The Great Gatsby flopped, selling under 23,000 copies in its first year
F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) became the novelist of Jazz Age glitter and crash, a term he popularized himself. Yet Gatsby sold poorly, his fame faded in the Depression, and only after his death at 44 did critics rank him among the greatest American writers of the century.
Named after his distant cousin Francis Scott Key, author of The Star-Spangled Banner, he was born in Saint Paul to a middle-class Catholic family. His father's wicker furniture business failed, the family moved to Buffalo, and when Procter & Gamble fired his father in 1908 they returned to Minnesota on his mother's inheritance. A priest at the Newman School in New Jersey urged him to write, and at Princeton he befriended Edmund Wilson and John Peale Bishop, both later useful allies.
At eighteen he fell for the Chicago debutante Ginevra King, later the model for Daisy Buchanan, whose father reportedly said poor boys should not think of marrying rich girls. Rejected, he joined the army in 1917, trained under Captain Dwight Eisenhower, whom he disliked, and dashed off a 120,000-word novel in three months that Scribner's editor Max Perkins turned down but encouraged. In Alabama he met Zelda Sayre, who agreed to marry him only after This Side of Paradise became a sensation in 1920.
The Beautiful and Damned in 1922 made him a celebrity, and stories for the Saturday Evening Post, Collier's and Esquire paid for an expensive life in Europe alongside Hemingway and the Lost Generation. The Great Gatsby of 1925 drew fair reviews but weak sales, though some critics now call it the Great American Novel. He finished Tender Is the Night in 1934 after Zelda was institutionalised for schizophrenia.
In all he published four novels, four collections and 164 stories. As Depression readers drifted away, he tried screenwriting in Hollywood without success and lived with the columnist Sheilah Graham. Having finally stopped drinking, he died of a heart attack in December 1940, and Wilson edited the unfinished The Last Tycoon for publication the next year.
Source: F. Scott Fitzgerald
