- The “F” stands for Francis, as he was named after a distant cousin called Francis Scott Key. If that name sounds familiar, it's because he was the man who wrote the words to the US National Anthem, The Star Spangled Banner. Fitzgerald's father rowed Confederate spies across the Potomac River when he was nine years old.
- F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote five novels and 160 short stories. It was the short stories which were most lucrative in his lifetime. His first two novels did all right, but his most famous one, The Great Gatsby, only sold 20,000 copies and was out of print by the 1930s. However, during the second world war, the book was identified as one that American soldiers serving overseas might like. They clearly did. The book now sells 500,000 copies a year.
- As well as novels and short stories, Fitzgerald wrote poetry, plays and screenplays. While at Princeton, he wanted to be a poet and wrote a number of poems. When America entered the first world war and Fitzgerald dropped out of college to enlist, he thought he might become the American Rupert Brooke. It occurred to him that like Rupert Brooke, he might not survive the war, so he wrote furiously hoping to leave a legacy. While he started off writing poems, his writing eventually became his first novel, This Side of Paradise. He never got to serve in the war, though, as the Armistice was signed just before he was due to be shipped overseas.
- He wrote a play called The Vegetable, which wasn't a great success. It was a fairly sceptical look at “the American dream” which didn't go down well with the audience. It ran for just one night. Later on, Fitzgerald moved to Hollywood and collaborated on a number of screenplays for a number of movies including Gone With the Wind, but he was only ever credited for one, a 1938 film called Three Comrades.
- In 1920 he married Zelda Sayre. The wedding was such a small affair that not even their parents attended – just three of Zelda's sisters, and there was no party afterwards. Zelda was a modern woman of the time, the quintessential “flapper”. They became quite the “it” couple in literary circles. Zelda was an accomplished painter, dancer and writer in her own right. It wasn't all parties and fun, though. Zelda struggled with mental illness and spent much of her later life in sanatoriums, while Fitzgerald himself struggled with alcoholism.
- Jay Gatsby may have been based on Fitzgerald’s maternal grandfather. Philip Francis McQuillan, who had emigrated at eight from Ireland, started poor but by his late 30s owned a business and became very rich. Daisy, however, was not based on Fitzgerald's wife, but on socialite and debutante Ginevra King, a woman he had a crush on while he was at college. Isabelle Borgé in This Side of Paradise was also based on her.
- He kept an amazingly detailed diary of his life and career. Most of it was about his work and his income, but in one section he wrote what he called “Outline Chart of My Life” detailing what he did in every month of his life from birth. From this we learn that his first word was “up” and that he was 5' 3” tall at the age of thirteen.
- For a time, he was a good friend of Ernest Hemingway, but Hemingway disliked Zelda intensely and saw her as an obstacle to his friend's writing. By 1937, they'd fallen out. “I talk with the authority of failure,” Fitzgerald wrote. “Ernest with the authority of success. We could never sit across the table again.”
- Toward the end of his life, he reportedly drank a quart of Gin and 12 bottles of Beer a day.
- He died of heart failure at the age of 44, four months after receiving his last royalty payment, which was $13.13. At the time, he was writing another novel called The Love of the Last Tycoon, in attempt to get himself out of debt. It was published a year later even though it was only half finished. Some critics said it was Fitzgerald’s most accomplished work.
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