title: There Will Be Blood

text: In 1911, Daniel is approached by Paul Sunday, a young man who tells him of an oil deposit under his family's property in Little Boston, California. Daniel visits the Sundays' property and meets Paul's identical twin brother Eli, who is a local preacher. Daniel attempts to purchase the farm from the Sundays at a bargain price under the ruse of using it to hunt quail, but his motives are questioned by Eli who knows the land has drilling potential. In exchange for the rights to the property, Eli demands $10,000 for his church. An agreement is made and Daniel acquires all the available land in and around the Sunday property, save for one holdout, William Bandy, after he neglected to negotiate with him.


title: There Will Be Blood

text: Eli asks for permission to bless the well before drilling begins; Daniel initially agrees, but then refuses to allow it when the time comes. Oil drilling begins and a series of misfortunes occur: an accident kills one worker and a gas blowout deafens H.W. and destroys the drilling infrastructure. Eli blames the disasters on the well not having been properly blessed. When Eli publicly demands the money still owed to him, Daniel beats and humiliates him. At the dinner table that night, Eli attacks and berates his father for having trusted Daniel.


title: There Will Be Blood

text: A man arrives at Daniel's doorstep claiming to be his half-brother, Henry. Daniel hires him and the two grow close. A jealous H.W. sets fire to their house, intending to kill Henry. Daniel sends H.W. away to a school for the deaf in San Francisco. A representative from Standard Oil offers to buy out Daniel's local interests, but, after a perceived slight, Daniel refuses and instead strikes a deal with Union Oil to build a pipeline to the California coast. However, Bandy's ranch remains an impediment.


title: There Will Be Blood

text: Reminiscing about their childhood home, Daniel becomes suspicious of Henry's story and confronts him one night at gunpoint. "Henry" confesses that he was a friend of the real Henry, who had in fact died of tuberculosis, and that he had impersonated Henry in the hope that Daniel could give him a job. In a fit of rage, Daniel murders the impostor and buries his body. Daniel then drinks heavily and weeps.


title: There Will Be Blood

text: The next morning, Daniel is awakened by Bandy, who knows of Daniel's crime and wants Daniel to publicly repent in Eli's church in exchange for being given an easement for the pipeline running across his land. As part of his baptism, Eli humiliates Daniel and coerces him into confessing that he had abandoned his son. Some time later, while the pipeline is being built, H.W. is reunited with Daniel, and Eli leaves Little Boston to go do missionary work.


title: There Will Be Blood

text: In 1927, H.W. marries Mary Sunday, the younger sister of Paul and Eli. Daniel, now extremely wealthy but a raging alcoholic, lives alone in a large mansion. Through a sign language interpreter, H.W. asks his father to dissolve their partnership so that he can establish his own independent drilling company in Mexico. Daniel reacts angrily and mocks H.W.'s deafness before revealing his true origins as a "bastard from a basket". H.W. tells Daniel he is glad that they are not related and walks out; Daniel continues to jeer at H.W. as he departs.


title: There Will Be Blood

text: While Daniel, drunk, is in the private bowling alley in his mansion, he is visited by Eli, who is now a radio preacher. Eli offers to sell Daniel the property rights to the Bandy ranch, since Bandy has recently died. Daniel agrees on condition that Eli denounces his faith and his own credibility. Eli acquiesces, after which Daniel coldly reveals that the property is now worthless because Daniel's neighboring wells have already tapped and drained the same oil reservoir. Desperate, Eli confesses to having lost money in the 1929 stock market crash and having strayed morally. Daniel taunts Eli before chasing him around the bowling alley and beating him to death with a bowling pin. When his butler appears to ask about the commotion, Daniel announces, "I'm finished."


title: There Will Be Blood

text: Many have seen the film as a commentary on the nature of capitalism and greed, and its inherent national presence in America. Daniel Plainview's "I have a competition in me" speech has been looked upon as key when analyzing the film from this angle.


title: There Will Be Blood

text: David Denby of "The New Yorker" described the film as being about "the driving force of capitalism as it both creates and destroys the future" and goes on to say that "this movie is about the vanishing American frontier. The thrown-together buildings look scraggly and unkempt, the homesteaders are modest, stubborn, and reticent, but, in their undreamed-of future, Wal-Mart is on the way."


title: There Will Be Blood

text: Others have noted themes of faith, religion, and family. James Christopher of "The Times" viewed the film as "a biblical parable about America's failure to square religion and greed."


title: There Will Be Blood

text: After Eric Schlosser finished writing "Fast Food Nation", reporters kept asking him about Upton Sinclair. Although he had read Sinclair's book "The Jungle", he did not know about his other works or anything about Sinclair himself. He decided to read most of Sinclair's works, and eventually read the novel "Oil!", which he loved. Schlosser, who found the book to be exciting and thought it would make a great film, sought out the Sinclair estate and purchased the film rights. He thought that he would try to find a director who was as passionate about the book as he was, but director Paul Thomas Anderson approached him first.


title: There Will Be Blood

text: Anderson had been working on a screenplay about two fighting families. He struggled with the script and soon realized it was not working. Homesick, he purchased a copy of "Oil!" in London, drawn to its cover illustration of a California oilfield. As he read, Anderson became more fascinated with the novel. After contacting Schlosser, he adapted the first 150 pages to a screenplay. He began to get a real sense of where his script was going after making many trips to museums dedicated to early oilmen in Bakersfield. Anderson changed the title from "Oil!" to "There Will Be Blood" because he felt "there's not enough of the book to feel like it's a proper adaptation".


title: There Will Be Blood

text: Anderson, who had said that he would like to work with Daniel Day-Lewis, wrote the screenplay with Day-Lewis in mind and approached the actor when the script was nearly complete. Anderson had heard that Day-Lewis liked his earlier film "Punch-Drunk Love", which gave him the confidence to hand Day-Lewis a copy of the incomplete script. According to Day-Lewis, being asked to do the film was enough to convince him. In an interview with "The New York Observer", he elaborated that what drew him to the project was "the understanding that [Anderson] had already entered into that world, [he] wasn't observing it [he'd] entered into it and indeed [he'd] populated it with characters who [he] felt had lives of their own".


title: There Will Be Blood

text: Anderson said that the line in the final scene, "I drink your milkshake!", was paraphrased from a quote by former Secretary of the Interior and U.S. Senator from New Mexico, Albert Fall, speaking before a Congressional investigation into the 1920s oil-related Teapot Dome scandal. Anderson said he was fascinated "to see that word [milkshake] among all this official testimony and terminology" to explain the complicated process of oil drainage.


title: There Will Be Blood

text: In 2013, an independent attempt to locate the statement in Fall's testimony proved unsuccessful—an article published in the "Case Western Reserve Law Review" suggested that the actual source of the paraphrased quote may instead have been remarks in 2003 by Sen. Pete Domenici of New Mexico during a debate over drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. In those remarks, Domenici stated:


title: There Will Be Blood

text: According to Joanne Sellar, one of the film's producers, it was a hard film to finance because "the studios didn't think it had the scope of a major picture". It took two years to acquire financing for the film. For the role of Plainview's "son", Anderson looked at people in Los Angeles and New York City, but he realized that they needed someone from Texas who knew how to shoot shotguns and "live in that world". The filmmakers asked around at a school and the principal recommended Dillon Freasier. They did not have him read any scenes and instead talked to him, realizing that he was the perfect person for the role.


title: There Will Be Blood

text: To build his character, Day-Lewis started with the voice. Anderson sent him recordings from the late 19th century to 1927 and a copy of the 1948 film "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre", including documentaries on its director, John Huston, an important influence on Anderson's film. According to Anderson, he was inspired by the fact that "Sierra Madre" is "about greed and ambition and paranoia and looking at the worst parts of yourself." While writing the script, he would put the film on before he went to bed at night. To research for the role, Day-Lewis read letters from laborers and studied photographs from the time period. He also read up on oil tycoon Edward Doheny, upon whom Sinclair's book is loosely based.


title: There Will Be Blood

text: Principal photography began in June 2006 on a ranch in Marfa, Texas, and took three months. Other location shooting took place in Los Angeles. The film was shot using Panavision XL 35 mm cameras outfitted primarily with Panavision C series and high-speed anamorphic lenses. Anderson tried to shoot the script in sequence with most of the sets on the ranch.


title: There Will Be Blood

text: Two weeks in, Anderson replaced the actor playing Eli Sunday with Paul Dano, who had originally only been cast in the much smaller role of Paul Sunday, the brother who tipped off Plainview about the oil on the Sunday ranch. A profile of Day-Lewis in "The New York Times Magazine" suggested that the original actor, Kel O'Neill, had been intimidated by Day-Lewis's intensity and habit of staying in character on and off the set. Anderson, Day-Lewis, and O'Neill all denied this claim, and Day-Lewis stated, "I absolutely don't believe that it was because he was intimidated by me. I happen to believe that—and I hope I'm right." O'Neill ascribed his dismissal to a poor working relationship with Anderson and his growing disinterest in acting.


title: There Will Be Blood

text: Anderson first saw Dano in "The Ballad of Jack and Rose" and thought that he would be perfect to play Paul Sunday, a role he originally envisioned to be a 12- or 13-year-old boy. Dano only had four days to prepare for the much larger role of Eli Sunday, but he researched the time period that the film is set in as well as evangelical preachers. The previous two weeks of scenes with Sunday and Plainview had to be re-shot with Dano instead of O'Neill.


title: There Will Be Blood

text: The interior mansion scenes were filmed at the Greystone Mansion in Beverly Hills, the former real-life home of Edward Doheny Jr., a gift from his father, Edward Doheny. Scenes filmed at Greystone involved the careful renovation of the basement's two-lane bowling alley. Anderson said it was "a particular situation, because it was so narrow that there could only be a very limited number of people at any given time, maybe five or six behind the camera and then the two boys." Day-Lewis later broke a rib in a fall during filming.


title: There Will Be Blood

text: Anderson had been a fan of Radiohead's music and was impressed with Jonny Greenwood's scoring of the film "Bodysong". While writing the script for "There Will Be Blood", Anderson heard Greenwood's orchestral piece "Popcorn Superhet Receiver," which prompted him to ask Greenwood to work with him. After initially agreeing to score the film, Greenwood had doubts and thought about backing out, but Anderson's reassurance and enthusiasm for the film convinced him to stick with it. Anderson gave Greenwood a copy of the film and three weeks later he came back with two hours of music recorded at Abbey Road Studios in London. Concerning his approach to composing the soundtrack, Greenwood said to "Entertainment Weekly":


title: There Will Be Blood

text: In December 2008, Greenwood's score was nominated for a Grammy in the category of "Best Score Soundtrack Album for Motion Picture, Television or Other Visual Media" for the 51st Grammy Awards. It features classical music, such as the third movement ("Vivace Non Troppo") of Johannes Brahms's Violin Concerto in D Major and Arvo Pärt's "Fratres" for cello and piano.


