What type of writer was fitzgerald

At this time Zelda Fitzgerald commenced ballet training, intending to become a professional dancer. In April she suffered her first breakdown. She was treated at Prangins clinic in Switzerland until September , while Fitzgerald lived in Swiss hotels. Work on the novel was again suspended as he wrote short stories to pay for psychiatric treatment. Nonetheless, the general view of his affluence is distorted. Fitzgerald was not among the highest-paid writers of his time; his novels earned comparatively little, and most of his income came from magazine stories.

Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald did spend money faster than he earned it; the author who wrote so eloquently about the effects of money on character was unable to manage his own finances. The Fitzgeralds returned to America in the fall of and rented a house in Montgomery. Fitzgerald made a second unsuccessful trip to Hollywood in She spent the rest of her life as a resident or outpatient of sanitariums.

Her autobiographical novel generated considerable bitterness between the Fitzgeralds, for he regarded it as pre-empting the material that he was using in his novel-in-progress. Published in , his most ambitious novel was a commercial failure, and its merits were matters of critical dispute. Set in France during the s, Tender Is the Night examines the deterioration of Dick Diver, a brilliant American psychiatrist, during the course of his marriage to a wealthy mental patient.

Ill, drunk, in debt, and unable to write commercial stories, he lived in hotels in the region near Asheville, North Carolina, where in Zelda Fitzgerald entered Highland Hospital. After Baltimore, Fitzgerald did not maintain a home for Scottie. When she was fourteen she went to boarding school, and the Obers became her surrogate family.

His trips East to visit his wife were disastrous. In California Fitzgerald fell in love with movie columnist Sheilah Graham. Their relationship endured despite his benders. After MGM dropped his option at the end of , Fitzgerald worked as a freelance script writer and wrote short-short stories for Esquire. Zelda Fitzgerald perished at a fire in Highland Hospital in Scott Fitzgerald died believing himself a failure. The obituaries were condescending, and he seemed destined for literary obscurity.

His third novel, The Great Gatsby , was highly regarded, but Tender is the Night was considered a disappointment. Paul, Minnesota , Fitzgerald had the good fortune—and the misfortune—to be a writer who summed up an era.

He left Princeton without graduating and used it as the setting for his first novel, This Side of Paradise It was perfect literary timing. With his stunning southern wife, Zelda, he headed for Paris and a mythic career of drinking from hip flasks, dancing until dawn, and jumping into outdoor fountains to end the party.

Scott became an alcoholic and Zelda, jealous of his fame or in some versions, thwarted by it , collapsed into madness. They crept home in to an America in the grip of the Great Depression —a land no longer interested in flaming youth except to pillory them for their excesses. The novel with which he had grappled for years, Tender Is the Night , about a psychiatrist destroyed by his wealthy wife, was published in to lukewarm reviews and poor sales. Fitzgerald retreated to Hollywood.

He made a precarious living as a scriptwriter and struggled to control his alcoholism. Miraculously he found the energy to begin another novel, The Last Tycoon , about a complex gifted movie producer. He had finished about a third of it when he died of a heart attack. Obituaries generally dismissed him.

Not until the early s did interest in Fitzgerald revive, and when it did, it became a veritable scholarly industry. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us!

Subscribe for fascinating stories connecting the past to the present. He was named after a famous ancestor. Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was born in St.

Paul Minnesota on September 24, The two were only A fifth, unfinished novel, The Love of the Last Tycoon , was published posthumously. Fitzgerald also wrote many short stories that treat themes of youth and promise along with age and despair.

The publication of The Great Gatsby prompted T. But if there is, this is it. Into the 21st century, millions of copies of The Great Gatsby and his other works have been sold, and Gatsby, a constant best-seller, is required reading in many high school and college classes.