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Francis Scott Fitzgerald was born on September 24, 1896, in St. Paul, Minnesota. Fitzgerald’s namesake (and second cousin three times removed on his father's side) was Francis Scott Key, who wrote the lyrics to the "Star-Spangled Banner."
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When Fitzgerald was 12, Edward lost his job with Procter & Gamble, and the family moved back to St. Paul in 1908 to live off of his mother's inheritance. Fitzgerald's mother, Mary McQuillan, was from an Irish-Catholic family that made a small fortune in Minnesota as wholesale grocers.
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When he was 13, he saw his first piece of writing appear in print: a detective story published in the school newspaper. In 1911, when Fitzgerald was 15 years old, his parents sent him to the Newman School, a prestigious Catholic preparatory school in New Jersey.
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graduating from the Newman School in 1913, Fitzgerald decided to stay in New Jersey to continue his artistic development at Princeton University.
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He was placed on academic probation, and, in 1917, he dropped out of school to join the U.S. Army. Afraid that he might die in World War I with his literary dreams unfulfilled, in the weeks before reporting to duty, Fitzgerald hastily wrote a novel called The Romantic Egotist.
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This Side of Paradise is a largely autobiographical story about love and greed. The story was centered on Amory Blaine, an ambitious Midwesterner who falls in love with, but is ultimately rejected by, two girls from high-class families.
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Beginning in 1920 and continuing throughout the rest of his career, Fitzgerald supported himself financially by writing great numbers of short stories for popular publications such as The Saturday Evening Post and Esquire.
Some of his most notable stories include "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz," "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," "The Camel's Back" and "The Last of the Belles." -
F. Scott Fitzgerald married Zelda Sayre on April 3, 1920, in New York City. Zelda was Fitzgerald’s muse, and her likeness is prominently featured in his works including This Side of Paradise, The Beautiful and the Damned, The Great Gatsby and Tender Is the Night.
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Frances Scott "Scottie" Fitzgerald was the only child of novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald. She was a writer, a journalist, and a prominent member of the Democratic Party. She was inducted into the Alabama Women's Hall of Fame in 1992.
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In 1922, Fitzgerald published his second novel, The Beautiful and Damned, the story of the troubled marriage of Anthony and Gloria Patch. The Beautiful and Damned helped to cement Fitzgerald’s status as one of the great chroniclers and satirists of the culture of wealth, extravagance and ambition that emerged during the affluent 1920s
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In 1934, after years of toil, Fitzgerald finally published his fourth novel, Tender is the Night, about an American psychiatrist in Paris, France, and his troubled marriage to a wealthy patient.
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Fitzgerald began work on his last novel, The Love of the Last Tycoon, in 1939. He had completed over half the manuscript when he died in 1940.
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Fitzgerald's life began to unravel. Always a heavy drinker, he progressed steadily into alcoholism and suffered prolonged bouts of writer's block. After two years lost to alcohol and depression, in 1937 Fitzgerald attempted to revive his career as a screenwriter and freelance storywriter in Hollywood, and he achieved modest financial, if not critical, success for his efforts before his death in 1940.
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Fitzgerald died of a heart attack on December 21, 1940, at the age of 44, in Hollywood, California. Fitzgerald died believing himself a failure, since none of his works received more than modest commercial or critical success during his lifetime.
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Zelda suffered from mental health issues, and the couple moved back and forth between Delaware and France. In 1930, Zelda suffered a breakdown. She was diagnosed with schizophrenia and treated at the Sheppard Pratt Hospital in Towson, Maryland. That same year was admitted to a mental health clinic in Switzerland. Two years later she was treated at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. She spent the remaining years before her death in 1948 in and out of various mental health clinics.
