Impact & Influence

Biography

Major Works

Scholarly Works

Audio/Video

Impact & Influence

Fitzgerald is widely regarded as one of America's greatest writers. His greatest success, The Great Gatsby, is often referenced as an example of the Great American Novel. In his novels and dozens of short stories — which often ran in The Saturday Evening Post and Esquire — Fitzgerald accurately captured the atmosphere and attitudes of the young and the rich, becoming the voice of the Lost Generation. Several notable writers, including T.S. Eliot and J.D. Salinger, praised Fitzgerald, and upon his death the Los Angeles Times wrote, "He was a brilliant, sometimes profound, writer. ... He has left us a legacy of pertinent questions which he did not pretend to be able to answer. That was not the smallest part of his greatness." The F. Scott Fitzgerald award, given annually to honor American authors of great importance, is named after him.

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Biography

Before he chronicled the Jazz Age, and eventually became an icon of the Roaring Twenties himself, F. Scott Fitzgerald was born in St. Paul, Minnesota. The descendent of the "Star Spangled Banner" author and the son of an upper-middle class family, Fitzgerald attended St. Paul Academy, where he published his first short story in the school newspaper. As a teenager, he moved East (where he would eventually settle) to attend prep school and Princeton University. After a brief stint in the Army, he married the beautiful and flirtatious Zelda Sayre, and the two embarked on a wild, lifestyle of parties, alcohol, jealousy and jazz. The couple welcomed the birth of an only child, Frances Scott Fitzgerald in 1921, and the two eventually separated. In the latter half of the 1930s, Fitzgerald lived in Hollywood and worked on film scripts and short stories. Despite Prohibition and the Great Depression looming over the country, Fitzgerald's alcoholism and wild lifestyle continued until 1940, when he suffered a fatal heart attack.

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Major Works

This Side of Paradise (1920)
The Basil and Josephine stories
The Beautiful and the Damned (1922)
The Great Gatsby (1925)
Tender is the Night (1934)
The Love of the Last Tycoon (published posthumously, 1993)

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Scholarly Works

Correspondance of F. Scott Fitzgerald, edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli and Judith S. Baughman
F. Scott Fitzgerald: New Perspectives, edited by Jackson R. Bryer, Alan Margolies, and Ruth Prigozy
A Historical Guide to F. Scott Fitzgerald, edited by Kirk Curnutt
The Matthew J. and Arlyn Bruccoli Collection of F. Scott Fitzgerald at the University of South Carolina: An Illustrated Catalogue, compiled by Park Bucker

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Audio/Video

Sorry, none available at this time.

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