SOURCE CITATION
"F. Scott Fitzgerald." Authors and Artists for Young Adults. Vol. 24. Gale Research, 1998. Reproduced in Biography Resource Center. Farmington Hills, Mich.: Thomson Gale. 2007.

BIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY
F. Scott Fitzgerald died on the afternoon of December 21, 1940, suffering a fatal heart attack as he was finishing a chocolate bar--one of his placebos for the alcohol that had ravaged both his talent and health. He was with his lover, the British gossip columnist Sheilah Graham, at the time, living in Los Angeles and working as what he termed a Hollywood hack. The author of such classics as The Great Gatsby and Tender is the Night had taken any script work he could get in his final years in order to support his wife, Zelda, in a private mental institution, and his daughter, Scottie, at Vassar. Most of America had long forgotten this symbol of the Jazz Age, dead at forty-four--the handsome young writer who had won instant popularity with his first novel, This Side of Paradise. Eulogies were left for his few remaining friends to make; the obituary writers were not in a eulogizing mood, and painted Fitzgerald's meteoric rise and fall--it was a scant twenty years from his first success to his death--as visible proof of the hollowness of the excesses of the 1920s. But what the obituary writers ignored was that Fitzgerald was hard at work on his fifth novel when he died, his first since Tender is the Night. That novel, The Last Tycoon, left unfinished, is Fitzgerald's attempt to make sense out of Hollywood. His fictional protagonist, Monroe Stahr, is a self-made man, the head of a major studio, and Fitzgerald's description of Stahr's ambition and his tragic failure, could serve as an epitaph for Fitzgerald himself: "He had flown up very high to see, on strong wings, when he was young. And while he was up there he had looked on all the kingdoms, with the kind of eyes that can stare straight ahead into the sun. Beating his wings tenaciously--finally frantically--and keeping on beating them, he had stayed up there longer than most of us, and then, remembering all he had seen from his great height of how things were, he had settled gradually to earth."

Fitzgerald, following his death, was forgotten for a time, but not lost. By the 1950s, critical evaluation of his accomplishment had turned the corner, and he has been increasingly viewed as one of the most important American writers of the twentieth century, not simply the hagiographer of the flashy 1920s, but an artist who took as his themes fundamentally American motifs: the struggle for success and the costs such a struggle demand; the confusion of image and reality; and yes, also the world of wealth and romance, always tinged with a tragic edge. His novels, The Great Gatsby and Tender is the Night--"among the principal achievements of American literature," according to W. R. Anderson in Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook--have entered the canon of literature survey courses along with the best of his 160 short stories. From a forgotten writer at his death, Fitzgerald has risen to become one of the best known American authors. A hundred years after his birth, he is still being honored: His works and memorabilia were displayed at a massive exhibition at the University of South Carolina honoring the centenary of his birth in 1996. Speaking at the opening of that exhibit, Fitzgerald's long-time friend and fellow Hollywood writer, Bud Schulberg, noted that Fitzgerald's legacy was carried on through the works. As reported in Library Journal, Schulberg concluded his speech by saying that "we who read Scott and love his work, we are his immortality." But perhaps the most fitting summation of his life was that given by Alice B. Toklas, the companion of Gertrude Stein, who knew the Fitzgerald's during their Paris years. In her collected letters, Staying on Alone, Toklas called Fitzgerald "the most sensitive...the most distinguished--the most gifted and intelligent of all his contemporaries. And the most lovable--he is one of those great tragic American figures."

