“Cut out
all these exclamation points. An exclamation point is like laughing at your own
joke.”
F. Scott Key Fitzgerald
(1896 - 1940)Curious facts about:
Named
after a famous ancestor. Francis Scott
Key Fitzgerald was born in St. Paul Minnesota on September 24, 1896. He was
named for Francis Scott Key, the lawyer and writer who penned the lyrics to
“The Star Spangled Banner” during the War of 1812. The two were only distantly
related—Key was a second cousin three times removed—but Fitzgerald was known to
play up the family connection. While driving past a statue of Key in an
alcoholic haze in 1934, he supposedly hopped from the car and hid in the
bushes, yelling to a friend, “Don’t let Frank see me drunk!”
He had a rocky
friendship with Ernest Hemingway. The macho
Hemingway and the urbane Fitzgerald might seem like an odd pairing, but the two
authors struck up a fast friendship after meeting in Paris in 1925. Their
relationship was complicated by Hemingway’s intense dislike of Zelda
Fitzgerald, whom he described a “crazy” and a distraction to her husband’s
writing. The literary titans drifted apart during the late-1920s, and Hemingway
later bashed Fitzgerald in print on more than one occasion. By 1937, Fitzgerald
lamented that their friendship was as good as finished. “I talk with the
authority of failure,” he wrote. “Ernest with the authority of success. We
could never sit across the table again.”
“The Great Gatsby” was considered a flop upon its release. Despite winning
rave reviews from the likes of T.S. Eliot and Edith Wharton, Fitzgerald’s 1925
masterpiece “The Great Gatsby” was never a bestseller in his lifetime. It
performed poorly compared to his first two novels, selling just over 20,000
copies and only turning a meager profit for its publisher. Popular interest in
the book didn’t spike until World War II, when some 150,000 copies were shipped
to U.S. servicemen overseas. Combined with other posthumous re-releases of his
work, this “Armed Services Edition” helped revive Fitzgerald’s literary
reputation and secure “The Great Gatsby” a place among the most beloved
American novels. The book now sells some 500,000 copies each year.
Fitzgerald was
hired by MGM in the late 1930s and relocated to Hollywood. Despite befriending
the crème of the crop in the Hollywood circuit like Spencer Tracy, Clark Gable,
and Errol Flynn, he hated the place: “Hollywood is a dump – in the human sense of
the word. A hideous town, pointed up by the insulating gardens of its rich;
full of the human spirit at a new low of debasement.”