title: There Will Be Blood

text: Greenwood's score was awarded the Silver Bear for outstanding artistic contribution (music) at the 58th Berlin International Film Festival in 2008.


title: There Will Be Blood

text: On review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 91% based on 244 reviews, with an average rating of 8.5/10. The website's critical consensus reads, "Widely touted as a masterpiece, this sparse and sprawling epic about the underhanded 'heroes' of capitalism boasts incredible performances by leads Daniel Day-Lewis and Paul Dano, and is director Paul Thomas Anderson's best work to date."


title: There Will Be Blood

text: On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 93 out of 100, based on 42 critics, indicating "universal acclaim".


title: There Will Be Blood

text: Andrew Sarris called the film "an impressive achievement in its confident expertness in rendering the simulated realities of a bygone time and place, largely with an inspired use of regional amateur actors and extras with all the right moves and sounds." In "Premiere", Glenn Kenny praised Day-Lewis's performance: "Once his Plainview takes wing, the relentless focus of the performance makes the character unique." Manohla Dargis wrote, in her review for "The New York Times", "the film is above all a consummate work of art, one that transcends the historically fraught context of its making, and its pleasures are unapologetically aesthetic."


title: There Will Be Blood

text: "Esquire" praised Day-Lewis' performance: "what's most fun, albeit in a frightening way, is watching this greedmeister become more and more unhinged as he locks horns with Eli Sunday … both Anderson and Day-Lewis go for broke. But it's a pleasure to be reminded, if only once every four years, that subtlety can be overrated."


title: There Will Be Blood

text: Richard Schickel in "Time" praised "There Will Be Blood" as "one of the most wholly original American movies ever made." Critic Tom Charity, writing about CNN's ten-best films list, calls the film the only "flat-out masterpiece" of 2007.


title: There Will Be Blood

text: Schickel also named the film one of the Top 10 Movies of 2007, ranking it at #9, calling Daniel Day-Lewis' performance "astonishing", and calling the film "a mesmerizing meditation on the American spirit in all its maddening ambiguities: mean and noble, angry and secretive, hypocritical and more than a little insane in its aspirations." James Christopher, chief film critic for "The Times", published a list in April 2008 of his top 100 films, placing "There Will Be Blood" in second place, behind only "Casablanca".


title: There Will Be Blood

text: Some critics were positive toward the work but less laudatory, often criticizing its ending. Mick LaSalle of the "San Francisco Chronicle", challenged the film's high praise by saying "there should be no need to pretend "There Will Be Blood" is a masterpiece just because Anderson sincerely tried to make it one" and noting that "the scenes between Day-Lewis and Dano ultimately degenerate into a ridiculous burlesque".


title: There Will Be Blood

text: Roger Ebert assigned the film three and a half out of four stars and wrote, ""There Will Be Blood" is the kind of film that is easily called great. I am not sure of its greatness. It was filmed in the same area of Texas used by "No Country for Old Men", and that is a great film, and a perfect one. But "There Will Be Blood" is not perfect, and in its imperfections (its unbending characters, its lack of women or any reflection of ordinary society, its ending, its relentlessness) we may see its reach exceeding its grasp."


title: There Will Be Blood

text: Carla Meyer of the "Sacramento Bee", who gave the film the same star rating as Ebert, opined that the final confrontation between Daniel and Eli marked when the work "stops being a masterpiece and becomes a really good movie. What was grand becomes petty, then overwrought." In 2014, Peter Walker of "The Guardian" likewise argued that the scene "might not be the very worst scene in the history of recent Oscar-garlanded cinema ... but it's perhaps the one most inflated with its own delusional self-importance."


title: There Will Be Blood

text: Several months after LaSalle's initial review of the film, he reiterated that while he still did not consider "There Will Be Blood" to be a masterpiece, he wondered if its "style, an approach, an attitude... might become important in the future." Since 2008, the film has been included in the book "1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die" and every revised edition released afterwards. "Total Film" placed it at number three in their list of the 50 best movies of "Total Film" lifetime. In "The Guardian", journalist Steve Rose ranked it the 17th best arthouse film of all time, and in a separate 2019 ranking a panel of four "Guardian" journalists ranked it the best film of the 21st century.


title: There Will Be Blood

text: "There Will Be Blood" is bravura film-making by one of American film's modern masters. Paul Thomas Anderson's epic poem of savagery, optimism and obsession is a true meditation on America. The film drills down into the dark heart of capitalism, where domination, not gain, is the ultimate goal. In a career defined by transcendent performances, Daniel Day-Lewis creates a character so rich and so towering, that "Daniel Plainview" will haunt the history of film for generations to come.


title: There Will Be Blood

text: Review aggregator site Metacritic, when comparing over 40 'top ten of the decade' lists from various notable publications, found "There Will Be Blood" to be the most mentioned, appearing on 46% of critics' lists and being ranked the decade's best film on five of them.


title: There Will Be Blood

text: In December 2009, Peter Travers of "Rolling Stone" chose the film as the #1 film of the decade, saying:


title: There Will Be Blood

text: Two years after first seeing "There Will Be Blood", I am convinced that Paul Thomas Anderson's profound portrait of an American primitive—take that, "Citizen Kane"—deserves pride of place among the decade's finest. Daniel Day-Lewis gave the best and ballsiest performance of the past 10 years. As Daniel Plainview, a prospector who loots the land of its natural resources in silver and oil to fill his pockets and gargantuan ego, he showed us a man draining his humanity for power. And Anderson, having extended Plainview's rage from Earth to heaven in the form of a corrupt preacher (Paul Dano), managed to "drink the milkshake" of other risk-taking directors. If I had to stake the future of film in the next decade on one filmmaker, I'd go with PTA. Even more than "Boogie Nights" and "Magnolia"—his rebel cries from the 1990s—"Blood" let Anderson put technology at the service of character. The score by Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood was a sonic explosion that reinvented what film music could be. And the images captured by Robert Elswit, a genius of camera and lighting, made visual poetry out of an oil well consumed by flame. For the final word on "Blood", I'll quote Plainview: "It was one goddamn hell of a show."


title: There Will Be Blood

text: "Chicago Tribune" and "At the Movies" critic Michael Phillips named "There Will Be Blood" the decade's best film. Phillips stated:


title: There Will Be Blood

text: This most eccentric and haunting of modern epics is driven by oilman Daniel Plainview, who, in the hands of actor Daniel Day-Lewis, becomes a Horatio Alger story gone horribly wrong. Writer/director Paul Thomas Anderson's camera is as crucial to the film's hypnotic pull as the performance at its center. For its evocation of the early 1900s, its relentless focus on one man's fascinating obsessions, and for its inspiring example of how to freely adapt a novel—plus, what I think is the performance of the new century—"There Will Be Blood" stands alone. The more I see it, the sadder, and stranger, and more visually astounding it grows—and the more it seems to say about the best and worst in the American ethos of rugged individualism. Awfully good!


title: There Will Be Blood

text: "Entertainment Weekly" critic Lisa Schwarzbaum named "There Will Be Blood" the decade's best film as well. In her original review, Schwarzbaum stated:


title: There Will Be Blood

text: Anyhow, a fierce story meshing big exterior-oriented themes of American character with an interior-oriented portrait of an impenetrable man (two men, really, including the false prophet Sunday) is only half Anderson's quest, and his exciting achievement. The other half lies in the innovation applied to the telling itself. For a huge picture, "There Will Be Blood" is exquisitely intimate, almost a collection of sketches. For a long, slow movie, it speeds. For a story set in the fabled bad-old-days past, it's got the terrors of modernity in its DNA. Leaps of romantic chordal grandeur from Brahms' Violin Concerto in D Major announce the launch of a fortune-changing oil well down the road from Eli Sunday's church—and then, much later, announce a kind of end of the world. For bleakness, the movie can't be beat—nor for brilliance.


title: There Will Be Blood

text: In December 2009, the website Gawker.com determined that "There Will Be Blood" is film critics' consensus best film of the decade when aggregating all Best of the Decade lists, stating: "And when the votes were all in, by a nose, "There Will Be Blood" stood alone at the top of the decade, its straw in the whole damn cinema's milkshake."


title: There Will Be Blood

text: The list of critics who lauded "There Will Be Blood" in their assessments of films from the past decade include:


title: There Will Be Blood

text: In 2016, it was voted the #3 best film of the 21st century as picked by 177 film critics from around the world.


title: There Will Be Blood

text: The February 2020 issue of "New York Magazine" lists "There Will Be Blood" alongside "Citizen Kane", "Sunset Boulevard", "Dr. Strangelove", "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid", "The Conversation", "Nashville", "Taxi Driver", "The Elephant Man", "Pulp Fiction", "In the Bedroom", and "Roma" as "The Best Movies That Lost Best Picture at the Oscars."


title: There Will Be Blood

text: The first public screening of "There Will Be Blood" was on September 29, 2007, at Fantastic Fest in Austin, Texas. The film was released on December 26, 2007, in New York City and Los Angeles where it grossed US$190,739 on its opening weekend. The film then opened in 885 theaters in selected markets on January 25, 2008, grossing $4.8 million on its opening weekend. The film went on to make $40.2 million in North America and $35.9 million in the rest of the world, with a worldwide total of $76.1 million, well above its $25 million budget; however, the prints and advertising cost for the film's United States release cost about $40 million.


title: There Will Be Blood

text: The film was released on DVD on April 8, 2008. It was released with one and two-disc editions, both are packaged in a cardboard case. Anderson has refused to record an audio commentary for the film. A HD DVD release was announced, but later canceled due to the discontinuation of the format. A Blu-ray edition was released on June 3, 2008. The film has grossed $23,604,823 through DVD sales.


title: F. Scott Fitzgerald

text: Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald (September 24, 1896 – December 21, 1940) was an American novelist, essayist, and short story writer. He is best known for his novels depicting the flamboyance and excess of the Jazz Age—a term he popularized. During his lifetime, he published four novels, four story collections, and 164 short stories. Although he achieved temporary popular success and fortune in the 1920s, Fitzgerald received critical acclaim only after his death and is now widely regarded as one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century.


title: F. Scott Fitzgerald

text: Born into a middle-class family in Saint Paul, Minnesota, Fitzgerald was raised primarily in New York state. He attended Princeton University where he befriended future literary critic Edmund Wilson. Owing to a failed romantic relationship with Chicago socialite Ginevra King, he dropped out in 1917 to join the United States Army during World War I. While stationed in Alabama, he met Zelda Sayre, a Southern debutante who belonged to Montgomery's exclusive country-club set. Although she initially rejected Fitzgerald's marriage proposal due to his lack of financial prospects, Zelda agreed to marry him after he published the commercially successful "This Side of Paradise" (1920). The novel became a cultural sensation and cemented his reputation as one of the eminent writers of the decade.