Among the Best and the Brightest
F. Scott Fitzgerald was born on September 24, 1896, in St. Paul, Minnesota, the only son of Edward and Mollie McQuillan Fitzgerald. Irish by ancestry, Fitzgerald was a distant relation of Francis Scott Key, who had penned the "Star-Spangled Banner," and despite financial setbacks the family tried desperately to maintain a patrician or at least upper-middle class lifestyle. Formative events occurred in the family prior to Fitzgerald's birth: Two older sisters died during an epidemic while Mollie was pregnant with her son. Another infant died only hours after its birth in 1900. Fitzgerald thus felt the over-protection that could result from such tragedies. But death was not the only cause for anguish in the Fitzgerald home. As the biographer Jeffrey Meyers pointed out in his Scott Fitzgerald: A Biography, the future author, "Like many American writers, including Ernest Hemingway, was the son of a weak father and strong mother." For the family, this meant that the father was much better at manners than at business. Edward Fitzgerald regaled his son with stories of his patrician, Confederate past, yet it was the mother's less patrician ancestors who had made successes of themselves in America. When Scott was two, the family moved to Buffalo and Syracuse, New York, where Edward took a position with Proctor & Gamble. For a decade the father held this position, but in 1908 he lost his job, and the family, including a daughter, Annabel, returned to St. Paul. Thereafter, they lived on Mollie's inheritance, always in rented houses, but in the best part of town. As a youth, Fitzgerald felt like "the outsider, the poor relation," according to Ruth Prigozy in Dictionary of Literary Biography. His father's failure set an early benchmark for Fitzgerald. He was later in life terrified of financial difficulties, and such fear ultimately dictated not only the theme of much of his writing, but also the type of writing he allowed himself to pursue. Lucrative short stories for the Saturday Evening Post market would take precedence over his more creative, novel-length efforts.

Fitzgerald was sent to a private school, the St. Paul Academy, from 1908 to 1911, and it was there that he wrote his first short stories, publishing them in the school magazine, Now and Then. Always eager to fit in and be admired, he tried out for sports but was too small for football. He found a niche in theater, however, writing plays and performing in school productions. After three years at the St. Paul Academy, poor grades forced him to withdraw. He then enrolled in the Newman School in Hackensack, New Jersey, where he continued his experiments in writing and in the theater. There he met the person "who would become the most influential figure in his early life, both creatively and personally," according to Prigozy. Father Sigourney Fay, a teacher and later director of the school, introduced Fitzgerald to the world of arts and letters, which included the writer, Shane Leslie, and also showed Fitzgerald another side of Catholicism, emphasizing the "beauty and richness of the experience [Fitzgerald] would always try to capture in his writing," as Prigozy noted. In all ways, the Newman experience was more successful for Fitzgerald than had been his years at St. Paul Academy. During the summers he also wrote plays for a St. Paul amateur theatrical society which were performed for charities.

In 1913, Fitzgerald entered Princeton University, and the following years would be central to his development as a writer. At Princeton he won a place for himself not with athletics, but with the pen, composing lyrics for the university's Triangle Club productions and writing for the Nassau Literary Magazine. He also made friendships that would continue to be important throughout his life with the future poet, John Peale Bishop, and the future critic and writer, Edmund Wilson, who became his intellectual conscience. He read widely: from Oscar Wilde to Compton Mackenzie, and from Bernard Shaw to H. G. Wells.

Fitzgerald was a handsome if not pretty man, and very much loved the drama and contest of romantic relationships. The Christmas of his sophomore year, he more than met his match in Ginevra King, a young debutante from Chicago whose family wealth put her out of Fitzgerald's league. She became important in another way for him, however--as a fictional prototype of the beautiful but elusive woman he used over and over in his fiction. Despite his social success at Princeton, bad grades once again plagued him, and he had to withdraw from school in 1916. Though he returned the following year, he never graduated. A war and literary fame intervened.

Chronicler of the Jazz Age
Back at Princeton in the fall of 1917, Fitzgerald continued writing stories, but also felt the pull to join the army and get in on the European war. He applied for a commission in the U.S. Army, and in October, 1917, he was appointed a second lieutenant, stationed in Montgomery, Alabama. He would spend fifteen months in the service, and never be posted overseas. Yet his military career was far from a total failure. It was in Alabama that Fitzgerald met the eighteen-year-old Zelda Sayre, daughter of a judge on the Alabama Supreme Court, who would become his wife. Zelda was bright, glamorous, and beautiful, fitting Fitzgerald's requirements for a bride, and he courted her with a will. During these early months in the Army, Fitzgerald continued writing short stories and also completed the first draft of a novel he entitled "The Romantic Egoist," a loosely autobiographical, coming-of-age story. Submitted to Charles Scribner's Sons, the manuscript fell on the desk of the editor, Max Perkins, who encouraged Fitzgerald to rewrite it.

