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F. Scott Fitzgerald with no doubt portrays The American Dream. He loved writing and always dreamed of becoming rich and famous. Fitzgerald was a very poor student and speller, however he excelled in writing and wrote many famous novels that are still read today. Some examples are The Great Gatsby, This Side Of Paradise, Tender Is The Night, and much more. In all these Novels Fitzgerald uses symbols or different literary devices to define The American Dream from different perspectives.

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F. Scott Fitzgerald’s had a rough childhood. He was one of the lowest in his class and was very poor at spelling. He then worked hard and pursed writing and he became famous, having many successful novels. These Novels are known to show the Jazz age and different perspectives of The American Dream. He also lived a not so good life of alcoholism and financial troubles. However he then worked through the low times in life to become a very successful and smarter man.

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About Gale In Context: High School Explore thousands of topics across subjects including literature, science, history, and social issues using different sources. Don't know how to login? Depending on this location's preferences, the log-in process could include your library card number, a student or user ID, or another provided password.

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F. Scott Fitzgerald and The Great Gatsby

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F. Scott Fitzgerald and The Great Gatsby

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The Great Gatsby was a book full of emotions created by F. Scott Fitzgerald. This source is another Biography so it talks about Fitzgerald’s life. That he quit his job and got into writing and he was passionate about it. This started his career and become a wealthy and very well known writer.It ties back to The American Dream and how Fitzgerald’s writing portrays it. He starting off in life not knowing what he was doing and doing poorly in school, to becoming a wonderful writer.

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The Great Gatsby is seen by critics and the general public as F. Scott Fitzgerald's quintessential novel, and is the novel he is most famous for. It tells the story of a rich man named Jay Gatsby and his quest to regain a past love. As its most recent movie adaptation is currently playing in theaters, Special Collections invites you to take a look back on the novel and the man that created it.

Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was born on September 24, 1896 in St. Paul, Minnesota and named after his second cousin three times removed, the Francis Scott Key of national anthem fame. While on academic probation at Princeton, Fitzgerald enlisted in the army in 1917. In June 1918, he was assigned to a camp near Montgomery, Alabama, where he met and fell in love with Zelda Sayre. In late 1919, after being discharged from the army and quitting his job in advertising, Fitzgerald began his career of writing short stories for magazines and other publications, with The Saturday Evening Post becoming his best story market. He published his first novel, This Side of Paradise, in March 1920 and married Zelda Sayre soon after. His success and the extravagant lifestyle of the young couple soon earned him a reputation as a bit of a playboy. He also became known as a heavy drinker, though he always wrote sober. After the publication of his second novel, The Beautiful and Damned, and the birth of his child, Frances Scott (Scottie) Fitzgerald, in 1921, the Fitzgeralds moved to Long Island where F. Scott wrote short stories to cover the family's debt after his play, The Vegetable, failed to make it into production. The family moved to France in the spring of 1924 so that F. Scott would be able to focus on his newest project, the novel that would become The Great Gatsby.

Before it became The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald's novel went through many revisions and forms. Special Collections has in its possession a facsimile of one such early edition, entitled Trimalchio. This is an allusion to a Roman novel, The Satyricon by Petronius. In this novel, Trimalchio is a freedman who has amassed power and wealth and shows this off by hosting exceedingly lavish dinner parties for his numerous guests. This copy includes correspondence between Fitzgerald and a man by the name of Perkins, Fitzgerald's friend and an employee of his publishers, in which Perkins makes suggestions for revision and suggests using a different title (pictured below right).

Shortly after this, Fitzgerald rewrote several aspects of his novel and reordered key scenes, such as the one where Gatsby's past is illuminated.

The Gatsby we know today comes in many different forms and editions. One of the more unique Gatsbys at Special Collections comes in the form of a fantastical graphic novel adaptation by Nicki Greenberg, in which Jay Gatsby is portrayed as a seahorse
and the others as any number of creatures.

There are also a number of more conventionally illustrated editions of The Great Gatsby in existence, such as the 1980 Limited Editions Club which is illustrated by artist Fred Meyer, whose recognizable style brings the Jazz Age to life on the page.

Most people are familiar with The Great Gatsby after having spent some time studying it at either a high school or college level. From Professor Lago's collection, we have her copy of The Great Gatsby, which has been heavily annotated for use as a teaching tool. Her extensive notes comment on such key themes as morality and hope. On the page shown here, she notes the importance of color symbolism, among other things.

In the years after The Great Gatsby was published, Fitzgerald began work on his fourth novel, Tender is the Night. Work on this novel was put on hold throughout the years due to Zelda Fitzgerald's declining mental and physical health. During her stay in a clinic in Switzerland, F. Scott returned to writing short stories for income. He completed Tender is the Night in 1934, though it was ultimately a commercial failure.

In the summer of 1937, Fitzgerald went to Hollywood to work as a screenwriter. It was there that he began an affair with columnist Sheilah Graham. After MGM Studios dropped his contract at the end of 1938, he worked as a freelance script writer and continued writing short sories. He began work on his last novel, The Love of the Last Tycoon, in 1939 and had more than half of it written when he died of a heart attack on December 21, 1940.

Though Fitzgerald was not much of a commercial success during his lifetime, he is now considered to be the author of one of the "great American novels" and is esteemed for his accurate portrayals of the Jazz Age. Many of his works, including collections of his short stories, are available for use by patrons in the Reading Room of Special Collections.

