F. Scott Fitzgerald Biography Quotes 50 Report mistakes

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Born as	Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald
Occup.	Author
From	USA
Born	September 24, 1896 St. Paul, Minnesota, USA
Died	December 21, 1940 Hollywood, California, USA
Cause	Heart attack
Aged	44 years

Early Life and Education
Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was born on September 24, 1896, in St. Paul, Minnesota, into a family that combined modest means with a strong sense of heritage. He was named for the lyricist of The Star-Spangled Banner, a distant relative, and grew up conscious of both aspiration and constraint. His father, Edward Fitzgerald, had mixed success in business, and his mother, Mary McQuillan, came from a prosperous Irish American family. Fitzgerald attended local schools in St. Paul before enrolling at the Newman School in New Jersey, where a teacher encouraged his literary ambitions. In 1913 he entered Princeton University. He wrote for the Triangle Club and campus magazines and forged friendships with classmates who would remain central to his intellectual life, including Edmund Wilson and John Peale Bishop. Academic standing slipped under the weight of literary activity and illness, and he left Princeton without a degree.

War Years and Meeting Zelda Sayre
During World War I, Fitzgerald joined the U.S. Army and was commissioned a second lieutenant. Stationed at various camps, he ended up at Camp Sheridan in Alabama, where he met Zelda Sayre, the spirited daughter of an Alabama judge. He did not see combat, but the urgency he associated with wartime shaped his drive to publish. After the armistice, he returned to civilian life determined to prove himself to Zelda and to make his career as a writer.

Apprenticeship and First Success
Fitzgerald worked briefly in New York in advertising while revising a novel begun at Princeton. Accepted by editor Maxwell Perkins at Charles Scribner's Sons, This Side of Paradise appeared in 1920. Its portrait of collegiate youth made him an overnight celebrity. He and Zelda married that same year. The book's success transformed Fitzgerald from an ambitious novice into a national figure, part chronicler and part emblem of a new, audacious generation.

Marriage, Jazz Age Persona, and Short Fiction
The Fitzgeralds quickly became symbols of the era they helped name. He popularized the phrase Jazz Age and captured its exuberance and anxieties in stories written for magazines like the Saturday Evening Post. Their daughter, Frances Scott (Scottie), was born in 1921. Money flowed in from short fiction, but the couple's spending kept them in frequent financial distress. Fitzgerald formed close ties with his editor Perkins and with his agent Harold Ober, who juggled his magazine submissions. He befriended writers such as Ring Lardner and maintained a lively, sometimes fraught correspondence with Edmund Wilson, who offered both admiration and stern criticism.

The Beautiful and Damned and Growing Ambition
Published in 1922, The Beautiful and Damned examined glamour and waste in the lives of Anthony and Gloria Patch, extending themes of desire and disillusionment that would preoccupy him. At the same time, Fitzgerald gathered stories into volumes like Flappers and Philosophers and Tales of the Jazz Age, refining a style that was both lyrical and exacting.

The Great Gatsby
In 1924 the Fitzgeralds moved to Europe, living in Paris and on the French Riviera. There he worked on The Great Gatsby, published in 1925. Compact, patterned, and luminous, the novel drew on American vernacular and classical structure to explore wealth, longing, and moral failure. Jay Gatsby's dream, observed by Nick Carraway, became a central American myth. Though initial sales were modest, the book impressed peers and critics. In Paris, Fitzgerald moved among expatriates, including Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein, and befriended Gerald and Sara Murphy, whose hospitality on the Riviera influenced his sense of setting and society. Relations with Hemingway were complicated, a mix of admiration, rivalry, and personal vulnerability, but those encounters sharpened Fitzgerald's sense of artistic discipline.

Strains, Exile, and Tender Is the Night
The late 1920s brought personal strain. Zelda's health faltered, and she underwent hospitalizations in Europe and later at the Phipps Clinic at Johns Hopkins. Fitzgerald's drinking, never the source of his talent but often its enemy, intensified. He continued to write accomplished stories, later collected in All the Sad Young Men, yet struggled with the long novel that became Tender Is the Night (1934). Set largely on the Riviera, the book followed Dick and Nicole Diver, mapping the erosion of charm and authority through illness, money, and compromise. Although some early reviewers were lukewarm, the novel's reputation grew, and many writers and critics now regard it as one of his finest achievements. Throughout these years he relied on Perkins as a steady editorial presence and on friends like Wilson for candor, even when their judgments stung.

Professional Challenges and the Short Story Craft
Fitzgerald's finances depended on short fiction, which he treated as both craft and livelihood. He wrote with speed for magazines, then revised with care for book publication, balancing popular appeal with literary standards. Stories like Babylon Revisited and Winter Dreams distilled the arc of rise and reckoning that shadowed his generation. He understood how the marketplace shaped a writer's choices and felt the cost of that bargain, even as the stories exhibit technical polish and emotional resonance.

Hollywood and The Last Tycoon
In 1937 Fitzgerald moved to Hollywood to work as a screenwriter. He signed on with a major studio and contributed to films, receiving credit on Three Comrades under director Frank Borzage and working, sometimes uncredited, on other projects. Hollywood offered a paycheck and a new professional discipline, yet the collaborative, commercial nature of the industry often frustrated him. During this period he formed a relationship with the journalist Sheilah Graham, whose companionship steadied his routines as he attempted sobriety and regular work. He began a final, ambitious novel, The Last Tycoon, drawing on his observations of the studios and inspired in part by the life and legend of producer Irving Thalberg. The manuscript revealed a writer regaining control of his materials: taut scenes, moral nuance, and a renewed sympathy for driven, solitary figures.

Final Years and Death
By 1939 Fitzgerald's health was precarious. He tried to reduce drinking and to structure his days around steady writing. Zelda remained in treatment, and the burdens of illness and separation marked his letters and budgets. On December 21, 1940, he died of a heart attack in Hollywood at age 44, at the apartment where he had been living near Sheilah Graham. The Last Tycoon was published posthumously in 1941, edited from the existing drafts and notes.

Style, Themes, and Legacy
Fitzgerald's prose fused lyric richness with precision. He wrote about money without sentimentality and about love without cynicism, tracing how desire and status entangle. Time is a central pressure in his work: youth passing into knowledge; hope eroding into memory; the American promise confronting limits. He combined an ear for speech with a classical sense of form, creating scenes that feel emblematic yet alive. Although his reputation dipped in the years immediately after his death, wartime and postwar readers rediscovered The Great Gatsby, and by mid-century he stood as a canonical American author. Writers such as Hemingway acknowledged his gifts even when they differed with his methods, and critics like Edmund Wilson helped to preserve and frame his achievement. Today, the arc of his life and the reach of his fiction remain intertwined: the chronicler of an age who also mapped, with unusual clarity, its costs.

Our collection contains 50 quotes who is written by Scott Fitzgerald, under the main topics: Witty One-Liners - Ethics & Morality - Wisdom - Friendship - Writing.

Other people realated to Scott Fitzgerald: Thomas Wolfe (Novelist), George Jean Nathan (Editor)

F. Scott Fitzgerald Famous Works