Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald (1896–1940) was an American novelist and short-story writer who is famous for his vivid portrait of the “Jazz Era” of the 1920s in such novels as The Great Gatsby.
Born in St. Paul, Minnesota, Fitzgerald was named for his eminent ancestor, Francis Scott Key, the author of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” the American national anthem. He joined Princeton University, where he wrote the lyrics for a few musical comedies. During World War I, he served as the second lieutenant in the army and wrote his first novel This Side of Paradise (1920,) which made him instantly famous.
Fitzgerald married the glamorous Zelda Sayre, and they embarked on a life of high living, big spending, and party-going, which characterized the “Jazz Age.” His next books, the novel The Beautiful and Damned (1922) and two collections of stories—Flappers and Philosophers (1920) and Tales of the Jazz Age (1922)—became sensational best-sellers.
Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925) is arguably America’s most celebrated novel. It features a near-criminal, but impractical financier whose romantic and destructive passion for the greedy and self-absorbed Daisy Buchanan leads ultimately to his death.
Fitzgerald sustained his professional career partly by writing Hollywood movie scripts—most notably, he refined the screenplays for Gone with the Wind (1939) and A Yank at Oxford (1938.) He wrote one additional completed novel, Tender Is the Night (1934) and the unfinished The Last Tycoon (1941.) His personal life declined because of alcoholism and his wife’s mental illness.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Riches have never fascinated me, unless combined with the greatest charm or distinction.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Topics: Wealth, Riches
Though the Jazz Age continued it became less and less an affair of youth. The sequel was like a children’s party taken over by the elders.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Topics: Party, Twentieth Century
Life was a damned muddle – a football game with everyone offside and the referee gotten rid of – everyone claiming the referee would have been on his side.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Topics: Life
No such thing as a man willing to be honest—that would be like a blind man willing to see.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Topics: Honesty
I hope she’ll be a fool—that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Having once found the intensity of art, nothing else that can happen in life can ever again seem as important as the creative process.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Topics: Art
It’s not a slam at you when people are rude – it’s a slam at the people they’ve met before.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Topics: Manners
Sometimes I think that idlers seem to be a special class for whom nothing can be planned, plead as one will with them—their only contribution to the human family is to warm a seat at the common table.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Topics: Idleness
Learn young about hard work and manners – and you’ll be through the whole dirty mess and nicely dead again before you know it.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Topics: Manners
I’ve been drunk for about a week now, and I thought it might sober me up to sit in a library.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Topics: Libraries
Being in love is great – you get a lot of compliments
and begin to think you are a great guy.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Topics: Failure, Mistakes, Defeat, Failures
I know myself, but that is all.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Topics: Self-Knowledge, Identity
No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man can store up in his ghosty heart
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Topics: Challenges
Everybody’s youth is a dream, a form of chemical madness.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Topics: Youth, Madness
Advertising is a racket, like the movies and the brokerage business. You cannot be honest without admitting that its constructive contribution to humanity is exactly minus zero.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Topics: Advertising
For a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Topics: Discovery
Never confuse activity with action.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Topics: Action
Of course all life is a process of breaking down, but the blows that do the dramatic side of the work – the big sudden blows that come, or seem to come, from outside – the ones you remember and blame things on and, in moments of weakness, tell your friends about, don’t show their effect all at once. There is another sort of blow that comes from within – that you don’t feel until it’s too late to do anything about it, until you realize with finality that in some regard you will never be as good a man again. The first sort of breakage seems to happen quick – the second kind happens almost without your knowing it but is realized suddenly indeed. Before I go on with this short history, let me make a general observation – the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Topics: Hope, Attitude, Mindsets, Positive Attitudes, Intelligence, Ability, Optimism, Wisdom, Ideas
No decent career was ever founded on a public.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Topics: Career, Public
Personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Topics: Personality
An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the school-masters of ever afterward.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Topics: Authors & Writing, Writing, Art, Writers
The intimate revelations of young men, or at least the terms in which they express them, are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Topics: Men
One writes of scars healed, a loose parallel to the pathology of the skin, but there is no such thing in the life of an individual. There are open wounds, shrunk sometimes to the size of a pin-prick but wounds still. The marks of suffering are more comparable to the loss of a finger, or the sight of an eye. We may not miss them, either, for one minute in a year, but if we should there is nothing to be done about it.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Topics: Suffering
Vitality shows not only in the ability to persist but the ability to start over.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Topics: Endurance, Perseverance, Resolve, Health
There was another silence, while Marjorie considered whether or not convincing her mother was worth the trouble. People over forty can seldom be permanently convinced of anything. At eighteen our convictions are hills from which we look; at forty-five they are caves in which we hide.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Topics: Beliefs, Age
Optimism is the content of small men in high places.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Topics: Optimism
Boredom is not an end-product, is comparatively rather an early stage in life and art. You’ve got to go by or past or through boredom, as through a filter, before the clear product emerges.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Topics: Boredom, Bores
Now the standard cure for one who is sunk is to consider those in actual destitution or physical suffering
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Topics: Despair
Our lives are defined by opportunities, even the ones we miss.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Topics: Life
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
Robert A. Heinlein American Science Fiction Writer
John Steinbeck American Novelist
William S. Burroughs American Novelist
Stephen King American Novelist
Ken Kesey American Novelist
James Lane Allen American Novelist
Philip K. Dick American Novelist
Ray Bradbury American Science-Fiction Writer
Joyce Carol Oates American Novelist
Nathaniel Hawthorne American Novelist