Frances Scott Fitzgerald

Frances Scott "Scottie" Fitzgerald (1921–1986) was the only child of Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald and novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald. She was a writer and a journalist and a prominent member of the United States Democratic Party.

Related Topics:
1921 - 1986 - Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald - F. Scott Fitzgerald - United States Democratic Party

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Her mother supposedly remarked upon Scottie's birth that she was glad to have borne a girl and that she hoped she would be a "beautiful little fool." In The Great Gatsby (1925), Daisy Buchanan says this of her young daughter.

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She had four children with her first husband, Samuel Jackson Lanahan. She later married Grove Smith. Both men were lawyers, and both marriages ended in divorce.

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She is the subject of an absorbing biography, "Scottie, The Daughter of . . . : The Life of Frances Scott Fitzgerald Lanahan Smith," which was written by her daughter Eleanor Lanahan.

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In it is copied Scottie Lanahan's startlingly civilized letter to her first husband, asking him for a divorce after 23 years.

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:"Dearest Lamb -

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:"I love you. I really do. I think you are an absolutely wonderful person, and I admire you very much.

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:"I nonetheless agree that we can't look forward to our declining years together. I don't know why our marriage is such a failure, when we like each other and are so nice to each other, and are both such nice people, basically - this is perhaps a vain remark but I feel the principal thing we have in common is that we're "nice" - there's just no way either of us could do anything cheap or common advertently. I have done some very foolish and cheap things inadvertently.

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:"Lamb dear, here's what I think should happen: I think we should continue our present life until the summer of 1967, when I think I should take the children out west, and quietly get a divorce when nobody's looking ...

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:"Dearest Jack, I just think that we were mis-mated. Yours and my life has been one long argument, often fun and definitely challenging, but dry. So little love, so little plain affection. A sort of rivalry, always - a competition. I have never felt as if I could do with you what I want to so badly, and hope I'll do before I die, which is crawl into someone's arms, and feel their solace."

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