F. Scott Fitzgerald
-
The Great Gatsby
*Fitzgerald is considered to be one of the primary spokesman of the era he named
“The Jazz Age”
*A native of St. Paul, Minnesota, Fitzgerald grew up in a family that was only
moderately
Well-off. His boyhood and adolescence was spent acquiring the proper manners and
Learning the strict social code of upper-class Midwestern urban life.
*His family’s Irish Catholicism and the strict Protestant moral standards of the Bible Belt
Provided him with unquestionable guidelines for irreproachable, pretentious behavior.
*Fitzgerald was sent to a prep school in New Jersey and then enrolled in Princeton.
He served in the U.S. Army from 1917 - 1919, but saw no overseas service.
*In 1920, Fitzgerald married Zelda Sayre and began his career as a published writer
With This Side of Paradise, an immediate best seller.
*The remaining 20 years of Fitzgerald’s life were kind of like a roller-coaster ride.
When he and Zelda were expecting their daughter, they moved back to St. Paul because
Of a feeling that the east was no place to raise an innocent child.
*Zelda, who had always been rather unstable, had a nervous breakdown in 1930, and by
1934 she was declared insane and had to be institutionalized.
*Fitzgerald died of a heart attack in 1940 at the age of only 44
*The Great Gatsby is considered to be his finest work and , in fact one of the classic
Masterpieces of American Literature.