Alexis Allen
Authors Info
F. Scott Fitzgerald

F. Scott Fitzgerald was born Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald on September 24, 1896, in St. Paul, Minnesota. Fitzgerald's mother, Mary McQuillan, was from an Irish-Catholic family that had made a small fortune in Minnesota as wholesale grocers. His father, Edward Fitzgerald, had opened a wicker furniture business in St. Paul, and, when it failed, he took a job as a salesman for Procter & Gamble that took his family back and forth between Buffalo and Syracuse in upstate New York during the first decade of Fitzgerald's life. But Edward Fitzgerald lost his job with Procter & Gamble in 1908, when F. Scott Fitzgerald was 12, and the family moved back to St. Paul to live off of his mother's inheritance. Fitzgerald was a bright, handsome and very striving boy, the happiness of his parents and especially his mother. He attended the St. Paul Academy, and when he was 13, he saw his first piece of writing appear in print: a detective story published in the school newspaper. In 1911, when Fitzgerald was 15 years old, his parents sent him to the Newman School. Which was a Catholic preparatory school in New Jersey. While he was There, he met Father Sigourney Fay. Then he noticed his awesome talent with his writing and encouraged him to continue his literary dreams. After He graduated From The Catholic school he attended Princeton University. At Princeton, he strictly dedicated himself to his writing, and writing scripts for Princeton's famous Triangle Club musicals also as frequent articles for the Princeton Tiger humor magazine and stories for the Nassau Literary Magazine. However, Fitzgerald's writing came at the expense of his coursework. He was placed on academic probation, and, in 1917, he dropped out of school to join the U.S. Army. He was Afraid that he might die in World War I with his writing hopes unfulfilled, and in the weeks before reporting to duty, Fitzgerald hastily wrote a novel called The Romantic Egotist. They rejected the novel an told him to submit more work in the future. In 1922, Fitzgerald published his second novel, “The Beautiful and the Damned“, the story of the troubled marriage of Anthony and Gloria Patch. The Beautiful and the Damned helped to cement his status as one of the great chroniclers and satirists of the culture of wealth, extravagance and ambition that emerged during the affluent 1920s, what became known as the Jazz Age. "It was an age of miracles," Fitzgerald wrote, "it was an age of art, it was an age of excess, and it was an age of satire." After he completed The Book, “The Great Gatsby“, Fitzgerald's life began to unravel. Always a heavy drinker, he began to steadily go into alcoholism and suffered prolonged bouts of writer's block. His wife, Zelda, also suffered from mental health issues, and the couple spent the late 1920s moving back and forth between Delaware and France. In 1930, she was briefly checked into a mental-health clinic in Switzerland, and, after the Fitzgeralds