F. Scott Fitzgerald (short) Biography

    F. Scott Fitzgerald is the author of my fourth quarter book, The Great Gatsby. Fitzgerald was born on September 24, 1896 in Saint Paul, Minnisota to a upper middle class Irish-Catholic family. Interestingly, he was named for his distant cousin, Franicis Scott Key--the author of the Star Spangled Banner. He spent his first ten years of life in Buffalo, New York and attended two Catholic schools. His schooling at these schools revealed to teachers that he was a boy of unusual intelligence with an extreme interest in literature. When he was ten, his father was fired from his job and they returned to Minnisota. There, his first literary publishing was published when he was 13 in the school newspaper; it was a detective story. He entered Princeton University in 1913 and wrote for the Princeton Triangle Club and the Princeton Tiger. He met Zelda Sayre, whom he called "the golden girl", and they married after much convincing by Fitzgerald. They had their first child in 1921. Fitzgerald's most famous novel, The Great Gatsby, was published in 1925 in the heart of the Jazz Age. He went on many trips to Europe and became good friends with Ernest Hemingway. Zelda was struck with schnzophrenia and Fitzgerald spent much of his time caring for her. He had been an alcholic since his college days, which left him in poor health by the late 1930's. He survived tuberculosis and suffered two heartattacks and died eventually on December 21st, 1940. He died believing himself a failure, although he is highly regarded as one of the best writers of the 20th century.
    In reading F. Scott Fitzgerald's biography, I saw many similarities between his life and The Great Gatsby. Jay Gatsby was supposedly born into a wealthy family, and when his family died, he inherited a lot of money. This is similar to Fitzgerald's upper-middle class birth. Fitzgerald lived a lot of his life on the East Coast, which makes me think he preferred there over his hometown in Minnisota. This is also like both Gatsby and Tom Buchanan, who adored living on the East Coast. Fitzgerald's name for his future wife "the golden girl" made me think of Gatsby's adoration for Daisy in the book. The fact that The Great Gatsby was published in the Jazz Age explains much of it's plot and storyline-such as Gatsby's extravaggant parties. I feel like F. Scott Fitzgerald drew a parallel to Gatsby in this book. He viewed himself as a character like Gatsby's--amazingly popular, but misunderstood. Both loved a woman very much and both had a tradegy among their characters and especially their deaths. After reading F. Scott Fitzgerald's biography, I can see many similarities between his life and the plotline of The Great Gatsby.