Discharged from the Army in 1919, Fitzgerald worked for a time in New York writing advertising copy. His romance with Zelda had been put on hold--he could not ask for her hand as a penniless wordsmith. Returning to St. Paul, he reworked his novel and submitted it again to Scribner under the title, This Side of Paradise. Perkins accepted the manuscript this time, and the book was published in the spring of 1920. While waiting for publication, Fitzgerald also worked on short fiction, and with the help of his new agent, Harold Ober, was able to place several of his stories in national magazines, including the Smart Set and Saturday Evening Post, the latter buying "Head and Shoulders" for $400, a not inconsiderable sum in 1920. Film rights to the novel were soon sold for another $2,500, and Fitzgerald felt he had arrived. Zelda and he were married in New York on April 3, 1920, a week after publication of his first novel.

This Side of Paradise is Fitzgerald at his most autobiographical, thinly disguising himself as his protagonist, Amory Blaine, whose life parallels Fitzgerald's own. Blaine's fictional Princeton years, in particular, draw on much of the material Fitzgerald had himself experienced: a failed romance, difficulty with grades because of the draw of more seductive pursuits, and the influence of friends, modeled on the real-life Bishop and Wilson. Writing on Fitzgerald's novels in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Scott Donaldson noted that in form "This Side of Paradise is less a novel than the collected works, to 1920, of its twenty-three-year-old author." Fitzgerald used poems, short stories, and even fragments of earlier plays in the novel, and though some reviewers found such a form experimental and daring, it was actually a result of Fitzgerald learning his craft on the job. In content, the novel also owed much to Mackenzie's Sinister Street, a novel Fitzgerald much admired.

Though reviews were mixed, the novel became quite popular, selling more than 40,000 copies in 1920. Its popularity is somewhat difficult to understand so many years later when mores have so drastically changed. But in its day, the activities of its young protagonists--the casual kiss and drink, the rude treatment of parents--were enough to brand them rebels. It is, in part, this high-spirited refutation of the old order that won the novel readers, but there was also that ineffable quality of spirit and life in the prose. Fitzgerald's college friend, Edmund Wilson, noted this quality in his Shores of Light: A Literary Chronicle of the Twenties and Thirties. Though Wilson found the book committed almost every sin of literature, he also concluded that "it does not commit the unpardonable sin: it does not fail to live." Other reviewers at the time were more effusive in praise. H. L. Mencken, in the Smart Set, observed that the book was "a truly amazing first novel-- original in structure, extremely sophisticated in manner, and adorned with a brilliancy that is as rare in American writing as honesty is in American statecraft." Harry Hansen wrote in the Chicago Daily News that the work was "one of the few American novels extant.... Fitzgerald has taken a real American type--the male flapper of our best colleges--and written him down with startling verisimilitude."

Fitzgerald's publishers followed up this success with publication of a collection of his short stories, Flappers and Philosophers, and thus began a usual cycle at Scribner: publication of a novel followed by a short story collection, establishing the dual career of Fitzgerald as both serious novelist and entertaining short story writer. Fitzgerald often railed at the time he had to spend on his short stories simply to earn enough money for the sort of lifestyle he and Zelda established in the 1920s, yet some of his best work is to be found in the short stories. As Prigozy noted in her critique of Fitzgerald's short fiction in Dictionary of Literary Biography, "at least a dozen of [Fitzgerald's] stories rank among the very best short fiction written in the twentieth century." In this first collection, two stories are notable, "The Ice Palace" and "Bernice Bobs Her Hair." In "The Ice Palace," a southern belle cannot tolerate the cold northern climate of her fiance's home, and after being trapped for a time in an ice palace, decides to return to her roots in the South. The daring flapper type was established in "Bernice Bobs Her Hair," when the young female protagonist accepts the dares of her friends to cut her hair short in the new fashion of the day. These two stories, according to Donaldson in Dictionary of Literary Biography, "belong with the best of [Fitzgerald's] tales." Those attracted to Fitzgerald's first novel also purchased his short story collection, and increasingly over the next decade and more, Fitzgerald relied on the magazine market to support him and his family, eventually earning $4,000 per story from the Saturday Evening Post. In 1922, he earned $25,000, most of it from short stories.