title: F. Scott Fitzgerald

text: His second novel, "The Beautiful and Damned" (1922), propelled him further into the cultural elite. To maintain his affluent lifestyle, he wrote numerous stories for popular magazines such as "The Saturday Evening Post", "Collier's Weekly", and "Esquire". During this period, Fitzgerald frequented Europe, where he befriended modernist writers and artists of the "Lost Generation" expatriate community, including Ernest Hemingway. His third novel, "The Great Gatsby" (1925), received generally favorable reviews but was a commercial failure, selling fewer than 23,000 copies in its first year. Despite its lackluster debut, "The Great Gatsby" is now hailed by some literary critics as the "Great American Novel". Following the deterioration of his wife's mental health and her placement in a mental institute for schizophrenia, Fitzgerald completed his final novel, "Tender Is the Night" (1934).


title: F. Scott Fitzgerald

text: Struggling financially because of the declining popularity of his works amid the Great Depression, Fitzgerald moved to Hollywood where he embarked upon an unsuccessful career as a screenwriter. While living in Hollywood, he cohabited with columnist Sheilah Graham, his final companion before his death. After a long struggle with alcoholism, he attained sobriety only to die of a heart attack in 1940, at 44. His friend Edmund Wilson edited and published an unfinished fifth novel, "The Last Tycoon" (1941), after Fitzgerald's death.


title: F. Scott Fitzgerald

text: Born on September 24, 1896, in Saint Paul, Minnesota, to a middle-class Catholic family, Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was named after his distant cousin, Francis Scott Key, who wrote in 1814 the lyrics for the American national anthem "The Star-Spangled Banner". His mother was Mary "Molly" McQuillan Fitzgerald, the daughter of an Irish immigrant who became wealthy as a wholesale grocer. His father, Edward Fitzgerald, descended from Irish and English ancestry, and had moved to Minnesota from Maryland after the American Civil War to open a wicker-furniture manufacturing business. Edward's first cousin twice removed, Mary Surratt, was hanged in 1865 for conspiring to assassinate Abraham Lincoln.


title: F. Scott Fitzgerald

text: One year after Fitzgerald's birth, his father's wicker-furniture manufacturing business failed, and the family moved to Buffalo, New York where his father joined Procter & Gamble as a salesman. Fitzgerald spent the first decade of his childhood primarily in Buffalo with a brief interlude in Syracuse between January 1901 and September 1903. His parents sent him to two Catholic schools on Buffalo's West Side—first Holy Angels Convent (1903–1904) and then Nardin Academy (1905–1908). As a boy, Fitzgerald was described by his peers as unusually intelligent with a keen interest in literature.


title: F. Scott Fitzgerald

text: Procter & Gamble fired his father in March 1908, and the family returned to Saint Paul. Although his alcoholic father was now destitute, his mother's inheritance supplemented the family income and allowed them to continue living a middle-class lifestyle. Fitzgerald attended St. Paul Academy from 1908 to 1911. At 13, Fitzgerald had his first piece of fiction published in the school newspaper. In 1911, Fitzgerald's parents sent him to the Newman School, a Catholic prep school in Hackensack, New Jersey. At Newman, Father Sigourney Fay recognized his literary potential and encouraged him to become a writer.


title: F. Scott Fitzgerald

text: After graduating from Newman in 1913, Fitzgerald enrolled at Princeton University and became one of the few Catholics in the student body. While at Princeton, Fitzgerald shared a room and became long time friends with John Biggs Jr, who later helped the author find a home in Delaware. As the semesters passed, he formed close friendships with classmates Edmund Wilson and John Peale Bishop, both of whom would later aid his literary career. Determined to be a successful writer, Fitzgerald wrote stories and poems for the Princeton Triangle Club, the "Princeton Tiger", and the "Nassau Lit".


title: F. Scott Fitzgerald

text: During his sophomore year, an 18-year-old Fitzgerald returned home to Saint Paul during Christmas break where he met and fell in love with 16-year-old Chicago debutante Ginevra King. The couple began a romantic relationship spanning several years. She would become his literary model for the characters of Isabelle Borgé in "This Side of Paradise", Daisy Buchanan in "The Great Gatsby", and many others. While Fitzgerald attended Princeton, Ginevra attended Westover, a Connecticut women's school. He visited Ginevra at Westover until her expulsion for flirting with a crowd of young male admirers from her dormitory window. Her return home ended Fitzgerald's weekly courtship.


title: F. Scott Fitzgerald

text: Despite the great distance separating them, Fitzgerald still attempted to pursue Ginevra, and he traveled across the country to visit her family's Lake Forest estate. Although Ginevra loved him, her upper-class family belittled Scott's courtship because of his lower-class status compared to her other wealthy suitors. Her imperious father Charles Garfield King purportedly told a young Fitzgerald that "poor boys shouldn't think of marrying rich girls."


title: F. Scott Fitzgerald

text: Rejected by Ginevra as an unsuitable match, a suicidal Fitzgerald enlisted in the United States Army amid World War I and received a commission as a second lieutenant. While awaiting deployment to the Western front where he hoped to die in combat, he was stationed in a training camp at Fort Leavenworth under the command of Captain Dwight Eisenhower, the future general of the Army and United States President. Fitzgerald purportedly chafed under Eisenhower's authority and disliked him intensely. Hoping to have a novel published before his anticipated death in Europe, Fitzgerald hastily wrote a 120,000-word manuscript entitled "The Romantic Egotist" in three months. When he submitted the manuscript to publishers, Scribner's rejected it, although the impressed reviewer, Max Perkins, praised Fitzgerald's writing and encouraged him to resubmit it after further revisions.


title: F. Scott Fitzgerald

text: In June 1918, Fitzgerald was garrisoned with the 45th and 67th Infantry Regiments at Camp Sheridan near Montgomery, Alabama. Attempting to rebound from his rejection by Ginevra, a lonely Fitzgerald began dating a variety of young Montgomery women. At a country club, Fitzgerald met Zelda Sayre, a 17-year-old Southern belle and the affluent granddaughter of a Confederate senator whose extended family owned the White House of the Confederacy. Zelda was one of the most celebrated debutantes of Montgomery's exclusive country club set. A romance soon blossomed, although he continued writing Ginevra, asking in vain if there was any chance of resuming their former relationship. Three days after Ginevra married a wealthy Chicago businessman, Fitzgerald professed his affections for Zelda in September 1918.


title: F. Scott Fitzgerald

text: Fitzgerald's Montgomery sojourn was interrupted briefly in November 1918 when he was transferred northward to Camp Mills, Long Island. While stationed there, the Allied Powers signed an armistice with Germany, and the war ended. Dispatched back to the base near Montgomery to await discharge, he renewed his pursuit of Zelda. Together, Scott and Zelda engaged in what he later described as sexual recklessness, and by December 1918, they had consummated their relationship. Although Fitzgerald did not initially intend to marry Zelda, the couple gradually viewed themselves as informally engaged, although Zelda declined to marry him until he proved financially successful.


title: F. Scott Fitzgerald

text: Upon his discharge on February 14, 1919, he moved to New York City, where he unsuccessfully begged the editors of various newspapers for a job. He then turned to writing advertising copy to sustain himself while seeking a breakthrough as an author of fiction. Fitzgerald wrote to Zelda frequently, and by March 1920, he had sent Zelda his mother's ring, and the two became officially engaged. Several of Fitzgerald's friends opposed the match, as they deemed Zelda ill-suited for him. Likewise, Zelda's Episcopalian family was wary of Scott because of his Catholic background, precarious finances, and excessive drinking.


title: F. Scott Fitzgerald

text: Seeking his fortune in New York, Fitzgerald worked for the Barron Collier advertising agency and lived in a single room in Manhattan's West Side. Although he received a small raise for creating a catchy slogan, "We keep you clean in Muscatine", for an Iowa laundry, Fitzgerald subsisted in relative poverty. Still aspiring to a lucrative career in literature, he wrote several short stories and satires in his spare time. Rejected over 120 times, he sold only one story, "Babes in the Woods", and received a pittance of $30.


title: F. Scott Fitzgerald

text: With dreams of a lucrative career in New York City dashed, Fitzgerald could not convince Zelda that he would be able to support her, and she broke off the engagement in June 1919. In the wake of Fitzgerald's rejection by Ginevra two years prior, his subsequent rejection by Zelda dispirited him. While Prohibition-era New York City was experiencing the burgeoning Jazz Age, Fitzgerald felt defeated and rudderless: two women had rejected him in succession; he detested his advertising job; his stories failed to sell; he couldn't afford new clothes, and his future seemed bleak. Unable to earn a successful living, Fitzgerald publicly threatened to jump to his death from a window ledge of the Yale Club, and he carried a revolver daily while contemplating suicide.


title: F. Scott Fitzgerald

text: In July, Fitzgerald quit his advertising job and returned to St. Paul. Having returned to his hometown as a failure, Fitzgerald became a social recluse and lived on the top floor of his parents' home at 599 Summit Avenue, on Cathedral Hill. He decided to make one last attempt to become a novelist and to stake everything on the success or failure of a book. Abstaining from alcohol and parties, he worked day and night to revise "The Romantic Egotist" as "This Side of Paradise"—an autobiographical account of his Princeton years and his romances with Ginevra, Zelda, and others.


title: F. Scott Fitzgerald

text: While revising his novel, Fitzgerald took a job repairing car roofs at the Northern Pacific Shops in St. Paul. One evening in the fall of 1919, after an exhausted Fitzgerald had returned home from work, the postman rang and delivered a telegram from Scribner's announcing that his revised manuscript had been accepted for publication. Upon reading the telegram, an ecstatic Fitzgerald ran down the streets of St. Paul and flagged down random automobiles to share the news.


title: F. Scott Fitzgerald

text: Fitzgerald's debut novel appeared in bookstores on March 26, 1920 and became an instant success. "This Side of Paradise" sold approximately 40,000 copies in the first year. Within months of its publication, his debut novel became a cultural sensation in the United States, and F. Scott Fitzgerald became a household name. Critics such as H. L. Mencken hailed the work as the best American novel of the year, and newspaper columnists described the work as the first realistic American college novel. The work catapulted Fitzgerald's career as a writer. Magazines now accepted his previously rejected stories, and "The Saturday Evening Post" published his story "Bernice Bobs Her Hair" with his name on its May 1920 cover.


