Francis
Scott key Fitzgerald was born on September 24, 1896, and named after his
ancestor Francis Scott key. Fitzgerald was raised in
Fitzgerald became a second lieutenant, and was stationed at
Camp Sheridan, in Montgomery, Alabama. There he met and fell in love with a wild
seventeen-years-old beauty named Zelda Sayre. Zelda finally agreed to marry
him, but her overpowering desire for wealth, fun, and leisure led her to delay
their wedding until he could prove a success. With the publication of this side
of paradise in 1920, Fitzgerald became a literary sensation, earning enough
money and fame to convince Zelda to marry him.
Many of these events from Fitzgerald's early life appear in
his most famous novel, The Great Gatsby, published in 1925. Like Fitzgerald,
Nick Caraway is a thoughtful young man from Minnesota ,
educated at an Ivy League school, who moves to New York after the war. Also similar to
Fitzgerald is Jay Gatsby, a sensitive young man who idolizes wealth and luxury
and who falls in love with a beautiful young woman while stationed at a
military camp in the south.
Having become a celebrity, Fitzgerald fell into a wild,
reckless life-style of parties, while desperately trying to please Zelda by
writing to earn money. Similarly, Gatsby amasses a great deal of wealth at a
relatively young age, and devotes himself to acquiring possessions and throwing
parties that he believes will enable him to win Daisy's love. Depression,
however, Zelda suffered a nervous breakdown and Fitzgerald battled alcoholism,
which hampered his writing. He published tender is the night in 1934, and sold
short stories to the Saturday evening post to support his lavish lifestyle. In
1937, he left for Hollywood
to write screenplays, and in 1940 while working on his novel the love of the
last tycoon, died of a heart attack at the age of forty-four.
Fitzgerald was the most famous chronicler of 1920s America,
an era that he explained Jazz Age. Written in 1925, The Great Gatsby is one of
the greatest literary documents of this period, in which the American economy
soared, bringing unparalleled levels of prosperity to the nation. Prohibition,
the ban on the sale and consumption of alcohol mandated by the Eighteenth
Amendment to the Constitution (1919), made millionaires out of bootleggers, and
an underground culture of having a good time sprang up. The chaos and violence
of World War I left America
in a state of shock, and the generation that fought the war wild and
extravagant living to compensate.
Like Nick in The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald found this new
lifestyle seductive and exciting, and, like Gatsby, he had always idolized the
very rich. Now he found himself in an era in which materialism set the tone of
society, particularly in the large cities of the East. Even so, like Nick,
Fitzgerald saw through the glitter of the Jazz Age to the moral emptiness and
hypocrisy beneath, and part of him longed for this absent moral center. In many
ways, the Great Gatsby represents
Fitzgerald’s attempt to confront his conflicting feelings
about the Jazz Age. Like Gatsby, Fitzgerald was driven by his love for woman
who symbolized everything he wanted, even as she led him toward everything he
found worthless.