Fitzgerald needed such sums to finance the whirlwind lifestyle he and Zelda adopted, for the couple never owned a home, rather staying in luxurious hotel accommodations or renting large estates in the United States and Europe. In the first years of their marriage they lived in New York City and Westport, Connecticut, and then traveled to Europe. Returning to the U.S., they settled for a time in St. Paul, and then moved on to fashionable Great Neck, Long Island. Already in place in the first two years of their marriage was the heavy drinking and partying the couple would indulge in for the next decade. They were the darling couple, the daring ones, the rule breakers, living out a life Fitzgerald had chronicled in his fiction. Their daughter, Scottie, was born in 1921, but her birth did not slow down their social life.

Yet amid all this frivolous living, Fitzgerald managed to publish his second novel, The Beautiful and the Damned, in 1922. This work describes the disintegration of a beautiful young couple, Anthony and Gloria Patch, something of a prescient announcement of what would ultimately happen to Fitzgerald's own marriage. The book was, according to Donaldson, "Fitzgerald's bleakest novel, infected by a tone of cynicism." The reviews were largely negative for this novel, though it sold relatively well. Fitzgerald followed it up with a play, The Vegetable, which never made it to Broadway as Fitzgerald had hoped. Important about both these works, however, is the exploration of themes vital to Fitzgerald's later work: the negative effects of too much money, and the tragedy of misplaced love.

In between these two works came publication of a further collection of short stories, Tales of the Jazz Age, which contained his popular fantasy tale, "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz," the novella-length "May Day," and "Winter Dreams," which deals with a major Fitzgerald theme--the encounter of wealth by a young man and how it changes him forever. Like so many other Fitzgerald protagonists, Dexter Green of "Winter Dreams" is in love with image over reality, and such a misplaced love costs him dearly. Otherwise, the collection was meager stuff, most of it written before 1920 and more suited to the magazine market, with its happy endings and reliance on plot, than to the book market. But as the humorist and writer Dorothy Parker once noted, Fitzgerald could write a bad story, but he never wrote badly. Steven Goldleaf, reviewing Fitzgerald's short stories in Reference Guide to Short Fiction, noted that "Fitzgerald's power derives from his rhythm and imagery, and his weakness was in developing plots and characters. Emphasizing language and de-emphasizing structure is more typical of poetry than prose and Fitzgerald's stories often resemble poems." Fitzgerald's best stories feature one moment of epiphany, of extreme intensity and realization, or, as Fitzgerald himself was fond of describing it, "some sort of epic grandeur."

The Great Gatsby
Fitzgerald's own moment of epic grandeur came with the writing of The Great Gatsby, the novel for which he is best remembered, the novel which is widely recognized as an American classic inspiring small libraries of literary criticism. Shortly after Fitzgerald's death in 1940, a critic in the New Yorker called The Great Gatsby "one of the most scrupulously observed and beautifully written of American novels," and such has remained its repute to this day. The critic Malcolm Cowley noted in his introduction to Three Novels: The Great Gatsby, Tender is the Night, The Last Tycoon that "There is a moment in any real author's career when he suddenly becomes capable of doing his best work. He has found a fable that expresses his central truth and everything else falls into place around it.... Something like that happened to Fitzgerald when he invented the story of Jimmy Gatz, otherwise known as Jay Gatsby." Fitzgerald was already mapping out his third novel in 1922 and also devoted part of 1923 to the writing of early portions of the book, but it was not until the family moved to France in 1924--in part to try and live more economically--that he settled down to work in earnest.