title: F. Scott Fitzgerald

text: Fitzgerald's new fame enabled him to earn much higher rates for his short stories, and Zelda resumed their engagement as Fitzgerald could now pay for her accustomed lifestyle. Although they were re-engaged, Fitzgerald's feelings for Zelda were at an all-time low, and he remarked to a friend, "I wouldn't care if she died, but I couldn't stand to have anybody else marry her." Despite mutual reservations, they married in a simple ceremony on April 3, 1920, at St. Patrick's Cathedral, New York. At the time of their wedding, Fitzgerald claimed neither he nor Zelda still loved each other, and the early years of their marriage were more akin to a friendship.


title: F. Scott Fitzgerald

text: Living in luxury at the Biltmore Hotel in New York City, the newlywed couple became national celebrities, as much for their wild behavior as for the success of Fitzgerald's novel. At the Biltmore, Scott did handstands in the lobby, while Zelda slid down the hotel banisters. After several weeks, the hotel asked them to leave for disturbing other guests. The couple relocated two blocks to the Commodore Hotel on 42nd Street where they spent half an hour spinning in the revolving door. Fitzgerald likened their juvenile behavior in New York City to two "small children in a great bright unexplored barn." Writer Dorothy Parker first encountered the couple riding on the roof of a taxi. "They did both look as though they had just stepped out of the sun", Parker recalled, "their youth was striking. Everyone wanted to meet him."


title: F. Scott Fitzgerald

text: As Fitzgerald was one of the most celebrated novelists during the Jazz Age, many admirers sought his acquaintanceship. He met sports columnist Ring Lardner, journalist Rebecca West, cartoonist Rube Goldberg, actress Laurette Taylor, actor Lew Fields, comedian Ed Wynn, and many others. He became close friends with critics George Jean Nathan and H. L. Mencken, the influential co-editors of "The Smart Set" magazine who led an ongoing cultural war against puritanism in American arts. At the peak of his commercial success and cultural salience, Fitzgerald recalled traveling in a taxi one afternoon in New York City and weeping when he realized that he would never be as happy again.


title: F. Scott Fitzgerald

text: Fitzgerald's ephemeral happiness mirrored the societal giddiness of the Jazz Age, a term which he popularized in his essays and stories. He described the era as racing "along under its own power, served by great filling stations full of money." In Fitzgerald's eyes, the era represented a morally permissive time when Americans became disillusioned with prevailing social norms and obsessed with self-gratification.


title: F. Scott Fitzgerald

text: During this hedonistic era, alcohol increasingly fueled the Fitzgeralds' social life, and the couple consumed gin-and-fruit concoctions at every outing. Publicly, their alcohol intake meant little more than napping at parties, but privately it led to bitter quarrels.


title: F. Scott Fitzgerald

text: As their quarrels worsened, the couple accused each other of marital infidelities. They remarked to friends that their marriage would not last much longer. After their eviction from the Commodore Hotel in May 1920, the couple spent the summer in a cottage in Westport, Connecticut, near Long Island Sound.


title: F. Scott Fitzgerald

text: In Winter 1921, his wife became pregnant as Fitzgerald worked on his second novel, "The Beautiful and Damned", and the couple traveled to his home in St. Paul, Minnesota, to have the child. On October 26, 1921, Zelda gave birth to their daughter and only child Frances Scott "Scottie" Fitzgerald. As she emerged from the anesthesia, he recorded Zelda saying, "Oh, God, goofo I'm drunk. Mark Twain. Isn't she smart—she has the hiccups. I hope it's beautiful and a fool—a beautiful little fool." Fitzgerald later used some of her rambling almost verbatim for Daisy Buchanan's dialogue in "The Great Gatsby".


title: F. Scott Fitzgerald

text: After his daughter's birth, Fitzgerald returned to drafting "The Beautiful and Damned". The novel's plot follows a young artist and his wife who become dissipated and bankrupt while partying in New York City. He modeled the characters of Anthony Patch on himself and Gloria Patch on—in his words—the chill-mindedness and selfishness of Zelda. "Metropolitan Magazine" serialized the manuscript in late 1921, and Scribner's published the book in March 1922. Scribner's prepared an initial print run of 20,000 copies. It sold well enough to warrant additional print runs reaching 50,000 copies. That year, Fitzgerald released an anthology of eleven stories entitled "Tales of the Jazz Age". He had written all but two of the stories before 1920.


title: F. Scott Fitzgerald

text: Following Fitzgerald's adaptation of his story "The Vegetable" into a play, in October 1922, he and Zelda moved to Great Neck, Long Island, to be near Broadway. Although he hoped "The Vegetable" would inaugurate a lucrative career as a playwright, the play's November 1923 premiere was an unmitigated disaster. The bored audience walked out during the second act. Fitzgerald wished to halt the show and disavow the production. During an intermission, Fitzgerald asked lead actor Ernest Truex if he planned to finish the performance. When Truex replied in the affirmative, Fitzgerald fled to the nearest bar. Mired in debt by the play's failure, Fitzgerald wrote short stories to restore his finances. Fitzgerald viewed his stories as worthless except for "Winter Dreams", which he described as his first attempt at the Gatsby idea. When not writing, Fitzgerald and his wife continued to socialize and drink at Long Island parties.


title: F. Scott Fitzgerald

text: Despite enjoying the Long Island milieu, Fitzgerald disapproved of the extravagant parties, and the wealthy people he encountered often disappointed him. While striving to emulate the rich, he found their privileged lifestyle morally disquieting. Although Fitzgerald admired the rich, he possessed a smoldering resentment towards them. While the couple were living on Long Island, one of Fitzgerald's wealthier neighbors was Max Gerlach. Purportedly born in America to a German immigrant family, Gerlach had been a major in the American Expeditionary Forces during World War I and became a gentleman bootlegger who lived like a millionaire in New York. Flaunting his new wealth, Gerlach threw lavish parties, never wore the same shirt twice, used the phrase "old sport", and fostered myths about himself, including that he was a relation of the German Kaiser. These details would inspire Fitzgerald in creating his next work, "The Great Gatsby".


title: F. Scott Fitzgerald

text: In May 1924, Fitzgerald and his family moved abroad to Europe. He continued writing his third novel, which would eventually become his magnum opus "The Great Gatsby". Fitzgerald had been planning the novel since 1923, when he told his publisher Maxwell Perkins of his plans to embark upon a work of art that would be beautiful and intricately patterned. He had already written 18,000 words for his novel by mid-1923 but discarded most of his new story as a false start. Initially titled "Trimalchio"—an allusion to the Latin work "Satyricon"—the plot followed the rise of a parvenu who seeks wealth to win the woman he loves. For source material, Fitzgerald drew heavily on his experiences on Long Island and once again on his lifelong obsession with his first love Ginevra King. "The whole idea of Gatsby", he later explained, "is the unfairness of a poor young man not being able to marry a girl with money. This theme comes up again and again because I lived it."


title: F. Scott Fitzgerald

text: Work on "The Great Gatsby" slowed while the Fitzgeralds sojourned on the French Riviera, where a marital crisis developed. Zelda became infatuated with a French naval aviator, Edouard Jozan. She spent afternoons swimming at the beach and evenings dancing at the casinos with him. After six weeks, Zelda asked for a divorce. Fitzgerald sought to confront Jozan and locked Zelda in their house until he could do so. Before any confrontation could occur, Jozan—who had no intention of marrying Zelda—left the Riviera, and the Fitzgeralds never saw him again. Soon after, Zelda overdosed on sleeping pills. The couple never spoke of the incident, but the episode led to a permanent breach in their marriage. Jozan later dismissed the entire incident and claimed no infidelity or romance had occurred: "They both had a need of drama, they made it up and perhaps they were the victims of their own unsettled and a little unhealthy imagination."


title: F. Scott Fitzgerald

text: Following this incident, the Fitzgeralds relocated to Rome, where he made revisions to the "Gatsby" manuscript throughout the winter and submitted the final version in February 1925. Fitzgerald declined a $10,000 offer for the serial rights, as it would delay the book's publication. Upon its release on April 10, 1925, Willa Cather, T. S. Eliot, and Edith Wharton praised Fitzgerald's work, and the novel received generally favorable reviews from contemporary literary critics. Despite this reception, "Gatsby" became a commercial failure compared to his previous efforts, "This Side of Paradise" (1920) and "The Beautiful and Damned" (1922). By the end of the year, the book had sold fewer than 23,000 copies. For the rest of his life, "The Great Gatsby" experienced tepid sales. It would take decades for the novel to gain its present acclaim and popularity.


title: F. Scott Fitzgerald

text: After wintering in Italy, the Fitzgeralds returned to France, where they alternated between Paris and the French Riviera until 1926. During this period, he became friends with writer Gertrude Stein, bookseller Sylvia Beach, novelist James Joyce, poet Ezra Pound and other members of the American expatriate community in Paris, some of whom would later be identified with the Lost Generation. Most notable among them was a relatively unknown Ernest Hemingway, whom Fitzgerald first met in May 1925 and grew to admire. Hemingway later recalled that, during this early period of their relationship, Fitzgerald became his most loyal friend.


title: F. Scott Fitzgerald

text: In contrast to his friendship with Scott, Hemingway disliked Zelda and described her as "insane" in his memoir, "A Moveable Feast". Hemingway claimed that Zelda preferred her husband to write lucrative short stories as opposed to novels in order to support her accustomed lifestyle. "I always felt a story in the "[Saturday Evening] Post" was tops", Zelda later recalled, "But Scott couldn't stand to write them." To supplement their income, Fitzgerald often wrote stories for magazines such as "The Saturday Evening Post", "Collier's Weekly", and "Esquire". He would first write his stories in an 'authentic' manner, then rewrite them to add plot twists which increased their salability as magazine stories. This "whoring", as Hemingway called these sales, emerged as a sore point in their friendship. After reading "The Great Gatsby", an impressed Hemingway vowed to put any differences with Fitzgerald aside and to aid him in any way he could, although he feared Zelda would derail Fitzgerald's writing career.


title: F. Scott Fitzgerald

text: Hemingway alleged that Zelda sought to destroy her husband, and she purportedly taunted Fitzgerald over his penis' size. After examining it in a public restroom, Hemingway confirmed Fitzgerald's penis to be of average size. A more serious rift soon occurred when Zelda belittled Fitzgerald with homophobic slurs and accused him of engaging in a homosexual relationship with Hemingway. Fitzgerald decided to have sex with a prostitute to prove his heterosexuality. Zelda found condoms he had purchased before any encounter occurred, and a bitter quarrel ensued, resulting in lingering jealousy. Soon after, Zelda threw herself down a flight of marble stairs at a party because Fitzgerald, engrossed in talking to Isadora Duncan, ignored her. In December 1926, after two unpleasant years in Europe which considerably strained their marriage, the Fitzgeralds returned to America.


