It’s the birthday of Francis Scott Fitzgerald, born in St. Paul (1896). He was working on his first novel when he met Zelda Sayre at a military dance in Montgomery, Alabama and fell in love. He told her she looked like the heroine in his novel.
…looked like they’d just stepped out of the sun…
They got engaged, but her parents didn’t approve because he didn’t have any money, so he moved to New York and tried to publish the novel. It was rejected twice. He moved home with his parents in St. Paul to rewrite it again.
While he worked on it, Zelda wrote him letters about the men she was dating and how maybe they should break off the engagement. His novel was about a man who loses a girl because he doesn’t have enough money, so he quoted lines from Zelda’s letter in the book. He changed the title to This Side of Paradise.
It was accepted by Scribner in September 1919. He took a train to Montgomery. She agreed to marry him. This Side of Paradise came out in 1920, when he was just 23, and he became an overnight sensation. He and Zelda got married a week after publication at St. Patrick’s in New York City.
They were the most famous literary couple of their day and perhaps any other. They were so famous that the Hearst papers had a reporter whose only job was to cover what they did. They were beautiful people. Dorothy Parker said, “Scott and Zelda looked like they’d just stepped out of the sun.”
Fitzgerald wrote a play, The Vegetable, produced in 1923. It was a flop. He sailed off to France in May of 1924. He started writing a novel about a bootlegger named Jay Gatsby. He worked on it all that summer. Fitzgerald was never satisfied with it. He said, “I never at any one time saw Gatsby clear myself, for he started as one man I knew and then changed into myself.”
By the time the stock market crashed in 1929, Fitzgerald had started to crash too. His marriage was coming apart. He was running out of money. His drinking was catching up with him. It took him nine years to write his next novel, Tender is the Night, which got mixed reviews in 1934. He died in 1940, at the age of 44, in a year in which all of his books together sold 72 copies with royalties of $13.
From the Writer’s Almanac by Garrison Keillor
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