Of course, Fitzgerald's attempt at economical living was doomed from the outset. Not for the Fitzgeralds was the bohemian life of the Left Bank, populated by such writers as Ernest Hemingway. Scott and Zelda kept to the fashionable hotels of the Right Bank, eating at the most expensive restaurants. By the end of May, the Fitzgeralds had left Paris for the Riviera, taking a villa near St. Raphael. There they met the wealthy Murphys, Sara and Gerald, with whom they would remain friends for years. Through the Murphys they in turn met many artists of the day, including the painters Pablo Picasso and George Braque, the composer Igor Stravinsky, and a score of others who would help shape literature, art, and music in the twentieth century. Though Fitzgerald was socializing heavily, he managed to finish a first draft of his novel by the end of August. It was that summer, also, that Zelda formed a liaison with a dashing French naval officer, prompting a crisis in the Fitzgerald home, but also contributing future material for Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night. But despite all these emotional distractions, Fitzgerald was able to promise his editor, Perkins, a revised version of the novel by that fall.

True to his word, Fitzgerald sent off the revised manuscript in late October of 1924. His working titles for the book included a rather macabre list of possibilities: "Gold-Hatted Gatsby," "Trimalchio in West Egg," and "The High-Bouncing Lover." However, at Perkins' insistence, the novel was ultimately published as simply The Great Gatsby. Written in France, the book is, however, profoundly American in theme and tone. It is a short novel, only some 50,000 words, but tightly written, and one that blends so many aspects of character with so much incident that it feels much longer. The novel is the story of the mysterious Jay Gatsby, born Gatz, who, during the war as a young officer, met and fell in love with a woman and lost her because of his lack of riches and promise. After the war, Gatsby made his fortune, realizing the American dream--though in a less than legal manner-- by bootlegging liquor. Four years later, Gatsby has come to reclaim his lost love, Daisy Buchanan, now married to Tom, whose wealth shields the couple from the real world. Daisy has had a daughter, and Tom has a mistress, Myrtle Wilson, the wife of a garage owner near the Buchanan's Long Island estate where the novel is largely set. Gatsby takes a house across the bay from the Buchanans, and tries in his bumbling and rather uncouth way to win Daisy. The novel thus chronicles the clash of the rich and the poor and the newly rich, the conflict between the old East with its cynical ways, and the raw, brash, but morally upright West.

Gatsby's failed attempt to win the hand of his beloved is narrated by Nick Carraway, himself a young man of the West, who rents a cottage close to Gatsby's estate and witnesses the lavish parties and visits by strange colleagues at the Gatsby residence. Nick is also a cousin of Daisy's and has been to Yale with Tom. Fresh from Minnesota, Nick is in turn aided in this recounting by another witness, Jordan Baker, who helps to supply information to further the story. Critics point out that these narrative devices are reminiscent of both Henry James and Joseph Conrad, and lend the novel a miasma of mystery, for the reader is never really sure of which information is true and which false. Ultimately, The Great Gatsby is a tale of tragic love and murder, for Gatsby is mistakenly killed by Myrtle Wilson's husband, prompting Nick to finally realize that the Buchanans were "careless people...who smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess." It is Gatsby, in the end, who becomes the romantic, tragic hero of the piece, a man who loved well but not wisely, a man who despite his bad taste and illegal money was "worth the whole damn bunch put together," according to Nick.

As Donaldson noted in Dictionary of Literary Biography, "The Great Gatsby has inspired probably as much critical commentary as any other twentieth- century novel, but it is so intricately patterned and tightly knit...that it hardly seems possible that criticism will exhaust the novel." Early reviews were largely positive. Gilbert Seldes, writing in The Dial, observed that with The Great Gatsby, "Fitzgerald...has mastered his talents and gone soaring in a beautiful flight.... Scenes of incredible difficulty are rendered with what seems an effortless precision." In a letter to the author, the poet T. S. Eliot concluded that for him, The Great Gatsby was "the first step that American fiction has taken since Henry James." Some reviewers of the day, such as H. L. Mencken in his critical study, F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Man and His Work, missed the mark, calling the book "no more than a glorified anecdote." John M. Kenny, writing in Commonweal, dubbed it "a mediocre novel."