title: F. Scott Fitzgerald

text: In 1926, film producer John W. Considine Jr. invited Fitzgerald to Hollywood during its golden age to write a flapper comedy for United Artists. He agreed and moved into a studio-owned bungalow with Zelda in January 1927. In Hollywood, the Fitzgeralds attended parties where they danced the black bottom and mingled with film stars. At one party they outraged guests Ronald Colman and Constance Talmadge by a prank: They requested their watches and, retreating into the kitchen, boiled the expensive timepieces in a pot of tomato sauce. The Hollywood life's novelty quickly faded for the Fitzgeralds, and Zelda frequently complained of boredom.


title: F. Scott Fitzgerald

text: While attending a lavish party at the Pickfair estate, Fitzgerald met 17-year-old Lois Moran, a starlet who had gained widespread fame for her role in "Stella Dallas" (1925). Desperate for intellectual conversation, Moran and Fitzgerald discussed literature and philosophy for hours while sitting on a staircase. Fitzgerald was 31 years old and past his prime, but the smitten Moran regarded him as a sophisticated, handsome, and gifted writer. Consequently, she pursued a relationship with him. The starlet became a muse for the author, and he wrote her into a short story called "Magnetism", in which a young Hollywood film starlet causes a married writer to waver in his sexual devotion to his wife. Fitzgerald later rewrote Rosemary Hoyt—one of the central characters in "Tender is the Night"—to mirror Moran.


title: F. Scott Fitzgerald

text: Jealous of Fitzgerald and Moran, an irate Zelda set fire to her own expensive clothing in a bathtub as a self-destructive act. She disparaged the teenage Moran as "a breakfast food that many men identified with whatever they missed from life." Fitzgerald's relations with Moran further exacerbated the Fitzgeralds' marital difficulties and, after merely two months in Jazz Age Hollywood, the unhappy couple departed for Delaware in March 1927.


title: F. Scott Fitzgerald

text: The Fitzgeralds rented "Ellerslie", a mansion near Wilmington, Delaware, until 1929. Fitzgerald returned to his fourth novel but proved unable to make any progress due to his alcoholism and poor work ethic. In Spring 1929, the couple returned to Europe. That winter, Zelda's behavior grew increasingly erratic and violent. During an automobile trip to Paris along the mountainous roads of the Grande Corniche, Zelda seized the car's steering wheel and tried to kill herself along with Fitzgerald and their nine-year-old daughter by driving over a cliff. Following this homicidal incident, doctors diagnosed Zelda with schizophrenia in June 1930. The couple traveled to Switzerland, where she underwent treatment at a clinic. They returned to America in September 1931. In February 1932, she underwent hospitalization at the Phipps Clinic at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland.


title: F. Scott Fitzgerald

text: In April 1932, when the psychiatric clinic allowed Zelda to travel with her husband, Fitzgerald took her to lunch with critic H. L. Mencken, by then the literary editor of "The American Mercury". In his private diary, Mencken noted Zelda "went insane in Paris a year or so ago, and is still plainly more or less off her base." Throughout the luncheon, she manifested signs of mental distress. A year later, when Mencken met Zelda for the last time, he described her mental illness as immediately evident to any onlooker and her mind as "only half sane." He regretted Fitzgerald could not write novels, as he had to write magazine stories to pay for Zelda's psychiatric treatment.


title: F. Scott Fitzgerald

text: During this time, Fitzgerald rented the "La Paix" estate in the suburb of Towson, Maryland, and worked on his next novel, which drew heavily on recent experiences. The story concerned a promising young American named Dick Diver who marries a mentally ill young woman; their marriage deteriorates while they are abroad in Europe. While Fitzgerald labored on his novel, Zelda wrote—and sent to Scribner's—her own fictionalized version of these same autobiographical events in "Save Me the Waltz" (1932). Piqued by what he saw as theft of his novel's plot material, Fitzgerald would later describe Zelda as a plagiarist and a third-rate writer. Despite his annoyance, he insisted upon few revisions to the work, and he persuaded Perkins to publish Zelda's novel. Scribner's published Zelda's novel in October 1932, but it was a commercial and critical failure.


title: F. Scott Fitzgerald

text: Fitzgerald's own novel debuted in April 1934 as "Tender Is the Night" and received mixed reviews. Its structure threw off many critics who felt Fitzgerald had not lived up to their expectations. Hemingway and others argued that such criticism stemmed from superficial readings of the material and from Depression-era America's reaction to Fitzgerald's status as a symbol of Jazz Age excess. The novel did not sell well upon publication, with approximately 12,000 sold in the first three months, but, like "The Great Gatsby", the book's reputation has since grown significantly.


title: F. Scott Fitzgerald

text: Amid the Great Depression, Fitzgerald's works were deemed elitist and materialistic. In 1933, journalist Matthew Josephson criticized Fitzgerald's short stories saying that many Americans could no longer afford to drink champagne whenever they pleased or to go on vacation to Montparnasse in Paris. As writer Budd Schulberg recalled, "my generation thought of F. Scott Fitzgerald as an age rather than a writer, and when the economic stroke of 1929 began to change the sheiks and flappers into unemployed boys or underpaid girls, we consciously and a little belligerently turned our backs on Fitzgerald."


title: F. Scott Fitzgerald

text: With his popularity decreased, Fitzgerald began to suffer financially and, by 1936, his book royalties amounted to $80. The cost of his opulent lifestyle and Zelda's medical bills quickly caught up, placing him in constant debt. He relied on loans from his agent, Harold Ober, and publisher Perkins. When Ober ceased advancing money, an ashamed Fitzgerald severed ties with his agent believing Ober had lost faith in him due to his alcoholism.


title: F. Scott Fitzgerald

text: As he had been an alcoholic for many years, Fitzgerald's heavy drinking undermined his health by the late 1930s. His alcoholism resulted in cardiomyopathy, coronary artery disease, angina, dyspnea, and syncopal spells. According to biographer Nancy Milford, Fitzgerald's claims of having tuberculosis (TB) served as a pretext to cover his drinking ailments. Fitzgerald scholar Matthew J. Bruccoli contends Fitzgerald did in fact have recurring TB. Another biographer, Arthur Mizener, notes Fitzgerald had a mild attack of TB in 1919 and conclusively had a tubercular hemorrhage in 1929. In the 1930s, as his health deteriorated, Fitzgerald had told Hemingway of his fear of dying from congested lungs.


title: F. Scott Fitzgerald

text: Fitzgerald's deteriorating health, chronic alcoholism, and financial woes made for difficult years in Baltimore. His friend H. L. Mencken wrote in a June 1934 diary entry that "the case of F. Scott Fitzgerald has become distressing. He is boozing in a wild manner and has become a nuisance. His wife, Zelda, who has been insane for years, is now confined at the Sheppard-Pratt Hospital, and he is living in Park Avenue with his little daughter, Scottie". By 1935, alcoholism disrupted Fitzgerald's writing and limited his mental acuity. From 1933 to 1937, he was hospitalized for alcoholism eight times. In September 1936, journalist Michel Mok of the "New York Post" publicly reported Fitzgerald's alcoholism and career failure in a nationally syndicated article. The article damaged Fitzgerald's reputation and prompted him to attempt suicide after reading it.


title: F. Scott Fitzgerald

text: By that same year, Zelda's intense suicidal mania necessitated her extended confinement at the Highland Hospital in Asheville, North Carolina. Nearly bankrupt, Fitzgerald spent most of 1936 and 1937 living in cheap hotels near Asheville. His attempts to write and sell more short stories faltered. He later referred to this period of decline in his life as "The Crack-Up" in a short story. The sudden death of Fitzgerald's mother and Zelda's mental deterioration led to his marriage further disintegrating. He saw Zelda for the last time on a 1939 trip to Cuba. During this trip, spectators at a cockfight beat Fitzgerald when he tried to intervene against animal cruelty. He returned to the United States and—his ill-health exacerbated by excessive drinking—underwent hospitalization at the Doctors Hospital in Manhattan.


title: F. Scott Fitzgerald

text: Fitzgerald's dire financial straits compelled him to accept a lucrative contract as a screenwriter with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) in 1937 that necessitated his relocation to Hollywood. Despite earning his highest annual income up to that point ($29,757.87, ), Fitzgerald spent the bulk of his income on Zelda's psychiatric treatment and his daughter Scottie's school expenses. During the next two years, Fitzgerald rented a cheap room at the Garden of Allah bungalow on Sunset Boulevard. In an effort to abstain from alcohol, Fitzgerald drank large amounts of Coca-Cola and ate many sweets.


title: F. Scott Fitzgerald

text: Estranged from Zelda, Fitzgerald attempted to reunite with his first love Ginevra King when the wealthy Chicago heiress visited Hollywood in 1938. "She was the first girl I ever loved and I have faithfully avoided seeing her up to this moment to keep the illusion perfect," Fitzgerald informed his daughter Scottie, shortly before the planned meeting. The reunion proved a disaster due to Fitzgerald's uncontrollable alcoholism, and a disappointed Ginevra returned east to Chicago.


title: F. Scott Fitzgerald

text: Soon after, a lonely Fitzgerald began a relationship with nationally syndicated gossip columnist Sheilah Graham, his final companion before his death. After a heart-attack at Schwab's Pharmacy, a doctor ordered Fitzgerald to avoid strenuous exertion. Fitzgerald had to climb two flights of stairs to his apartment, while Graham lived on the ground floor. Consequently, he moved in with Graham, who lived in Hollywood on North Hayworth Avenue, one block east of Fitzgerald's apartment on North Laurel Avenue.


title: F. Scott Fitzgerald

text: Throughout their relationship, Graham claimed Fitzgerald felt constant guilt over Zelda's mental illness and confinement. He repeatedly attempted sobriety, had depression, had violent outbursts, and attempted suicide. On occasions that Fitzgerald failed his attempt at sobriety, he would ask strangers, "I'm F. Scott Fitzgerald. You've read my books. You've read "The Great Gatsby," haven't you? Remember?" As Graham had read none of his works, Fitzgerald attempted to buy her a set of his novels. After visiting several bookstores, he realized they had stopped carrying his works. The realization that he was largely forgotten as an author further depressed him.


title: F. Scott Fitzgerald

text: During this last phase of his career, Fitzgerald's screenwriting tasks included revisions on "Madame Curie" (1943) and an unused dialogue polish for "Gone with the Wind" (1939)—a book which Fitzgerald disparaged as unoriginal and an "old wives' tale". Both assignments went uncredited. His work on "Three Comrades" (1938) became his sole screenplay credit. To the studio's annoyance, Fitzgerald ignored scriptwriting rules and included descriptions more fitting for a novel. In his spare time, he worked on his fifth novel, "The Last Tycoon", based on film executive Irving Thalberg. In 1939, MGM terminated his contract, and Fitzgerald became a freelance screenwriter. During his work on "Winter Carnival" (1939), Fitzgerald had an alcoholic relapse and sought treatment by New York psychiatrist Richard Hoffmann.


