F. Scott Fitzgerald

Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald (September 24, 1896–December 21,1940) was an Irish-American Jazz Age novelist and short story writer.

Hollywood years

Once again in dire financial straits, Fitzgerald spent the second half of the 1930s in Hollywood, working on commercial short stories, scripts for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, and his fifth and final novel, The Love of the Last Tycoon, based on the life of film executive Irving Thalberg. He and Zelda became estranged; she continued living in mental institutions on the east coast, while he lived with his lover Sheilah Graham, a movie columnist, in Hollywood.

Related Topics:
1930s - Hollywood - Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer - The Love of the Last Tycoon - Irving Thalberg

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From 1939 until his death, Fitzgerald mocked himself as a Hollywood hack through the character of Pat Hobby in a sequence of 17 short stories later collected as "The Pat Hobby Stories."

Related Topics:
Hack - The Pat Hobby Stories

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Always something of an alcoholic and consequently in poor health during the late 1930s, Fitzgerald suffered two heart attacks in late 1940. After the first he was ordered by his doctor to avoid strenuous exertion and to obtain a first floor apartment. As Sheilah Graham, his lover at the time, had an apartment on the first floor, he moved in with her. On the night of December 20, 1940 he had his second heart attack; but since the doctor was to come to his house the following day, he and Sheilah went home. On December 21, 1940, F. Scott Fitzgerald collapsed while clutching the mantlepiece in Sheilah Graham's apartment and died at the age of 44.

Related Topics:
1930s - 1940 - December 20 - December 21

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His funeral was attended by very few people. Among the attendants was Dorothy Parker, who reportedly cried and murmured, "the poor son of a bitch," a line from Jay Gatsby's funeral in Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. Zelda died in a fire at the Highland mental institution in Asheville, North Carolina, in 1948. The two were originally buried in Rockville Union Cemetery but with the permission and assistance of their only child, Frances "Scottie" Fitzgerald Lanahan Smith, the Women's Club of Rockville had their bodies moved to the family plot in Saint Mary's Cemetery, in Rockville, Maryland.

Related Topics:
Dorothy Parker - Asheville, North Carolina - 1948 - Rockville Union Cemetery - Saint Mary's Cemetery - Rockville, Maryland

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Fitzgerald never completed The Love of the Last Tycoon. His notes for the novel were edited by his friend Edmund Wilson and published in 1941 as The Last Tycoon. However, there is now critical agreement that Fitzgerald intended the title of the book to be The Love of the Last Tycoon, as is reflected in a new 1994 edition of the book, edited by Fitzgerald scholar Matthew Bruccoli of the University of South Carolina.

Related Topics:
The Love of the Last Tycoon - Edmund Wilson - 1941 - 1994 - Matthew Bruccoli - University of South Carolina

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