But time has stood on the side of critics like Eliot, and after Fitzgerald's death, the critics looked at The Great Gatsby with new eyes, finding it to be a powerful statement about the material culture of the 1920s and of the American dream gone awry. Writing in 1942 in his On Native Grounds: An Interpretation of Modern American Prose Literature, the literary critic Alfred Kazin called the novel "one of the most moving of American tragedies," applauding the author's deep understanding of his protagonist, Jay Gatsby. Other critics began comparing it to the greats of the American canon, noting the sophistication of technique, the tight interweaving of various story strands, and the deft hand used to narrate the events of the fable through the voice of Nick Carraway. "One of the happiest decisions was to present The Great Gatsby through the mind and eye of a narrator only partially committed to participating in and judging its world," observed Frederick J. Hoffman in his Modern Novel in America: 1900-1950. "Gatsby himself, to look at him through Carraway's eyes, is a tragic victim...."

Carraway, as narrator, has himself spawned a cottage industry of criticism, with speculations on both his reliability and sexual orientation. Other critics found the book as a whole to represent the pinnacle of Fitzgerald's art. Douglas Taylor, in the University of Kansas City Review, while commenting on the mythic quality of The Great Gatsby and the Christ-like character of Gatsby, also declared that "In precision of workmanship, elegance of prose style, and control of dramatic point of view, [The Great Gatsby] represents to my mind Fitzgerald's genius at its sustained best." Still other critics have focussed on the themes in the novel, and many have fixed on the contrast of money and power. Writing in his The American Novel and Its Tradition, the critic and educator Richard Chase noted that the "special charm of Gatsby rests in its odd combination of romance with a realistic picture of raw power--the raw power of the money that has made a plutocracy," and also observed that the novel "gives us an unforgettable...sense of the 1920's and what the people were like who lived in them." Barry Gross, writing in Centennial Review, summed up Gatsby and his particular power to draw in readers of all generations: "Gatsby represents nothing less than wonder itself, the heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, the extraordinary gift for hope, the romantic readiness that makes life a journey." In the novel, it is left to Nick Carraway, after Gatsby's poorly attended funeral and the glimpse into the real history of the man, to introduce the motif of Gatsby as the romantic searcher. Sitting on the lawn, looking at the green dock light of the Buchanan's which had caught Gatsby's attention, he compares Gatsby's journey and illusion to that of the nation itself: "He had come a long way," Nick observed, "to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in the vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night."

Despite favorable reviews, the book did not sell well, going through only two printings of about 24,000 copies in 1925 and earning Fitzgerald about $2,000 after all his advances from Scribner and his agent had been paid back. Though stage and film adaptations of The Great Gatsby helped in his continual financial battle, Fitzgerald had to return to the short story.

Tender Is the Night
The Fitzgeralds stayed on in France through 1926. It was during those years that Fitzgerald met Ernest Hemingway, a writer he had earlier championed to his editor, Max Perkins, at Scribner. Fitzgerald was drawn to Hemingway's charm and discipline, and Hemingway in turn found Fitzgerald to be a talented author, though one who never fully achieved his potential. Zelda, during these years, was searching for her own means of expression, first in painting, then in dance, and finally in literature. Another short story collection, All the Sad Young Men, was published in 1926, and included the story, "The Rich Boy," a further exploration of some of the themes appearing in The Great Gatsby, and a story, according to Donaldson in Dictionary of Literary Biography, that was among Fitzgerald's "very best." Sold initially to Red Book magazine, this story earned more than the royalties from The Great Gatsby.

While still in France, Fitzgerald began taking notes for what would become his fourth novel, Tender Is the Night. The book was a long time in the making, not appearing until 1934. Meanwhile, the Fitzgeralds' lifestyle was becoming increasingly destructive, alcohol playing a large part in the mix. Zelda was beginning to show signs of the strain that would ultimately consign her to a mental institution for the rest of her days. In 1926 the Fitzgeralds returned to the United States and Fitzgerald worked in Hollywood for a time, then moved to Delaware to attempt a settled life style. Zelda threw herself into ballet lessons while Fitzgerald turned out short stories for the magazines, primarily the Saturday Evening Post.