title: F. Scott Fitzgerald

text: Director Billy Wilder described Fitzgerald's foray into Hollywood as like that of "a great sculptor who is hired to do a plumbing job". Edmund Wilson and Aaron Latham suggested Hollywood sucked Fitzgerald's creativity like a vampire. His failure in Hollywood pushed him to return to drinking, and he drank nearly 40 beers a day in 1939. Beginning that year, Fitzgerald mocked himself as a Hollywood hack through the character of Pat Hobby in a sequence of 17 short stories. "Esquire" originally published the Pat Hobby Stories between January 1940 and July 1941. Approaching the final year of life, Fitzgerald wrote regretfully to his daughter: "I wish now I'd never relaxed or looked back—but said at the end of "The Great Gatsby": I've found my line—from now on this comes first. This is my immediate duty—without this I am nothing."


title: F. Scott Fitzgerald

text: Fitzgerald achieved sobriety over a year before his death, and Graham described their last year together as one of the happiest times of their relationship. On the night of December 20, 1940, Fitzgerald and Graham attended the premiere of "This Thing Called Love". As the couple left the Pantages Theatre, a sober Fitzgerald experienced a dizzy spell and had difficulty walking to his vehicle. Watched by onlookers, he remarked in a strained voice to Graham, "I suppose people will think I'm drunk."


title: F. Scott Fitzgerald

text: The following day, as Fitzgerald annotated his newly arrived "Princeton Alumni Weekly", Graham saw him jump from his armchair, grab the mantelpiece, and collapse on the floor without uttering a sound. Lying flat on his back, he gasped and lapsed into unconsciousness. After failed efforts to revive him, Graham ran to fetch Harry Culver, the building's manager. Upon entering the apartment, Culver stated, "I'm afraid he's dead." Fitzgerald died of occlusive coronary arteriosclerosis at 44 years old.


title: F. Scott Fitzgerald

text: On learning of her father's death, Scottie telephoned Graham from Vassar and asked she not attend the funeral for social propriety. In Graham's place, her friend Dorothy Parker attended the visitation held in the back room of an undertaker's parlor. Observing few other people at the visitation, Parker murmured "the poor son of a bitch"—a line from Jay Gatsby's funeral in "The Great Gatsby". When Fitzgerald's poorly embalmed corpse arrived in Bethesda, Maryland, only thirty people attended his funeral. Among the attendees were his only child, Scottie, his agent Harold Ober, and his lifelong editor Maxwell Perkins.


title: F. Scott Fitzgerald

text: Zelda eulogized Fitzgerald in a letter to a friend: "He was as spiritually generous a soul as ever was... It seems as if he was always planning happiness for Scottie and for me. Books to read—places to go. Life seemed so promising always when he was around. ... Scott was the best friend a person could have to me". At the time of his death, the Roman Catholic Church denied the family's request that Fitzgerald, a non-practicing Catholic, be buried in the family plot in the Catholic Saint Mary's Cemetery in Rockville, Maryland. Fitzgerald was buried instead with a simple Protestant service at Rockville Union Cemetery. When Zelda died in a fire at the Highland Hospital in 1948, she was buried next to him at Rockville Union. In 1975, Scottie successfully petitioned to have the earlier decision revisited, and her parents' remains were moved to the family plot in Saint Mary's.


title: F. Scott Fitzgerald

text: At the time of his death, Fitzgerald believed his life a failure and that his work was forgotten. The few critics who were familiar with his work regarded him as a failed alcoholic—the embodiment of Jazz Age decadence. Margaret Marshall in "The Nation" dismissed Fitzgerald as a Jazz Age scribe "who did not fulfill his early promise—his was a fair-weather talent which was not adequate to the stormy age into which it happened, ironically, to emerge." His "New York Times" obituary deemed his work forever tied to an era "when gin was the national drink and sex the national obsession". In retrospective reviews that followed after his death, literary critics such as Peter Quennell dismissed his magnum opus "The Great Gatsby" as merely a nostalgic period piece with "the sadness and the remote jauntiness of a Gershwin tune".


title: F. Scott Fitzgerald

text: Surveying these posthumous attacks, John Dos Passos opined that many literary critics in popular newspapers lacked the basic discernment about the art of writing. "The strange thing about the articles that came out about Fitzgerald's death," Dos Passos later recalled, "was that the writers seemed to feel that they didn't need to read his books; all they needed for a license to shovel them into the ashcan was to label them as having been written in such and such a period now past."


title: F. Scott Fitzgerald

text: Within one year after his death, Edmund Wilson completed Fitzgerald's unfinished fifth novel "The Last Tycoon" using the author's extensive notes, and he included "The Great Gatsby" within the edition, sparking new interest and discussion among critics. Amid World War II, "The Great Gatsby" gained further popularity when the Council on Books in Wartime distributed free Armed Services Edition copies to American soldiers serving overseas. The Red Cross distributed the novel to prisoners in Japanese and German POW camps. By 1945, over 123,000 copies of "The Great Gatsby" had been distributed among U.S. troops. By 1960—thirty-five years after the novel's original publication—the book was selling 100,000 copies per year. This renewed interest led "The New York Times" editorialist Arthur Mizener to proclaim the novel a masterwork of American literature.


title: F. Scott Fitzgerald

text: By the 21st century, "The Great Gatsby" had sold millions of copies, and the novel is required reading in many high school and college classes. Despite its publication nearly a century ago, the work continues to be cited by scholars as relevant to understanding contemporary America. According to Professor John Kuehl of New York University: "If you want to know about Spain, you read Hemingway's "The Sun Also Rises". If you want to know about the South, you read Faulkner. If you want to know what America's like, you read "The Great Gatsby". Fitzgerald is the quintessential American writer."


title: F. Scott Fitzgerald

text: "The Great Gatsby"s popularity led to widespread interest in Fitzgerald himself. By the 1950s, he had become a cult figure in American culture and was more widely known than at any period during his lifetime. In 1952, critic Cyril Connolly observed that "apart from his increasing stature as writer, Fitzgerald is now firmly established as a myth, an American version of the Dying God, an Adonis of letters" whose rise and fall inevitably prompts comparisons to the Jazz Age itself.


title: F. Scott Fitzgerald

text: Seven years later, Fitzgerald's friend Edmund Wilson remarked that he now received copious letters from female admirers of Fitzgerald's works and that his flawed alcoholic friend had posthumously become "a semi-divine personage" in the popular imagination. Echoing these opinions, writer Adam Gopnik asserted that—contrary to Fitzgerald's claim that "there are no second acts in American lives"—Fitzgerald became "not a poignant footnote to an ill-named time but an enduring legend of the West".


title: F. Scott Fitzgerald

text: Decades after his death, Fitzgerald's childhood Summit Terrace home in St. Paul became a National Historic Landmark in 1971. Fitzgerald detested the house and deemed it an architectural monstrosity. In 1990, Hofstra University established the F. Scott Fitzgerald Society, which later became an affiliate of the American Literature Association. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the society organized an online reading of "This Side of Paradise" to mark its centenary. In 1994, the World Theater in St. Paul—home of the radio broadcast of A Prairie Home Companion—was renamed the Fitzgerald Theater.


title: F. Scott Fitzgerald

text: More so than most contemporary writers of his era, F. Scott Fitzgerald's authorial voice evolved and matured over time, and his each successive novel represented a discernible progression in literary quality. Although his peers eventually hailed him as possessing "the best narrative gift of the century," this narrative gift was not perceived as immediately evident in his earliest writings. Believing that prose has a basis in lyric verse, Fitzgerald initially crafted his sentences entirely by ear and, consequently, his earliest efforts contained numerous malapropisms and descriptive non sequiturs which irritated both editors and readers. During these early attempts at writing fiction, he received over 122 rejection letters, and the publishing house Scribner's rejected his first novel three times despite extensive rewrites.


title: F. Scott Fitzgerald

text: For his first novel, Fitzgerald used as his literary templates H. G. Wells' 1909 work "Tono-Bungay" and Sir Compton Mackenzie's 1913 novel "Sinister Street", which chronicled a young college student's coming-of-age at Oxford University. Although Fitzgerald imitated the plot of Mackenzie's novel, his debut work differed remarkably due to its experimental style. He discarded the stodgy narrative technique of most novels and instead unspooled the plot in the form of textual fragments, letters, and poetry intermingled together. This atonal blend of different fictive elements prompted cultural elites to fête the young Fitzgerald as a literary trailblazer whose work modernized a staid literature which had lagged "as far behind modern habits as behind modern history." His work, they declared, pulsed with originality.


title: F. Scott Fitzgerald

text: Although critics praised "This Side of Paradise" as highly original, they eviscerated its form and construction. They highlighted the fact that the work had "almost every fault and deficiency that a novel can possibly have," and a consensus soon emerged that Fitzgerald's prosemanship left much to be desired. He could write entertainingly, his detractors conceded, but he gave scant attention to form and construction. Having read and digested these criticisms of his debut novel, Fitzgerald sought to improve upon the form and construction of his prose in his next work and to venture into a new genre of fiction altogether.


title: F. Scott Fitzgerald

text: For his sophomore effort, Fitzgerald discarded the trappings of collegiate bildungsromans and crafted an "ironical-pessimistic" novel in the style of Thomas Hardy's oeuvre. With the publication of "The Beautiful and Damned", editor Max Perkins and others commended the conspicuous evolution in the quality of his prose. Whereas "This Side of Paradise" had featured workmanlike prose and chaotic organization, "The Beautiful and Damned" displayed the superior form and construction of an awakened literary consciousness.


title: F. Scott Fitzgerald

text: Although critics deemed "The Beautiful and Damned" to be less ground-breaking than its predecessor, many recognized that the vast improvement in literary form and construction between his first and second novels augured great prospects for Fitzgerald's future. John V. A. Weaver predicted in 1922 that, as Fitzgerald matured as a writer, he would become regarded as one of the greatest authors of American literature. Consequently, expectations arose that Fitzgerald would significantly improve with his third work.


title: F. Scott Fitzgerald

text: When composing "The Great Gatsby", Fitzgerald chose to depart from the writing process of his previous novels and to fashion a conscious artistic achievement. He eschewed the realism of his previous two novels and composed a creative work of sustained imagination. To this end, he consciously emulated the literary styles of Joseph Conrad and Willa Cather. He was particularly influenced by Cather's 1923 work, "A Lost Lady," which features a wealthy married socialite pursued by a number of romantic suitors and who symbolically embodies the American dream.


