person1896–1940

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Disciplines:

Summary

American novelist — author of The Great Gatsby, Tender Is the Night, and This Side of Paradise — who captured the Jazz Age and the American Dream's corruption with more stylistic precision than any contemporary — whose career ended in alcoholic decline in Hollywood.

Core Contribution

Creates The Great Gatsby as the canonical American Dream critique — Fitzgerald's prose (the most musical in American fiction) and Gatsby's tragedy (the impossibility of recapturing the past, the corruption of wealth's promise) is the most assigned and most quoted American novel in the educational canon.

Key Spikes & Highlights

Was famous at 23 and considered a has-been by 40 — the most extreme reputation collapse in American literary history in one lifetime; Gatsby sold fewer than 25,000 copies in his lifetime (1925–40) and he died thinking it a failure; Edmund Wilson edited the posthumous edition that launched the novel's canonical status
Zelda and Scott's marriage is the most documented codependent literary relationship — both brilliant, both competing, both alcoholic; Zelda's Save Me the Waltz (1932) and Scott's Tender Is the Night (1934) drew from the same material; he felt she was appropriating his material; she felt he was exploiting her breakdown

Notable Works & Achievements

This Side of Paradise

The Great Gatsby

Tender Is the Night

The Last Tycoon

Historical Influences

Henry James Joseph Conrad Keats

Intellectual Lineage

St. Paul, Minnesota Princeton Zelda Sayre New York Paris Hollywood

Contemporaries & Peers

Ernest Hemingway John Dos Passos Edmund Wilson

Minds Influenced

American fiction

Intellectual Posterity

The Great Gatsby Jazz Age as cultural period Daisy Buchanan The green light

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