Returning to France in 1929, the Fitzgeralds were once again living on the edge, and Fitzgerald's novel-in-progress had already gone through several metamorphoses. Summering on the Riviera near their friends, Sara and Gerald Murphy, Fitzgerald made a fresh start on his novel, modeling his protagonists on the Murphys and also incorporating thematic material from his own short story, "The Rough Crossing." Still, writing short stories interfered with the novel--he was earning $4,000 per story now--as well as drinking and an increasingly psychological strain between Fitzgerald and Zelda, who was now also writing short stories. The Stock Market crash of 1929 was a death knell for the excesses of the 1920s; the following spring Zelda suffered a nervous breakdown, and the beautiful young couple was no more. Ultimately Zelda was sent to a Swiss sanatorium where she was diagnosed as a schizophrenic. Though Zelda was released from this sanatorium, it was only to be the first of a series of such experiences. Financing her treatment would henceforth be a major concern for Fitzgerald.

The Fitzgeralds returned to the U.S. in 1931, and that same year he published the short story "Babylon Revisited," one of his most-anthologized stories and one which attempted to put some meaning to his own experiences in Europe. For a time, Zelda strengthened, and returned to writing, but upon the death of her father in 1932, she suffered another breakdown and thereafter was never free of mental illness. Through it all, however, Fitzgerald continued writing, and finally in 1934, nine years after publication of his previous novel, Tender Is the Night was published.

That novel is essentially the story of the disintegration of the psychiatrist, Dick Diver, who marries his patient, Nicole Warren. As usual, Fitzgerald included large dollops of autobiography in his story. When Dick meets Nicole, she is a young patient in a Swiss clinic, daughter of a wealthy Chicago businessman; Diver is a promising young psychiatrist. Ultimately, however, Dick sacrifices his career in order to make Nicole whole again. His attempt fails, and Nicole takes up with another man, while Diver returns to small-town practice in America. On another level, however, the story is also a chronicle of the destructive forces of the 1920s--Dick Diver is not only ruined by his love for Nicole, but also by the seductive charm of expatriate life in Paris and on the Riviera. Fitzgerald put many personal experiences into this work, including Zelda's affair with the French aviator and his own shipboard romance with a young American starlet whom he met on one of his many sailings between France and the United States. Fitzgerald told this story not in straight chronological order, but by beginning with the Divers in the prime of their marriage in 1925; then he goes back and forth between 1917 and 1925, and follows their disintegration to 1929 and the Stock Market crash which acts as a symbolic finale. Using this structure, Fitzgerald parallels the destruction of the Divers with the loss of American innocence in the decade following World War One.

Tender Is the Night has often been linked with The Great Gatsby as Fitzgerald's crowning achievements. Much of the criticism that appeared upon publication of the novel, however, dealt with its political implications. Reviewers were more interested in reading into it a judgement on the boom- and-bust of the 1920s and the 1930s, rather than examining it as a work of art. Seldes, writing in the New York Evening Journal, championed the work, declaring that Fitzgerald had written "the great novel." But most critics of the day voiced disappointment with the work. Henry Seidel Canby observed in The Saturday Review of Literature that the novel was "brilliant" in places, but overall complained of Fitzgerald's "laziness" in botched structure, theme, and style. The world had changed since the 1920s. In the midst of the Great Depression, readers and critics were no longer charmed by the excesses of wealthy expatriates. Only 13,000 copies of the novel were sold in the first two years after its publication.

Fitzgerald tried to answer his critics regarding structural problems in the novel with a revised edition, but over the years it is his original version that has been adapted. Time, also, has reversed the earlier negative critical reception. Increasingly, Tender Is the Night has been praised for the richness of its style, the intricate interplay of stories, and the depth of its thematic devices. In Critical Quarterly, the English poet and critic John Lucas observed that Tender Is the Night "is about breakdowns: breakdowns in marriages, friendships, and individuals; breakdowns suggestive of a larger breakdown which, in the last analysis, involves the whole of Western society," and noted that the conclusion, with Dick moving back to the United States, "is a very moving ending and a supremely tactful one." The thematic depths of the novel have also been acknowledged. Writing in the Fitzgerald/Hemingway Annual: 1978, Bruce L. Grenberg concluded that Tender Is the Night "presents with the clearest intensity Fitzgerald's profound paradoxical conception that man's nobility lies in his unyielding efforts to be his best self--even when faced with certain defeat, that man's tragedy lies in his failure to recognize his own limitations and live with them." As a mirror of his own life and the life of the times he inhabited, Tender Is the Night has found a special place in Fitzgerald's collected works. David Littlejohn, writing in Commonweal, observed that "Fitzgerald's genius, as Tender Is the Night gives witness, was fully to understand the hopelessness, even the appalling viciousness of the romantic ideal he created."