title: F. Scott Fitzgerald

text: With the publication of "The Great Gatsby", Fitzgerald had refined his prose style and plot construction, and the literati now hailed him as a master of his craft. Readers complimented him that "Gatsby" "is compact, economical, polished in the technique of the novel," and his writing now contained "some of the nicest little touches of contemporary observation you could imagine—so light, so delicate, so sharp". By eliminating the earlier defects in his writing, he had upgraded from "a brilliant improvisateur" to "a conscientious and painstaking artist." Gertrude Stein posited that Fitzgerald had surpassed contemporary writers such as Hemingway due to his masterful ability to write in natural sentences.


title: F. Scott Fitzgerald

text: The realization that Fitzgerald had improved as a novelist to point that "Gatsby" was a masterwork was immediately evident to certain members of the literary world. Edith Wharton lauded "Gatsby" as such an improvement upon Fitzgerald's previous work that it represented a "leap into the future" for American novels, and T. S. Eliot believed it represented a turning point in American literature. After reading "Gatsby", Gertrude Stein declared that Fitzgerald would "be read when many of his well-known contemporaries are forgotten."


title: F. Scott Fitzgerald

text: Nine years after the publication of "The Great Gatsby", Fitzgerald completed his fourth novel "Tender Is the Night" in 1934. By this time, the field of literature had greatly changed due to the onset of the Great Depression, and once popular writers such as Fitzgerald and Hemingway who wrote about upper-middle-class lifestyles were now disparaged in literary periodicals whereas so-called "proletarian novelists" enjoyed general applause.


title: F. Scott Fitzgerald

text: Due to this change, although Fitzgerald showed a mastery of "verbal nuance, flexible rhythm, dramatic construction and essential tragi-comedy" in "Tender Is the Night", many reviewers dismissed the work for its disengagement with the political issues of the era. Nevertheless, a minority opinion praised the work as the best American novel since "The Great Gatsby". Summarizing Fitzgerald's artistic journey from apprentice novelist to magisterial author, Burke Van Allen observed that no other American novelist had shown such "a constantly growing mastery of his equipment, and a regularly increasing sensitivity to the esthetic values in life."


title: F. Scott Fitzgerald

text: After Fitzgerald's death, writers such as John Dos Passos assayed Fitzgerald's gradual progression in literary quality and posited that his uncompleted fifth novel "The Last Tycoon" could have been Fitzgerald's greatest achievement. Dos Passos argued in 1945 that Fitzgerald had finally attained a grand and distinctive style as a novelist; consequently, even as an unfinished fragment, the dimensions of his work raised "the level of American fiction" in the same way that "Marlowe's blank verse line raised the whole of Elizabeth verse."


title: F. Scott Fitzgerald

text: In contrast to the discernible progression in literary quality and artistic maturity represented by his novels, Fitzgerald's 164 short stories displayed the opposite tendency and attracted significant criticism. Whereas he composed his novels with a conscious artistic mindset, money became his primary impetus for writing short stories. During the lengthy interludes between novels, his stories sustained him financially, but he lamented that he had "to write a lot of rotten stuff that bores me and makes me depressed."


title: F. Scott Fitzgerald

text: Realizing that slick magazines such as the "Saturday Evening Post" and "Esquire" were more likely to publish stories which pandered to young love and featured saccharine dénouements, Fitzgerald became adept at tailoring his short fiction to the vicissitudes of commercial tastes.


title: F. Scott Fitzgerald

text: From 1920 until his death, Fitzgerald published nearly four pieces per year in the magazine and, in 1931 alone, he earned nearly $40,000 () by churning out seventeen short stories in quick succession.


title: F. Scott Fitzgerald

text: Although a dazzling extemporizer, Fitzgerald's short stories were criticized for lacking both thematic coherence and quality. Critic Paul Rosenfeld wrote that many of Fitzgerald's short stories "lie on a plane inferior to the one upon which his best material extends." Echoing Hemingway's critique that Fitzgerald ruined his short stories by rewriting them to appease magazine readers, Rosenfeld noted that Fitzgerald debased his gift as a storyteller by transforming his tales into social romances with inevitably happy endings.


title: F. Scott Fitzgerald

text: Commenting upon this tendency in Fitzgerald's short stories, Dos Passos remarked that "everybody who has put pen to paper during the last twenty years has been daily plagued by the difficulty of deciding whether he's to do 'good' writing that will satisfy his conscience or 'cheap' writing that will satisfy his pocketbook... A great deal of Fitzgerald's own life was made a hell by this sort of schizophrenia."


title: F. Scott Fitzgerald

text: For much of his literary career, cultural commentators hailed Fitzgerald as the foremost chronicler of the Jazz Age generation whose lives were defined by the societal transition towards modernity. In contrast to the older Lost Generation to which Fitzgerald and Hemingway belonged, the Jazz Age generation were younger Americans who had been adolescents during World War I and were largely untouched by the devastating conflict's psychological and material horrors.


title: F. Scott Fitzgerald

text: With his debut novel, Fitzgerald became the first writer to turn the national spotlight upon this generation. He riveted the nation's attention upon the activities of their sons and daughters cavorting in the rumble seat of Bearcat roadster on a lonely road and sparked a societal debate over their perceived immorality. Due to this thematic focus, his works became a sensation among college students, and the press depicted him as the standard-bearer for "youth in revolt". "No generation of Americans has had a chronicler so persuasive and unmaudlin" as Fitzgerald, Van Allen wrote in 1934, and no author was so identified with the generation recorded.


title: F. Scott Fitzgerald

text: Remarking upon the cultural association between Fitzgerald and the flaming youth of the Jazz Age, Gertrude Stein wrote in her memoir "The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas" that the author's fiction essentially created this new generation in the public's mind. Echoing this assertion, critics John V. A. Weaver and Edmund Wilson insisted that Fitzgerald imbued the Jazz Age generation with the gift of self-consciousness while simultaneously making the public aware of them as a distinct cohort.


title: F. Scott Fitzgerald

text: The perception of Fitzgerald as the chronicler of the Jazz Age and its insouciant youth led various societal figures to denounce his writings. They decried his use of modern "alien slang" and claimed his depiction of young people engaged in drunken sprees and premarital sex to be wholly fabricated. Fitzgerald ridiculed such criticisms, and he opined that blinkered pundits wished to dismiss his works in order to retain their outdated conceptions of American society.


title: F. Scott Fitzgerald

text: As Fitzgerald's writings made him "the outstanding aggressor in the little warfare" between "the flaming youth against the old guard," a number of social conservatives later rejoiced when he died. Mere weeks after Fitzgerald's death in 1940, Westbrook Pegler wrote in a column for "The New York World-Telegram" that the author's passing recalled "memories of a queer bunch of undisciplined and self-indulgent brats who were determined not to pull their weight in the boat and wanted the world to drop everything and sit down and bawl with them. A kick in the pants and a clout over the scalp were more like their needing."


title: F. Scott Fitzgerald

text: A recurrent theme in F. Scott Fitzgerald's fiction is the psychic and moral gulf between the average American and wealthy elites. This recurrent theme is ascribable to Fitzgerald's life experiences in which he was "a poor boy in a rich town; a poor boy in a rich boy's school; a poor boy in a rich man's club at Princeton." He "sensed a corruption in the rich and mistrusted their might." Consequently, he became a vocal critic of America's leisure class and his works satirized their lives.


title: F. Scott Fitzgerald

text: This preoccupation with the idle lives of America's leisure class in Fitzgerald's fiction attracted criticism. H. L. Mencken believed Fitzgerald's myopic focus upon the rich detracted from the broader relevance of his societal observations. He argued that "the thing that chiefly interests the basic Fitzgerald is still the florid show of modern American life—and especially the devil's dance and that goes on at the top. He is unconcerned about the sweating and suffering of the nether herd".


title: F. Scott Fitzgerald

text: Nevertheless, Mencken conceded that Fitzgerald came the closest to capturing the wealthy's "idiotic pursuit of sensation, their almost incredible stupidity and triviality, their glittering swinishness". His works skewered those "who take all of the privileges of the European ruling class and assume none of its responsibilities". For this reason, critics predicted that much of Fitzgerald's fiction would become timeless social documents that captured the naked venality of the hedonistic Jazz Age.


title: F. Scott Fitzgerald

text: Following Fitzgerald's death, scholars focused on how Fitzgerald's fiction dissects the entrenched class disparities in American society. His novel, "The Great Gatsby", underscores the limits of the American lower class to transcend their station of birth. Although scholars posit different explanations for the continuation of class differences in the United States, there is a consensus regarding Fitzgerald's belief in its underlying permanence. Although fundamental conflict occurs between entrenched sources of socio-economic power and upstarts who threaten their interests, Fitzgerald's fiction shows that a class permanence persists despite the country's capitalist economy that prizes innovation and adaptability. Even if the poorer Americans become rich, they remain inferior to those Americans with "old money". Consequently, Fitzgerald's characters are trapped in a rigid American class system.


title: F. Scott Fitzgerald

text: Much of Fitzgerald's fiction is informed by his life experiences as a societal outsider. As a young boy growing up in the eastern Midwest, he perpetually strained "to meet the standard of the rich people of St. Paul and Chicago among whom he had to grow up without ever having the money to compete with them". His wealthier neighbors viewed the young author and his family to be lower-class, and his classmates at affluent institutions such as Newman and Princeton regarded him as a parvenu. His later life as an expatriate in Europe and as a writer in Hollywood reinforced this lifelong sense of being an outsider.


title: F. Scott Fitzgerald

text: Consequently, many of Fitzgerald's characters are defined by their sense of "otherness". In particular, Jay Gatsby, whom other characters belittle as "Mr. Nobody from Nowhere", functions as a cipher because of his obscure origins, his unclear ethno-religious identity and his indeterminate class status. Much like Fitzgerald, Gatsby's ancestry precludes him from the coveted status of Old Stock Americans. Consequently, Gatsby's ascent is deemed a threat not only due to his status as "nouveau riche", but because he is perceived as an outsider.


title: F. Scott Fitzgerald

text: Because of such themes, scholars assert that Fitzgerald's fiction captures the perennial American experience as it is a story about outsiders and those who resent them—whether such outsiders are newly-arrived immigrants, the "nouveau riche", or successful minorities. Since Americans living in the 1920s to the present must navigate a society with entrenched prejudices, Fitzgerald's depiction of resultant status anxieties and social conflict in his fiction has been highlighted by scholars as still enduringly relevant nearly a hundred years later.


