1. Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald
September 24, 1896-December 21, 1940
By: Allison Peabody

2. The Early Life
He was born in Saint Paul, Minnesota where his parents, Edward and Mary, gave him
three names to show their pride in a distant relative who wrote the Star Spangle Banner.
After Edward failed to keep a job the family lived off Marys' inheritance.
Fitzgerald went to Princeton in 1913, but he was an unsuccessful student and football
player. He stopped studying, because he wrote all the time.
By 1916 during his senior year of Princeton he had left with very low grades and he joined the army.
His army career was also unsuccessful and during that same time he started to write.
(The war ended before he went overseas.)
Fitzgerald fell in love with Zelda in 1918 but she declined marrying him because he was poor.
The publication of This Side of Paradise on March 26, 1920, made Fitzgerald famous almost overnight.
A week later he married Zelda Sayre in New York.
After a summer in Westport, Connecticut, the Fitzgerald's took an apartment in New York City.
He wrote his second novel, The Beautiful and Damned, a naturalistic chronicle of the dissipation of Anthony and Gloria Patch.

3. The Later Years
When Zelda Fitzgerald became pregnant they took their first trip to Europe in and then settled in St. Paul for the birth of their only child, Frances Scott (Scottie) Fitzgerald, who was born in October 1921.
He was an alcoholic but wrote sober, but he hurt his reputation.
He went to France for a few years to write The Great Gatsby and Zelda's behavior started to be unusual.
When Zelda pursued a career in ballet she became damaged and Fitzgerald stayed with her but hey began to have problems.
He got money for writing articles for The Saturday Post and tried to work but then Zelda stayed in mental hospitals.
Fitzgerald tried to help Scottie by sending her to boarding school and control her values.
While he continually wrote and saved money he fell in love with a Shelia Graham. There relationship continued while he wrote The Last Tycoon.
Fitzgerald was more than halfway done with The Last Tycoon when he died in Hollywood, California from a heart attack at age 44.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, his wife, Zelda, and daughter, Scotty, in their Paris apartment in 1926.

4. Writing Highlights
The New York Times described F. Scott Fitzgerald's work as, “…So long as he saw his segment of America clearly, and felt it with all his senses he could produce a reality more satisfying than life itself-which is the reason why novels are read instead of history books when the reader of tomorrow seeks to recreate an era.” By this the Times meant that Fitzgerald had such a great way of writing by recreating the era people want to read his books rather than read history books. This Side of Paradise, The Beautiful and Damned, and The Great Gatsby were some of the big hits later on.

5. Historical/Cultural Context of Afternoon of an Author
The Afternoon of an Author has many sections to it. Each new chapter is another edition from a magazine. A part of the story was added each week to the newspaper.
It is overtime read by people first by the magazine and those people are left to wonder until the next issue came out.
There is also an introduction to each new edition that describes how it relates to Fitzgerald's life and what made him write that section.

6. Afternoon of an Author Analysis Highlights
The guy does not always win the girl over.
After another dancer takes Minnie away is Basil walks out onto the veranda. He finds, “There was a flurry of premature snow in the air and the stars looked cold. Staring up at them he saw that they were his stars as always—symbols of ambition, struggle and joy” (68-69).
As he looked Basil found that “…only the practiced eye of the commander saw that one star was no longer there” (69).
This means that Minnie represented the symbols of his ambition, struggle and joy, but once he realized he would never have her the star she was disappeared.

7. Historical/Cultural context of “The Crack-Up”
“The Crack-Up”, that is part of larger piece
being The Crack-Up.
It was first published as series in February,
March, and April 1936 issues of Esquire.
It is a confessional by Fitzgerald about his
life and what he had learned from it.

8. Summary of the “The Crack-Up”
“The Crack-Up” explains how F. Scott Fitzgerald is having trouble processing how the world works. He finds that he cracking under all the pressures of life. The things he used to love were things he was pushing away and hating life. While someone he knows makes him realize that maybe there is not a crack in him but really the crack is much bigger than people realize. The world is really cracking and breaking apart. Fitzgerald finds that he cannot be broken or bitter while the world needs to be put back together not him.

9. Main Concepts of “The Crack-Up”
In 1935, Fitzgerald hit a low point emotionally and physically. Overall he seemed “cracked” or “broken” and this led him to write about his troubles.
He explained how his struggles of never succeeded added to the pressure. (not good enough in football, didn’t graduate college, unsuccessful overseas career)
Motif: The repeating theme of “The Crack-Up” is Fitzgerald explaining how he feels broken and will never recover because he wont succeed in anything.

10. Main Concepts of “The Crack-Up”
In “The Crack-Up” Fitzgerald has a tone of unhappiness, tiredness, dread filled, being miserable, and overall depressed.
He has a longing to go back in time so he doesn’t have to deal with the pressures of life.
He also uses metaphors and similes to make an extended comparison of the him the broken writer to a cracked plate. “--And then suddenly, surprising, I got better. --And cracked like an old plate as soon as I heard the news.” (2nd page)

11. Main Concepts of “The Crack-Up”
F. Scott Fitzgerald found that he had a lot of feelings that made him bitter and this caused him agony. He could not sleep, have relationships with others, and routine things became a chore. Everything he festered was beating him up and it was causing him more harm.
Definition
Catharsis: The purging of the emotions or relieving of emotional tensions, especially through certain kinds of art, as tragedy or music. (near bottom of 2nd pg.)
By using this he could rid himself of some of the anxiety.

12. Love & Hate of “The Crack-Up”
Life doesn’t always work out the way you want or think it will. The love and hate are not so clearly defined.
“The Crack-Up” explains the troubles he has been through. He realizes within his life he had been out of reach from the things he used to love. Fitzgerald says “-he hated the night when I couldn’t sleep and hating the day because it went toward the night.” He felt trapped. This made find things he did like and talk to someone about it.

13. More about “The Crack-Up”
“The Crack-Up” made people criticize Fitzgerald for being overdramatic and self-pitied. While others could relate to the story because they were going through the some of the things due to the Great Depression, Spanish Civil War, etc.
Others were angry that he wasn’t writing about these events instead of his own problems.
Fitzgerald is not specific in describing his reasons why he is writing “The Crack-Up”. Although we know his wife had mental problems and had affairs with married women. He also had alcoholic, financial and writing problems.

14. Fitzgerald Fun Facts He dedicated Great Gatsby to Zelda.
His first word as a baby was “up”.
He had a scar on his forehead from when
he slid down the hall carpet at age three.
He was a terrible speller.
Ernest Hemingway became close friends with Scott,
although he frequently criticized Zelda. Hemingway thought she
was absolutely “insane” and claimed that she “encouraged her husband to
drink so as to distract him from his writing.”
He hated Hollywood but became friends with many of the big wigs but he said that, “Hollywood is a dump – in the human sense of the word. A hideous town, pointed up by the insulating gardens of its rich; full of the human spirit at a new low of debasement.”
In his ledger, Fitzgerald noted he received a $3,939 advance for his in-progress novel, The Great Gatsby. He made $16,666 off the movie rights for Gatsby.
F. Scott hated the first movie adaptation (a silent film that came out in 1926) so much that he walked out of the theater.
The Fitzgerald family on a liner's deck in 1925, just before Gatsby was published.