The Last Years and The Last Tycoon
The negative reception of Tender Is the Night did not stop Fitzgerald from writing short stories. As always, such stories were absolutely essential to his finances, even more so now that Zelda required constant treatment. In 1937, Fitzgerald made another foray into the world of screenwriting, accepting a $1,000 per week salary from MGM, despite his decline in popularity and his own self-declared "moral bankruptcy." In Hollywood he worked on the film Three Comrades, but other scripts were failures and soon he was left to turning out a series of stories which sold for only $250 each. He continued to drink destructively, though a relationship with the columnist Sheilah Graham did provide some domestic stability. Zelda was lost to him forever, and his daughter was in college. Fitzgerald started one last creative effort in these years, the unfinished novel The Last Tycoon.

Monroe Stahr is Fitzgerald's last great romantic hero, a self-fashioned man and head of a powerful studio in Hollywood. Much of the action is recounted by Cecilia Brady, daughter of another studio boss, and a woman who is partly in love with the illusive Stahr. Stahr, meanwhile, is in love with his own creative work as well as with a young actress, Kathleen Moore, whom he ultimately loses. Once again, the quintessential Fitzgerald hero loves unwisely and--as Fitzgerald had sketched in the ending to his novel--comes to ruin. While at work on this fifth novel, Fitzgerald died, but the unfinished novel was published the following year.

The Fitzgerald legend has continued to grow since the time of his death, aided in part by biographies by Arthur Mizener, Andrew Turnbull, and the critical work of Matthew J. Bruccoli. Fitzgerald's works have been translated into thirty-five languages and continue to sell about half a million copies a years. Recent critical attention has also placed Fitzgerald among the contemporary masters of the short story. Fitzgerald and his wife were ultimately reunited in death--Zelda died in a fire in a mental hospital in 1948. In 1975 their bodies were interred together in the cemetery at St. Mary's Church in Rockville, Maryland, near where Fitzgerald's parents were buried. The epitaph cut in the couple's gravestone was the last line from The Great Gatsby: "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."

In the final analysis, perhaps Fitzgerald's biography is, as the biographer Jeffrey Meyers suggested, a cautionary tale. "Fitzgerald's short life was in many ways a tragic one," Meyers wrote in Scott Fitzgerald: A Biography. "His greatest work shows what happens to people who pursue illusory American dreams, and how society (which they have rejected) fails to sustain them in their desperate hour.... Fitzgerald courageously explored and revealed his own character. He has left us, not a glamorous legend, but a vivid record of self-examination."

UPDATES
September 8, 2003: Fitzgerald's letters to Ginevra King, written over a two-year period after they met as teenagers, are donated by King's daughter and granddaughters to the collection of Fitzgerald's papers housed at Princeton University. King inspired several of Fitzgerald's characters, including Daisy Buchanan in The Great Gatsby. Source: New York Times, www.nytimes.com, September 8, 2003.
July 13, 2004: Fitzgerald's novel The Great Gatsby was serialized in its entirety in the New York Times' Metro section as part of a summer promotion. Source: Associated Press, http://customwire.ap.org (July 13, 2004)r> October 28, 2005: The film G, written by Christopher Scott Cherot and Charles E. Drew Jr. and directed by Cherot, was based on Fitzgerald's novel The Great Gatsby. The movie was released by Andrew Lauren Productions. Source: New York Times, www.nytimes.com, October 28, 2005.

CAREER
Novelist, poet, playwright, screenwriter, and author of short stories. Worked briefly as a copywriter at Barron Collier Advertising Agency in New York City, 1919; worked sporadically as a screenwriter at motion picture studios in Los Angeles, CA, including Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and United Artists, 1927-40, contributing to filmscripts such as Winter Carnival, The Women, and Gone With the Wind, all 1939. Military Service: U.S. Army, 1917- 19; became second lieutenant.