title: F. Scott Fitzgerald

text: Although many contemporary critics and literary peers regarded Fitzgerald as possessing "the best narrative gift of the century." they nonetheless contended that his fiction lacked engagement with the salient socio-political issues of his time, and he lacked a conscious awareness of how to use his considerable talent as an author.


title: F. Scott Fitzgerald

text: Poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, who met Fitzgerald during his years abroad in Paris, likened him unto "a stupid old woman with whom someone has left a diamond; she is extremely proud of the diamond and shows it to everyone who comes by, and everyone is surprised that such an ignorant old woman should possess so valuable a jewel". His friend Edmund Wilson concurred with Millay's assessment and averred that Fitzgerald was a gifted writer with a vivid imagination who did not have any intellectual ideas to express. Wilson argued that Fitzgerald's early works such as "This Side of Paradise" suffer from the defects that they are meaningless and lack intellectual substance.


title: F. Scott Fitzgerald

text: Wilson attempted to convince Fitzgerald to write about America's social problems, but Fitzgerald did not believe that fiction should be used as a political instrument. Wilson also pressed Fitzgerald to support causes like the defense of Sacco and Vanzetti, but Fitzgerald had no interest in activism, and he became annoyed to even read articles about the politically-fraught Sacco and Vanzetti case which became a "cause célèbre" among American literati during the 1920s. Largely indifferent to politics, Fitzgerald himself ascribed the lack of ideational substance in his fiction to his upbringing as his parents were likewise disinterested in such matters.


title: F. Scott Fitzgerald

text: Fitzgerald partly justified the perceived lack of political and intellectual substance in his fiction by arguing that he was writing for a new, largely apolitical, generation "dedicated more than the last to the fear of poverty and the worship of success; grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken."


title: F. Scott Fitzgerald

text: "Nobody was interested in politics," Fitzgerald declared of this particular generation, and, as "it was characteristic of the Jazz Age that it had no interest in politics at all", Fitzgerald's fiction reflected the contemporary zeitgeist's perfunctory cynicism and aversion to political crusades in the wake of Prohibition.


title: F. Scott Fitzgerald

text: Throughout his literary career, Fitzgerald often drew upon the private correspondence, diary entries, and life experiences of other persons to use in his fiction. While writing "This Side of Paradise", Fitzgerald quoted verbatim entire letters sent to him by his Catholic mentor, Father Sigourney Fay. In addition to using Fay's correspondence, Fitzgerald drew upon anecdotes that Fay had told him about his private life. When reading "This Side of Paradise", Fay wrote to Fitzgerald that the use of his own biographical experiences told in confidence to the young author "gave him a queer feeling."


title: F. Scott Fitzgerald

text: Fitzgerald continued this practice throughout his life. While writing "The Beautiful and Damned", Fitzgerald inserted sentences from his wife's diary. When his friend Burton Rascoe asked Zelda to review the book for the "New-York Tribune" as a publicity stunt, she wrote—partly in jest—that it "seems to me that on one page I recognized a portion of an old diary of mine which mysteriously disappeared shortly after my marriage, and also scraps of letters, which, though considerably edited, sound to me vaguely familiar." Similarly, Fitzgerald borrowed biographical incidents from his friend, Ludlow Fowler, for his short story "The Rich Boy". Fowler asked that certain passages be excised prior to publication. Fitzgerald acquiesced to this request, but the passages were restored in later reprints after Fitzgerald's death.


title: F. Scott Fitzgerald

text: Perhaps the most striking example of this tendency lies at the core of "The Great Gatsby". As a parting gift before their relationship ended, Ginevra King—the inspiration for Daisy Buchanan—wrote a story that she sent to Fitzgerald. In her story, she is trapped in a loveless marriage with a wealthy man yet still pines for Fitzgerald, a former lover from her past. The lovers are reunited only after Fitzgerald has attained enough money to take her away from her adulterous husband. Fitzgerald frequently re-read Ginevra's story, and scholars have noted the plot similarities between Ginevra's story and Fitzgerald's novel.


title: F. Scott Fitzgerald

text: As one of the leading authorial voices of the Jazz Age, Fitzgerald's literary style influenced a number of contemporary and future writers. As early as 1922, critic John V. A. Weaver noted that Fitzgerald's literary influence was already "so great that it cannot be estimated."


title: F. Scott Fitzgerald

text: Similar to Edith Wharton and Henry James, Fitzgerald's style often used a series of disconnected scenes to convey plot developments. His lifelong editor Max Perkins described this particular technique as creating the impression for the reader of a railroad journey in which the vividness of passing scenes blaze with life. In the style of Joseph Conrad, Fitzgerald often employed a narrator's device to unify these passing scenes and imbue them with deeper meaning.


title: F. Scott Fitzgerald

text: "Gatsby" remains Fitzgerald's most influential literary work as an author. The publication of "The Great Gatsby" prompted poet T. S. Eliot to opine that the novel was the most significant evolution in American fiction since the works of Henry James. Charles Jackson, author of "The Lost Weekend", wrote that "Gatsby" was the only flawless novel in the history of American literature. Later authors Budd Schulberg and Edward Newhouse were deeply affected by it, and John O'Hara acknowledged its influence on his work. Richard Yates, a writer often compared to Fitzgerald, hailed "The Great Gatsby" as showcasing Fitzgerald's miraculous talent and triumphal literary technique. An editorial in "The New York Times" summarized the considerable influence of Fitzgerald upon contemporary writers and Americans in general during the Jazz Age: "In the literary sense he invented a 'generation' ... He might have interpreted them, and even guided them, as in their middle years they saw a different and nobler freedom threatened with destruction."


title: F. Scott Fitzgerald

text: Fitzgerald's stories and novels have been adapted into a variety of media formats. His earliest short stories were cinematically adapted as flapper comedies such as "The Husband Hunter" (1920), "The Chorus Girl's Romance" (1920), and "The Off-Shore Pirate" (1921). Other Fitzgerald short stories have been adapted into episodes of anthology television series, as well as the 2008 film "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button". Nearly every novel by Fitzgerald has been adapted for the screen. His second novel "The Beautiful and Damned" was filmed in 1922 and 2010. His third novel "The Great Gatsby" has been adapted numerous times for both film and television, most notably in 1926, 1949, 1958, 1974, 2000, and 2013. His fourth novel "Tender Is the Night" was made into a 1955 CBS television episode, an eponymous 1962 film, and a BBC television miniseries in 1985. "The Last Tycoon" has been adapted into a 1976 film, and a 2016 Amazon Prime TV miniseries.


title: F. Scott Fitzgerald

text: Beyond adaptations of his works, Fitzgerald himself has been portrayed in dozens of books, plays, and films. He inspired Budd Schulberg's novel "The Disenchanted" (1950), later adapted into a Broadway play starring Jason Robards. Other theatrical productions of Fitzgerald's life include Frank Wildhorn's 2005 musical "Waiting for the Moon", and a musical produced by the Japanese Takarazuka Revue. Fitzgerald's relationships with Sheilah Graham and Frances Kroll Ring respectively served as the basis for the films "Beloved Infidel" (1959) and "Last Call" (2002). Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda have appeared as characters in the films "Midnight in Paris" (2011) and "Genius" (2016). Other depictions of Fitzgerald include the TV movies "Zelda" (1993), "F. Scott Fitzgerald in Hollywood" (1976), "The Last of the Belles" (1974), and the TV series "" (2015).


title: Tick, Tick... Boom! (film)

text: Tick, Tick... Boom! (also stylized as tick, tick... BOOM!) is a 2021 American biographical musical comedy drama film directed by Lin-Manuel Miranda in his feature directorial debut. Written by Steven Levenson, who also serves as an executive producer, it is based on the stage musical of the same name by Jonathan Larson, a semi-autobiographical story about Larson writing a musical to enter into the theater industry. The film stars Andrew Garfield as Larson, alongside Robin de Jesús, Alexandra Shipp, Joshua Henry, Judith Light, and Vanessa Hudgens.


title: Tick, Tick... Boom! (film)

text: "Tick, Tick... Boom!" had its world premiere at the AFI Fest on November 10, 2021, and began a limited theatrical release two days later, before streaming on Netflix on November 19. The film received acclaim for Garfield's performance and Miranda's direction. It was named one of the best films of 2021 by the American Film Institute, and was nominated for Best Motion Picture - Musical or Comedy at the 79th Golden Globe Awards, and Best Picture at the 27th Critics' Choice Awards. For his performance, Garfield earned numerous awards, including the Golden Globe Award for Best Actor – Motion Picture Musical or Comedy, as well as a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actor.


title: Tick, Tick... Boom! (film)

text: In 1992, Jonathan Larson performs his rock monologue "Tick, Tick... Boom!" at New York Theatre Workshop, accompanied by friends Roger and Karessa. He describes an incessant ticking noise he hears in his head and begins to tell his story. An unseen narrator explains the film is the true story of Larson, "except for the parts Jonathan made up."


title: Tick, Tick... Boom! (film)

text: In early 1990, Jonathan juggles work at the Moondance Diner in SoHo with preparing for a workshop of his musical and passion project "Superbia". He feels pressure to be successful before he turns 30: with his birthday just over a week away, he sees the workshop as his last chance. He has a party at home with friends, including his former roommate Michael, his girlfriend Susan, and fellow waiters Freddy and Carolyn. Susan tells Jonathan about a teaching job at Jacob's Pillow and asks him to come. Michael, who previously left theater for a lucrative advertising career, sees Susan's offer as an opportunity for Jonathan to consider a serious future, and invites Jonathan to join an advertising focus group at his company. Jonathan's producer Ira asks him to write a new song for "Superbia" because the story needs it. This troubles him, as his idol Stephen Sondheim told him the same at a composing workshop some years ago, but he can't come up with anything and he only has a week.


title: Tick, Tick... Boom! (film)

text: Jonathan finds himself unable to concentrate on preparing for the workshop as he thinks about Michael and Susan's offers. His anxieties are only compounded when he learns from Carolyn that Freddy, who is HIV-positive, has been hospitalized. Susan, frustrated by Jonathan's indecisiveness and obsession with his career, breaks up with him.


title: Tick, Tick... Boom! (film)

text: To get money to hire a full band for the workshop, Jonathan attends the advertising focus group. However, he deliberately sabotages it, angering Michael. He feels Jonathan, for the sake of a financially unstable theater career, is wasting the privilege to have a life with the person he loves—something Michael cannot do as a gay man in the AIDS crisis. After receiving an encouraging call from his agent Rosa, Jonathan tries to write the new song the night before the workshop but his power gets cut off. He heads to a swimming pool to vent his frustrations over the workshop and his personal life, before finally coming up with the new song. At the workshop are friends, family, and industry professionals, including Sondheim. Jonathan receives praise but no offers to produce "Superbia".