The literary titans drifted apart during the late-1920s, and Hemingway later bashed Fitzgerald in print on more than one occasion. Their relationship was complicated by Hemingway’s intense dislike of Zelda Fitzgerald, whom he described as “crazy” and a distraction to her husband’s writing. The macho Hemingway and the urbane Fitzgerald might seem like an odd pairing, but the two authors struck up a fast friendship after meeting in Paris in 1925. He had a rocky friendship with Ernest Hemingway. Fitzgerald’s itinerant nature was due in part to his attempts to escape his hard-partying lifestyle and find peace and quiet to write, but he also occasionally moved to cities where his mentally ill wife Zelda was being hospitalized. Between 19, he lived variously in New York City, Connecticut, Minnesota, Long Island, Paris, the French Riviera, Rome, Los Angeles, Delaware, Switzerland, Baltimore and North Carolina. He never lived in the same place for more than a few years.ĭespite earning a small fortune as a writer, Fitzgerald never owned a home and spent most of his life living out of rented houses, apartments and high-class hotels. Age 14 is described as “A Year of Much Activity but Dangerous,” while the headline for 1920-the year he first found fame-reads “Revelry and Marriage. Many years also include a brief summary sentence. Fitzgerald documented everything from his first word (“up”), to his height at age 13 (5’3’), to the date he fell in love with Zelda (September 7, 1918). Much of the ledger is dedicated to recording his published works as a writer and his income, but one section, titled “Outline Chart of My Life,” provides a month-by-month account of his activities since birth. He kept an extraordinarily detailed record of his life.īetween 19, Fitzgerald obsessively recorded the progress of his life and career in a large, leather-bound business ledger. Fitzgerald sank into alcoholism and struggled to write, and Zelda suffered a mental breakdown and spent the latter part of her life in and out of sanitariums. The couple’s fashionable clothes and booze-fueled antics made them the toast of the literary world-writer Ring Lardner even called them “the prince and princess of their generation”-but their glamorous lives were later visited by tragedy in the 1930s. She smoked and drank in public, cracked risqué jokes and was an accomplished painter, dancer and writer. Beautiful and unpredictable, Zelda was a major inspiration for the new generation of liberated “flapper” girls Fitzgerald often wrote about in his novels and stories. Shortly after the publication of “This Side of Paradise,” Fitzgerald married Zelda Sayre, the daughter of an Alabama judge. His wife Zelda was considered the quintessential 1920s “flapper.” While he never made it to the battlegrounds of World War I-the November 1918 armistice was signed shortly before he was to be shipped overseas-Fitzgerald did complete a draft of an unpublished novel called “The Romantic Egotist,” which he later reworked into his smash hit debut “This Side of Paradise.”Ĥ. Worried he might die in battle, he began frantically writing in his off-hours in the hopes of leaving behind a literary legacy. When the United States entered World War I in 1917, Fitzgerald dropped out of Princeton and took a commission as a second lieutenant in the army. He narrowly missed out on serving in World War I. After reading a typo-filled version of “This Side of Paradise,” literary critic Edmund Wilson-a classmate of Fitzgerald’s during his Princeton days-declared it “one of the most illiterate books of any merit ever published…full of English words misused with the most reckless abandon.” 3. Despite his legendary command of the written word, Fitzgerald was also a poor speller and may have suffered from dyslexia. He had a penchant for cutting classes during his time at Princeton University and nearly failed out before abandoning his studies to join the military. He was a poor student and an atrocious speller.įitzgerald read widely and demonstrated an early talent for writing, but he was a lousy student who struggled to achieve passing marks in both grade school and college. While driving past a statue of Key in an alcoholic haze in 1934, he supposedly hopped from the car and hid in the bushes, yelling to a friend, “Don’t let Frank see me drunk!” 2. The two were only distantly related-Key was a second cousin three times removed-but Fitzgerald was known to play up the family connection. He was named for Francis Scott Key, the lawyer and writer who penned the lyrics to “The Star Spangled Banner” during the War of 1812. Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was born in St.
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