F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Study of His Work and Writing Advice

Did you know that F. Scott Fitzgerald was named after the lyricist of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” Francis Scott Key? Like the well-known U.S. Attorney of the District of Columbia, Fitzgerald also became famous for his words about life in the United States and the idea of the American dream. Known as the “poet laureate of the ‘Jazz Age,’” Fitzgerald was a man who wrote about love, loss, dreams, and hope everlasting his short lifetime and even shorter career. Known for penning iconic American novels such as The Great Gatsby, The Beautiful and the Damned, This Side of Paradise, Tender Is the Night, and more, the 20th-century American author lived a tumultuous life that in a way mirrored the lives of his most well-known protagonists. Writing about society, socioeconomic status, love, loss, and the American Dream in the 1920s, Fitzgerald heavily influenced American literature during his lifetime and what it has become today. Famously the rival of American author and journalist Ernest Hemingway, Fitzgerald lived a short but eventful life and in his short-lived career, cemented himself as one of the most prominent American writers whose works are still being read and loved by bookworms across the nation to this day.

Early Life and Epic Romance

Born in 1896, Fitzgerald grew up in St. Paul, Minnesota, and was raised by a middle-class family, as his father was a businessman who relied on his wife’s wealthy family. Despite his success as an author, Fitzgerald did not do particularly well in school. His propensity for various antics caused him to do poorly in the classroom. After enrolling at Princeton University, he fell madly in love with Ginevra King, a famous American socialite and heiress who many believe later served as inspiration for his character Daisy Buchanan in his novel The Great Gatsby (1925). Much like his famed character Gatbsy, Fitzgerald often dated girls in higher socioeconomic classes than himself and aspired to climb the social ladder. Like Gatsby, it is rumored that Fitzgerald was obsessed with King and was in love with her for the rest of his life, as Gatsby loved Daisy. Although Fitzgerald’s wife is more commonly known as the epic love of his life, many believe that he was truly in love with King all of his life and that she was his “one who got away.” After a torrid romance, King’s father forced her to break off the relationship that was hurling towards marriage due to Fitzgerald’s lower socioeconomic class. Heartbroken, he “flunked out of Princeton University in 1917.” Subsequently, devastated and lost, he enlisted in the army and served as a second lieutenant in the Great War. It was in this time “in July 1918, while he was stationed near Montgomery, Alabama, he met Zelda Sayre, the daughter of an Alabama Supreme Court judge.” Very shortly after their meeting, their whirlwind romance swept them to New York where the young couple hoped to be wed and Fitzgerald wanted to achieve success as a writer.

Marriage and Success

After arriving in New York in 1918, Fitzgerald began working in advertising and consequently, Sayre was unhappy with this career choice. She fled, leaving Fitzgerald so depressed that he returned to his childhood hometown to resume fiction writing, where he finished and published his first novel This Side of Paradise (1920). Shortly after this publication, he and Sayre were finally married. The publication of Fitzgerald’s epic first novel launched him into his short career of success, with his “peak years of popularity [from] (1920-1925).” He then subsequently began publishing novels and collections of short stories throughout the 1920s, his short stories primarily focusing on flappers and the era now known as the Roaring Twenties. The Fitzgeralds’ only child, a daughter named Frances Scott (“Scottie”) Fitzgerald, was born in 1921 and shortly after her birth, they fled to live with other American expats in France in 1924. It was after they moved to the French Riviera that Fitzgerald published possibly his best-known novel, The Great Gatsby (1925), and subsequently focused on writing short stories, rather than novels. Over the years, Fitzgerald’s focus on specific themes became more apparent, as he often highlighted “ambition and loss, discipline vs. self-indulgence, love and romance, and money and class.”

Downfall and Later Years

Following the success of The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald drank heavily and went into a steep depression in which he also suffered from alcoholism. At the same time, Zelda began to suffer many physical and emotional issues related to her declining mental health and was transferred in and out of hospitals. In the throes of the Great Depression, “through the 1930s they fought to save their life together, and, when the battle was lost, Fitzgerald said, ‘I left my capacity for hoping on the little roads that led to Zelda’s sanitarium.’” This downward spiral unfortunately only continued as the years went on and ended in tragedy. As Zelda’s condition worsened, Fitzgerald eventually left her in 1937 and went on to “become a scriptwriter in Hollywood.” While in California, he met and began a relationship with “Sheilah Graham, a famous Hollywood gossip columnist” who he remained with for the rest of his days, while occasionally visiting his wife and daughter. Tragically, in 1940 Fitzgerald succumbed to his alcoholism and died of a heart attack at 44 years old. His final novel, The Last Tycoon, was left unfinished with his untimely death and was published posthumously in 1941. Zelda passed away shortly after her husband in 1948, leaving behind their only remaining descendant, their daughter.

Writing Advice

Like many other authors, in addition to being a writer, Fitzgerald was also a teacher in his own way, as he offered writing advice to aspiring young authors and students around the country. Some young writers would send him their work and in one instance, he responded to Frances Turnbull accordingly, “You've got to sell your heart, your strongest reactions, not the little minor things that only touch you lightly, the little experiences that you might tell at dinner. This is especially true when you begin to write, when you have not yet developed the tricks of interesting people on paper, when you have none of the technique which it takes time to learn.” Although it could be considered a bit harsh, Fitzgerald’s point in his letter remains true today, as no reader wants to read a book, short story, or article that doesn’t focus on pathos. Similarly, Fitzgerald advised his daughter about a story she wrote when she was 15 when he wrote, “If you have anything to say, anything you feel nobody has ever said before, you have got to feel it so desperately that you will find some way to say it that nobody has ever found before, so that the thing you have to say and the way of saying it blend as one matter—as indissolubly as if they were conceived together.”

In terms of his straightforward writing advice, Fitzgerald recommended that anyone who wanted to be a successful writer be an adept note-taker, form a strong outline, and create original characters. When describing the importance of notetaking, Fitzgerald once said, “You must begin by making notes. You may have to make notes for years…. When you think of something, when you recall something, put it where it belongs. Put it down when you think of it. You may never recapture it quite as vividly the second time.” In a similar vein, Fitzgerald delineated the importance of outlining your work and how to go about doing so when he said, “On the first page of the file put down an outline of a novel of your times enormous in scale (don’t worry, it will contract by itself) and work on the plan for two months. Take the central point of the file as your big climax and follow your plan backward and forward from that for another three months. Then draw up something as complicated as a continuity from what you have and set yourself a schedule.” As in his work, Fitzgerald was not only great at outlining, but he is known for creating completely unique, iconic characters. When discussing how to create characters as opposed to stereotypes, Fitzgerald said “Begin with an individual, and before you know it you find that you have created a type; begin with a type, and you find that you have created–nothing.” He also advised that to keep your plot moving, in addition to creating compelling characters, you use verbs to forward the action “About adjectives: all fine prose is based on the verbs carrying the sentences. They make sentences move.”

In his 20-year career, Fitzgerald published four novels and more than 160 short stories. Although Fitzgerald was primarily known for “the elegiac melancholy of The Great Gatsby and Tender Is the Night, his short fiction reveals that he was as adept at comedy and fantasy as at tragedy—a testament to the breadth and range of his talent.” One of the most well-known American authors, Fitzgerald remains an influential figure in the writing community today.