Happy Birthday F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Eternal Flame

Coinciding with our thoughts on eternal life, we take a moment to recognize the birthday of one of America’s greatest writers, F. Scott Fitzgerald. Everything that can be said about Fitzgerald has most likely already been said. So we will leave it up to the archives. Check out his obituary from the Associated Press.

HOLLYWOOD, Dec. 22 (AP) Scott Fitzgerald, novelist, short-story writer and scenarist, died at his Hollywood home yesterday. He was forty-four years old. He suffered a heart attack three weeks ago.

Wrote of “Lost Generation”

F. Scott Fitzgerald is said to have invented the so-called “younger generation” of two decades ago. At any rate, he was the most articulate writer about the rich, young set which was also variously referred to as “the lost generation” and the “post-war generation,” and as such he acquired a reputation far out of proportion to his works, which were limited to four novels and several volumes of short stories.

All four novels were characterized by rich, loose-living characters, who grew older as Mr. Fitzgerald grew older. Invariably they met disillusionment and despair. In commenting on Mr. Fitzgerald’s last novel, “Tender Is the Night,” Clifton Fadiman, book critic for “The New Yorker,” summed up Mr. Fitzgerald’s career with the words:

“In Mr. Fitzgerald’s case, at any rate, money is the root of all novels. In ‘This Side of Paradise,’ Mr. Fitzgerald’s first and most successful novel, the world of super-wealth was viewed through the glass of undergraduate gayety, sentiment and satire. With ‘The Great Gatsby’ the good-time note was dropped, to be replaced by a darker accent of tragic questioning.”

“Questions Become Sharper”

“The questions have become sharper, bitterer in ‘Tender Is the Night,’ but the world of luxurious living remains his only world. This universe he both loves and despises. It is the contradictoriness of this emotional attitude that gives his novels their special quality, and is also in part responsible for some of their weaknesses.”

Mr. Fitzgerald came of an old Southern family. His great-grandfather’s brother was Francis Scott Key, composer of “The Star Spangled Banner.” The author was named after him. His father’s aunt was Mrs. Suratt, one of the conspirators hanged for the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.

Mr. Fitzgerald’s father went through several severe financial reverses, which gave his son an understandable fear of poverty. The family, however, was able to send him to Princeton University, where his undergraduate escapades are still remembered. He passed his entire freshman year writing a show for the Triangle Club, which was accepted, and then tutored in the subjects in which he had failed so he could come back and act in it.

Quit to Join Army

In 1917, in his senior year, he quit college to join the Army as a second lieutenant. He missed the train which was to take his regiment to Camp Sheridan, Ala., and according to the story he told friends, commandeered an engine and cab by telling Pennsylvania Railroad officials that he possessed confidential papers for President Wilson. He caught up with the troops in Washington. In camp he wrote his first novel, first titled “The Romantic Egotist.”

The war ended before his unit saw service and Mr. Fitzgerald tried to sell the novel. It was rejected. After holding a job in advertising in New York a few months, he quit and returned to St. Paul, where his family was living, and rewrote “The Romantic Egotist” under the title “This Side of Paradise.”

It was published in 1920 and was tremendously successful. The hero, Amory Blaine, a young Princeton undergraduate like Mr. Fitzgerald, was considered a composite of all the sad young men of the post-war flapper era, and the novel became a sort of social document of its time. Mr. Fitzgerald, who was only twenty-three years of age, was greeted as one of the most promising of young writers.

Married in Same Year

The same year Mr. Fitzgerald was married to Miss Zelda Sayre, daughter of Anthony D. Sayre, an Alabama Supreme Court Justice. In 1922 his second novel, “The Beautiful and Damned,” appeared. It was the story of a rich young married couple dancing on the edge of doom, and Mrs. Fitzgerald in a newspaper article said that several of the passages appeared to have come from her diary.

In 1923 he wrote “The Vegetable,” a satire in play form, and in 1925 “The Great Gatsby,” which was generally regarded as his best novel. It is the story of a mysterious man, whose money, it is implied, comes from something dishonest. In the end he is broken, not by his sins, but by his aspirations. Mr. Fitzgerald’s “Tales of the Jazz Age,” a book of short stories, was also popular.

The Fitzgeralds lived in France from 1925 to 1928, where Mr. Fitzgerald wrote short stories later incorporated in “All the Sad Young Men.” Returning in 1928, he said that “the French are as far above us as we are above the African Negro.” After an interval of nine years his last novel, “Tender Is the Night,” was published in 1934. Critics commented that he had never quite lived up to his early promise.

Called Himself “Cracked Plate”

In 1936, in a magazine article, Mr. Fitzgerald described himself as “a cracked plate.”

“Now the standard cure for one who is sunk is to consider those in actual destitution or physical suffering,” he wrote.

“This is an all-weather beatitude for gloom in general, but at 3 o’clock in the morning the cure doesn’t workòand in a real dark night of the soul it is always 3 o’clock in the morning.”

A reporter once asked him what he thought had become of the jazz-mad, gin-drinking generation he wrote of in “This Side of Paradise.”

His answer was: “Some became brokers and threw themselves out of windows. Others became bankers and shot themselves. Still others became newspaper reporters. And a few became successful authors.”

For the last three years, Mr. Fitzgerald had been in Hollywood. He had done little screen work recently, however, and his writing consisted of a few short stories for magazines and a play he was working on.

Surviving, besides his wife, who is living in Montgomery, Ala., is a daughter, Frances Scott Fitzgerald.