Great Gatsby

Great Gatsby4

From the time he wrote his first novel, F. Scott Fitzgerald was bound to be a classic novelist, portraying his life from birth, through his youth, and through his older years in mostly all of his novels, including his most popular novel, The Great Gatsby. Fitzgerald’s life from youth to death found full expression in some 160 short stories (Prigozy, 1). The elegiac note that characterizes his reminiscences of his early childhood and struggling adolescence greatly affected his work (Prigozy, 1).

F. Scott Fitzgerald was born on September 24, 1897 in St. Paul, Minnesota. His father, Edward Fitzgerald was a distinguished lawyer, Fitzgerald’s mother, Mary McQuillan, was left with the inheritance of a million-dollar grocery business after her parents’ death (Philips, 1).

Fitzgerald was an intellectual, and he was a very dramatic child, but did poorly in school and he was often known as an outcast (Philips, 1). He grew up experiencing the end of WW1 and the jazz age. He also got to experience the roaring twenties (Prigozy, 1). He moved many times with his family in his young age. His family often moved to different apartments in the same cities (Prigozy, 1). These, his teen years, had a great impact on his life. “A sense of estrangement so characteristic of his formative years marks much of his fiction, from the first short stories, written when he was thirteen, to his last efforts in Hollywood” (Prigozy, 2). In 1911, at the age of fourteen, Fitzgerald was enrolled into St. Paul academy. This would be where he published his first few short stories in the school magazine. He later re-created his school years in the Basil Duke Lee series, which showed what it was like to be an outsider and to be disliked, as Fitzgerald was (Prigozy, 2). He was an average student, but managed to get into Princeton in 1913, from which he never graduated (Philips, 1). His years at Princeton were the most influential on his writings, mostly because of a man named John Peale Bishop. Bishop introduced Fitzgerald to poetry, that especially of John Keats and Edmund Wilson, who would become the “intellectual conscience” of Fitzgerald’s life (Prigozy, 3). Instead of graduating, he enlisted into the Army at the end of WW1, which is when he met his wife Zelda Sayre, whom he met in a boot camp during the war (Philips, 2).