F. Scott Fitzgerald

Fitzgerald's father ran a wicker-furniture business in Buffalo that failed before Scott turned two, then lost a second job at Procter & Gamble, so the family limped back to Saint Paul, Minnesota, in 1908 to live on his mother's inherited money instead of his father's earning power, a dependence Fitzgerald never stopped being embarrassed by. Catholic schools gave way to St. Paul Academy and then, in 1913, to Princeton, where he wrote for the Triangle Club and neglected his coursework so completely that he left in 1917 without a degree, on academic probation more than once. He took an Army commission instead and trained at Fort Leavenworth under a young captain named Dwight Eisenhower, who outranked him and, by his own account, outdrilled him too.

He married Zelda Sayre in New York in April 1920, days after This Side of Paradise made him rich and well known at 23, and spent the next decade writing and living the story BriefHistory tells in full, the fame, The Great Gatsby, a marriage that came apart as Zelda's mental illness deepened. What is left for this page is what came after the party, when the writing stopped paying and the drinking never really stopped at all.

By 1936 his book royalties for the year came to 80 dollars. He was hospitalized for alcoholism eight times between 1933 and 1937 and was drinking, by his own later count, nearly 40 beers a day by 1939. MGM hired him to write screenplays in 1937 at close to 30,000 dollars a year, work he found humiliating and was mostly bad at, earning sole screen credit on exactly one produced film before the studio let his contract lapse in 1939. Zelda, diagnosed with schizophrenia in 1930, spent most of the decade institutionalized while he wrote to cover her bills and their daughter's tuition, a marriage he could not fix and would not leave.

He collapsed while reading a magazine in his Hollywood apartment on December 21, 1940, and died of a heart attack without regaining consciousness, at 44. Thirty people came to the funeral in Bethesda, Maryland, and the Catholic Church initially refused him a grave in the family plot because he had died outside its good graces, so he went into Rockville Union Cemetery under a Protestant service instead. His body was moved to the family's Catholic plot only in 1975. The Armed Services Editions of The Great Gatsby, printed by the millions for soldiers in the Second World War, did more than any critic to bring him back, and the book has not gone out of print since.

F. Scott Fitzgerald's life against the full span of the corpus.

• This Side of Paradise book
  Published when he was 23, and made him famous within weeks 1920
• The Beautiful and Damned book
  His second novel 1922
• The Great Gatsby book
  Sold modestly in his lifetime 1925
• Tender Is the Night book
  Written across nine years while Zelda was institutionalized 1934
• The Last Tycoon book
  Unfinished at his death, published the following year 1941

• 1908 aged ~12 Family returns to Saint Paul after his father loses his job
• 1913 aged ~17 Enters Princeton
• 1917 aged ~21 Leaves Princeton without a degree and takes an Army commission He trained at Fort Leavenworth under Captain Dwight Eisenhower.
• April 3, 1920 aged 23 Marries Zelda Sayre days after This Side of Paradise is published
• April 10, 1925 aged 28 The Great Gatsby is published
• June 1930 aged 33 Zelda is diagnosed with schizophrenia
• 1937 aged ~41 MGM hires him as a contract screenwriter He earned sole credit on one produced film, Three Comrades.
• December 21, 1940 aged 44 Dies of a heart attack in Hollywood, at 44

• Dwight D. Eisenhower 1890–1969
  34th President and Supreme Allied Commander in Europe during World War II. outranked and outdrilled him at Fort Leavenworth
• H.L. Mencken 1880–1956
  Satirist and cultural critic whose biting prose defined American journalism in the early 20th century. reviewed his work
• Cole Porter 1891–1964
  Composer and lyricist of Broadway standards including Anything Goes and Kiss Me Kate. wrote the same decade in music
• Toni Morrison 1931–2019
  Nobel laureate whose novels, including Beloved, explored the African American experience with profound lyricism. later re-examined the American Dream he defined