Francis Scott Fitzgerald

Francis Scott Fitzgerald

Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald is known as one of the most important

American writers of his time. He wrote about the troubling time period in which he lived known as the Jazz Age. During this era people were either rich or dreamt of great wealth. Fitzgerald fell into the trap of wanting to be wealthy, and suffered great personal anguish because of these driving forces. I have chosen to write a term paper on F.Scott Fitzgerald. The goal of this presentation is to show F. Scott Fitzgerald's life through his defeats and triumphs and how these situations affected his life as a writer.

Fitzgerald's life started in the Midwestern part of the United States.

On September 24, 1896, he was born in St. Paul, Minnesota. F. Scott

Fitzgerald was of Irish heritage on both sides and was distantly related to

Francis Scott Key, for whom he is named, and to Maryland aristocracy. His parents, Edward Fitzgerald of the Glen Mary Farm near Rockville, Maryland and

Mary McQuillan of St. Paul wed February 13, 1890 in Washington, D.C. Fitzgerald' s maternal grandfather was a very successful wholesale merchant. His grandfather's early death and his father's inability to keep a job, forced the family to be extremely dependent on the wealth of his grandfather's estate.

Fitzgerald attended the St. Paul Academy as a child. In 1911 he entered the

Newman School in Hackensack, NJ. Growing up with a father who was out of work and who relied on his wife's inheritance gave Fitzgerald a mixed feeling of guilt and shame and yet he felt love for both his parents. These inner conflicts in his early life could have contributed to his inability to manage his finances, along with his constant obsession of gaining extreme wealth.

Fitzgerald later went to Princeton University, where writing and football were his main interests. It was there that he met friends Edmund

Wilson and John Peale Bishop. Fitzgerald was too small to play football so he joined a fraternity called the triangle club, the second most prestigious cliche on campus, football being first. After Princeton, Fitzgerald was quoted as saying to a friend “I want to be the greatest writer who ever lived don't you

(Bruccoli, 1981).” In 1917, Fitzgerald joined the army and prepared to fight in

World War I. It was soon after his mobilization that he sold his fir...

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... ceaselessly into the past” (Grolier

Encyclopedia, 1993). Showing his failed attempts to reach back into the past made him into someone who felt he had no control upon his destiny, because it could never be as successful as his past. He did know that his work would have a permanent claim upon the American Literary World.

Fitzgerald's life mirrored his novels. His live was filled love and tragedy. He pursued his dreams, and in real life, often lived those dreams. He longed to capture his youth and its purity. He produced thousands of short stories, often times to support their frivolous lifestyles as well as to tell their stories. Many scholars have critiqued his work and their desire to interpret Fitzgerald's work line the shelves of libraries. The Great Gatsby is a Great American Classic in which hundreds of thousands of copies are sold each year to high school and college students every where. Much of his work has been translated into 35 languages. It's ironic that more of Fitzgerald's books are sold every year than were sold during his lifetime. Sometimes it takes more than a lifetime to reach your goals and Fitzgerald found a way to accomplish his goals without living forever.