F Scott Fitzgerald Part I

 F Scott Fitzgerald was born in 1896, and is regarded as one of the most influential novelists in the 20th century.  In some ways, he was ill educated and erratic.  His novels are short and not weighted by great learning.  However his work reflected the age of post War America and Europe where old certainties had been destroyed by the painful experience of a World War.  He was born in Minnesota and his family were well to do, having made a fortune in the grocery business.  By American standards, he was upper middle class.  The family were of Irish ancestry and Catholics and he was educated at Catholic schools.  They had moved to Buffalo New York when he was a boy and like the narrator of "The Great Gatsby" Nick Carraway, he was in essence a mid Westerner who found New York city fascinating if amoral and frightening at times.  His father worked for Proctor and Gamble and the family also had private money.  In 1908 they returned to St Paul where he had been born and he continued his education, eventually going to the prestigious Princeton University. 

He was an intelligent boy, somewhat spoiled by his parents and he wanted to be a writer.  He enjoyed the social life of Princeton but wasn't really academic.

Fitzgerald met a young society girl called Ginevra King when he was at Princeton and fell madly in love with her. For 2 years from 1915 to 1917, he courted her and wrote her love letters, and she would become the model for some of the “society women in his books.  He left Princeton in 1917 to join the army, but he never served in combat. However his army time became part of the background of Jay Gatsby, who also joined the army, and served in Europe.  

Fitzgerald was posted to Alabama, where he met another young socialite,. Zelda Sayre.  Again he fell madly in love and became obsessed with this beautiful  Southern girl..  He had been advised that it was unwise for a poor young man like him to pursue Ginevra King, who was from a rich family…  but he was passionately in love with Zelda and she returned his feelings. Fitzgerald had never had a job other than his brief army service and he had not yet started on his writing career.

He and Zelda became closer and sexually intimate.  When he was discharged from the Army, he started to look for work as a reporter but ended up in advertising, which was a job which used his writing skills.