers and Beaus on the Tennis Courts, Dances Like a Professional and Has Infallible Methods for Getting Her Own Way. All Deliriously Celluloid but Why Not? the Public Notoriously Prefer Glamour to Realism. Pictures Like Miss Moore’s Flapper Epics Present a Glamorous Dream of Youth and Gaiety and Swift, Tapping Feet. Youth Actual Youth Is Essentially Crude. but the Movies Idealize It, Even as Gershwin Idealizes Jazz in Rhapsody in Blue.
Clara Bow Is the Quintessence of What the Term ‘Flapper’ Signifies as a Definite Description. Pretty, Impudent, Superbly Assured, as Worldly Wise, Briefly Clad and ‘Hard Berled’ as Possible. There Were Hundreds of Them Her Prototypes. Now, Completing the Circle, There Are Thousands More Patterning Themselves After Her.
European Actresses Were the First to Disregard Personal Appearance in Emotional Episodes. Disarranged Hair the Wrong Profile to the Camera Were of No Account During a Scene. Their Abandonment to Emotion Precluded All Thought of Beauty. Pola Negri Brought It to This Country. It Was Adopted by Some. but the Flappers Seem to Have Been a Bit Nervous as to the Results. It Was, Perhaps, Safer to Be Cute Than Character. This Little Alice White Girl, However, Appears to Have a Flair for This Total Lack of Studied Effect. She Is the Flapper Impulsive Child of the Moment Wildly Eager for Every Drop of Life. She Represents Not the American Flapper but the European.
Life Starts All Over Again When It Gets Crisp in the Fall.
Grow Up, and That Is a Terribly Hard Thing to Do. It Is Much Easier to Skip It and Go from One Childhood to Another.
Little-known facts about F. Scott Fitzgerald — origins, oddities, and behind-the-scenes details from a public life.
Zelda Fitzgerald died in a fire at the mental hospital where she was a voluntary patient, eight years after Scott’s death; she spent less than nine months in hospitals during the decade after his death.
Fitzgerald popularized the phrase the Jazz Age to describe the riotous 1920s; the Roaring Twenties entered popular use only in the 1940s.
He overcame alcoholism and was sober for over a year before his death, which occurred from a heart attack at Sheilah Graham’s apartment.
He was a mentor and close friend of Ernest Hemingway, but they grew apart as Hemingway’s fame rose and Fitzgerald’s declined; Hemingway disapproved of Fitzgerald writing for commercial magazines and Hollywood.
He struggled with writing screenplays because of the image-based medium, which contrasted with his language-based novel and short story skills.
He moved to Paris in 1924, writing The Great Gatsby there; the Fitzgeralds returned to the U.S. in 1930.
His unfinished novel The Last Tycoon was published posthumously.
He was portrayed by Tom Hiddleston in Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris 2011.
Frances Scott Fitzgerald Smith was his only child with Zelda.
He was named after Francis Scott Key, a distant relative.
He was of Irish-American descent.
His first novel, This Side of Paradise, was written shortly after attending Princeton.
In the late 1930s, he rented a house from Edward Everett Horton on his Encino estate for $200 a month; the area is now part of Highway 101.
He was a fourth cousin once removed of Wallis Warfield Simpson, Duchess of Windsor, through the Warfield family.
He cited Flaming Youth 1923 as the only film capturing the 1920s sexual revolution, lamenting that its success led to less daring imitations.
He is buried at St. Mary’s Catholic Cemetery in Rockville, Maryland.
He left Princeton during his junior year to join the U.S. Army after a rejection by Ginevra King.
The Gatsby Style was honored on a 32¢ U.S. postage stamp in the Celebrate the Century series released May 28, 1998.
He was portrayed by Malcolm Gets in Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle 1994.
He was nominated in the 2007 inaugural New Jersey Hall of Fame and elected in 2008.
A 23¢ U.S. postage stamp in the Literary Arts series debuted on September 27, 1996, in St. Paul, Minnesota.
Hofstra University established the F. Scott Fitzgerald Society in 1990, which became an affiliate of the American Literature Association; during the COVID-19 pandemic, the society organized an online reading of This Side of Paradise for its centenary.
He was portrayed by David Hoflin in Z: The Beginning of Everything 2015.
Quick answers to the questions readers ask most about F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Celebrities similar to F. Scott Fitzgerald — same craft, ranked by reach.
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