Bruccoli, Matthew J. "A Brief Life of Fitzgerald." Biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald. The F. Scott Fitzgerald Society, n.d. Web. 21 May 2013. http://www.fscottfitzgeraldsociety.org/biography/index.html.

"Trimalchio." Trimalchio. N.p., n.d. Web. 23 May 2013.
<http://www.princeton.edu/~achaney/tmve/wiki100k/docs/Trimalchio.html>.

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F. Scott Fitzgerald and The Great Gatsby

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The Great Gatsby is seen by critics and the general public as F. Scott Fitzgerald's quintessential novel, and is the novel he is most famous for. It tells the story of a rich man named Jay Gatsby and his quest to regain a past love.

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Fitzgerald loved to write, his first published novel was when he was 13. However he did not do well in school so he was moved in and out of different schools. He then started writing for smaller companies and grew bigger and bigger and published his own novels that everyone enjoyed.

It portrays The American Dream and how he interprets it. He showed that even someone with so little money and knowledge can go very far in life if you put the work into it. He wrote tons and tons of novels and some of them were extraordinary.

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F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) was born on 24 September 1896 to a salesman father and an Irish-Catholic mother who was the heir to a successful Minnesota grocery store. The F. Scott of F. Scott Fitzgerald stands for Francis Scott; he was named for his distant cousin, the writer of the poem that became the lyrics to American national anthem. Until 1908 the family moved throughout upstate New York, but when his father lost his job the Fitzgeralds moved to St. Paul, Minnesota.

Scott, as family and friends knew him, had his first story published when he was 13 - a detective story printed in the school newspaper. After his expulsion for lack of academic effort, he boarded at Newman School, a Catholic school in New Jersey. After graduation in 1913, he attended Princeton University, where he wrote articles for the college humour magazine, stories for the literary magazine, and scripts for the musicals of the Triangle Club. However, again he neglected his studies; in 1917 he was placed on academic probation, and he dropped out of Princeton to join the army.

Shortly before reporting for duty Fitzgerald wrote his first novel, The Romantic Egoist, and although the publisher rejected it, Fitzgerald was encouraged to submit later works.

Zelda

While posted to Camp Sheridan in Alabama, then Second Lieutenant Fitzgerald met Zelda Sayre, daughter of an Alabama Supereme Court judge and society darling. The Great War ended in 1918, so Scott never was deployed to Europe. Zelda would not marry Scott until he could support her financially, and although he moved to New York to work in advertising and write short stories, she broke off the engagement.

Fitzgerald moved home to his parents to work on The Romantic Egoist. Recast as This Side of Paradise it was accepted for publication in 1919. Zelda and Scott resumed their engagement, and the couple were married in New York a week after publication in 1920. Their only child, Frances Scott Fitzgerald, was born a year later.

Writing & Celebrity

This Side of Paradise became an immediate hit. With literary success came wealth, and with wealth came the Fitzgeralds' new penchant for high living. Scott became known as a playboy and drank heavily, supporting himself largely through short stories published in popular magazines and papers like The Saturday Evening Post and Esquire. In 1922 Fitzgerald published his second novel, The Beautiful and the Damned. It was this novel's satire of the Jazz Age that secured his position as a member of the Lost Generation. However, Zelda and Scott lived beyond their means, embracing the decadent lifestyle of the New York celebrity, and Fitzgerald had to take out frequent loans from his literary agent and editor to avoid financial troubles. Like so many American writers after World War I, Fitzgerald moved to France, where he befriended fellow writer Ernest Hemingway. In France he wrote the now classic (then underrated) novel The Great Gatsby.

Decline & Death

In the 1920s Fitzgerald fell into severe alcoholism and suffered from writer's block, and Zelda's mental health deteriorated (in 1930 she was diagnosed with schizophrenia). The couple moved between Delaware and France, and Zelda was hospitalised in Switzerland and Baltimore. In 1932 Zelda published her semi-autobiographical novel Save me the Waltz. Scott was furious that she had drawn heavily on their life together, but would go on to do the same himself in his novel Tender is the Night (1934), the story of an American psychiatrist married to a schizophrenic. The novel was a commercial disaster.

Fitzgerald's alcoholism, depression, and financial problems worsened, and after Zelda was placed in a North Carolina hospital in 1937, Scott left his wife behind and moved to Hollywood to try his hand as a screenwriter. In 1939 he began work on his final novel, The Love of the Last Tycoon, but died of a heart attack the following year without completing the work. He was forty-four, and considered himself a failure at the time of his death. It is only posthumously that he has been acknowledged as one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century. The Great Gatsby is a perpetual set text, and Fitzgerald's shrewd depiction of his degrading society is lauded.

Short story colleections
Flappers and Philosophers (1920)
Tales of the Jazz Age (1922)
All the Sad Young Men (1926)
Taps at Reveille (1935)
Short Stories (1989)

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F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) was born on 24 September 1896 to a salesman father and an Irish-Catholic mother who was the heir to a successful Minnesota grocery store. The F. Scott of F. Scott Fitzgerald stands for Francis Scott; he was named for his distant cousin, the writer of the poem that became the lyrics to American national anthem.

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"So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past," Fitzgerald writes at the end of his novel (Fitzgerald 193). The novel's most important message is that the American dream is a greater purpose that represents money and romance.