Timeline:
- Born in St. Paul, Minnesota on September 24, 1896
- Attended the St. Paul Academy & Catholic prep school
- First published at age 13--a detective story in the school newspaper.
- Dropped out of Princeton in 1917 to join the army
- Commissioned as a second lieutenant in the infantry
- Met Zelda Sayre while stationed in Alabama
- Moved to New York City after honorable discharge
- Published first novel, This Side of Paradise in 1920
- Began working as a freelance story writer
- Married Zelda Sayre in April 1920
- Only child, Frances Scott Fitzgerald, born in October 1921 in St. Paul, Minnesota
- Wrote The Great Gatsby in France in the spring of 1924
- Zelda has first mental breakdown in 1930 while living in France; suffers a relapse in 1932 and is institutionalized
- In 1936, daughter Frances is sent to boarding school; Fitzgerald becomes ill and is unable to work
- Moves to Hollywood; works as a screen-writer for MGM, adapting the film Three Comrades
- Begins an affair with movie columnist Sheilah Graham
- Dies of a heart attack in Graham’s apartment on December 21, 1940
Fitzgerald believed that he had died a failure; he did not became accepted as a definitive American author until 1950-1960. The Great Gatsby, which examines the theme of aspiration in America, is now considered the "great American Novel."
Themes:
The chief themes in Fitzgerald’s work are aspiration and loss. He saw his time period in American history as “an age of miracles, it was an age of art, it was an age of excess, and it was an age of satire.” (From “Echoes of the Jazz Age.”) Fitzgerald was an alcoholic, but he wrote sober.
