The Great Gatsby

“I want to write something new—something extraordinary and beautiful and simple & intricately patterned.”

- F. Scott Fitzgerald

A brief biography...

F. Scott Fitzgerald was born on September 24, 1896 in St. Paul, Minnesota. Of both Irish immigrant and Southern colonial landowner descent, Fitzgerald embodied curious and often contradictory qualities, much like his ancestry. Edmund Wilson, close friend and literary critic, once said this about Fitzgerald:

01 - Video of ai recreation of F. Scott Fitzgerald from the F. Scott Fitzgerald Museum

Fitzgerald made a name for himself when he wrote The Side of Paradise in 1920, an instant bestseller, but like Jay Gatsby, his entrance into the higher echelons of society was momentary. He married Zelda Sayre a week after his successful novel was published and they had a daughter, Scottie, who was born one year later.

“In his very expression of the anarchy by which he finds himself bewildered, of his revolt which cannot fix on an object, he is typical of the war generation—the generation so memorably described on the last page of This Side of Paradise as ‘grown up to find all gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in men shaken.’” (qtd. in Lillios)

When The Great Gatsby was published in 1925, it received little notoriety. According to The Fitzgerald Society, "its artistic maturity was stymied for a decade by alcoholism, financial problems, and the mental illness of his wife, Zelda."

After Zelda lost her life in 1948 when the mental institution she was living in caught aflame, Fitzgerald moved to Hollywood, hoping to try his luck again. He was working on his last novel, The Last Tycoon, which never finished after he died of a heart attack in 1940.