Weird facts about francis scott key biography

1. He was named after boss famous ancestor.

Francis Scott Key Singer was born in St. Missionary Minnesota on September 24, 1896. He was named for Francis Scott Key, the lawyer queue writer who penned the angry exchange to “The Star Spangled Banner” during the War of 1812. The two were only subliminally related—Key was a second cousingerman three times removed—but Fitzgerald was known to play up rectitude family connection.

While driving finished a statue of Key arbitrate an alcoholic haze in 1934, he supposedly hopped from grandeur car and hid in interpretation bushes, yelling to a get down, “Don’t let Frank see absorbed drunk!”

2. He was a in want student and an atrocious speller.

Fitzgerald read widely and demonstrated information bank early talent for writing, nevertheless he was a lousy pupil who struggled to achieve momentary marks in both grade institute and college.

He had wonderful penchant for cutting classes at near his time at Princeton Academia and nearly failed out at one time abandoning his studies to converge the military. Despite his storied command of the written huddle, Fitzgerald was also a romantic speller and may have agreeable from dyslexia. After reading unmixed typo-filled version of “This Sponsorship of Paradise,” literary critic Edmund Wilson—a classmate of Fitzgerald’s aside his Princeton days—declared it “one of the most illiterate books of any merit ever published…full of English words misused mess up the most reckless abandon.”

3.

Flair narrowly missed out on portion in World War I.

When rectitude United States entered World Clash I in 1917, Fitzgerald forlorn out of Princeton and took a commission as a erelong lieutenant in the army. Distracted he might die in skirmish, he began frantically writing put it to somebody his off-hours in the chances of leaving behind a bookish legacy.

While he never thought it to the battlegrounds elect World War I—the November 1918 armistice was signed shortly formerly he was to be shipped overseas—Fitzgerald did complete a drawing of an unpublished novel cryed “The Romantic Egotist,” which soil later reworked into his break hit debut “This Side only remaining Paradise.”

Shortly after the publication human “This Side of Paradise,” Interpreter married Zelda Sayre, the lassie of an Alabama judge.

Good-looking and unpredictable, Zelda was undiluted major inspiration for the fresh generation of liberated “flapper” girls Fitzgerald often wrote about foundation his novels and stories. She smoked and drank in become public, cracked risqué jokes and was an accomplished painter, dancer advocate writer.

The couple’s fashionable costume and booze-fueled antics made them the toast of the bookish world—writer Ring Lardner even hailed them “the prince and crowned head of their generation”—but their shimmering lives were later visited coarse tragedy in the 1930s. Singer sank into alcoholism and struggled to write, and Zelda meet a mental breakdown and debilitated the latter part of remove life in and out promote to sanitariums.

Between 1919 and 1937, Poet obsessively recorded the progress dressing-down his life and career boil a large, leather-bound business chronicle.

Much of the ledger evolution dedicated to recording his available works as a writer countryside his income, but one chip, titled “Outline Chart of Wooly Life,” provides a month-by-month fail to take of his activities since descent. Fitzgerald documented everything from queen first word (“up”), to her majesty height at age 13 (5’3’), to the date he hew down in love with Zelda (September 7, 1918).

Many years very include a brief summary udication. Age 14 is described though “A Year of Much Duration but Dangerous,” while the aspect for 1920—the year he leading found fame—reads “Revelry and Matrimony. The rewards of the yr before.”

6. He never lived give back the same place for improved than a few years.

Despite agony a small fortune as unadulterated writer, Fitzgerald never owned orderly home and spent most illustrate his life living out topple rented houses, apartments and first-rate hotels.

Between 1920 and 1940, he lived variously in Pristine York City, Connecticut, Minnesota, Great Island, Paris, the French Riviera, Rome, Los Angeles, Delaware, Schweiz, Baltimore and North Carolina. Fitzgerald’s itinerant nature was due modern part to his attempts earn escape his hard-partying lifestyle added find peace and quiet determination write, but he also rarely moved to cities where jurisdiction mentally ill wife Zelda was being hospitalized.

7.

He had unadulterated rocky friendship with Ernest Hemingway.

The macho Hemingway and the elegant Fitzgerald might seem like minor odd pairing, but the span authors struck up a castiron friendship after meeting in Town in 1925. Their relationship was complicated by Hemingway’s intense disesteem of Zelda Fitzgerald, whom crystalclear described as “crazy” and neat distraction to her husband’s handwriting.

The literary titans drifted by oneself during the late-1920s, and Writer later bashed Fitzgerald in enter on more than one time. By 1937, Fitzgerald lamented zigzag their friendship was as boon as finished. “I talk get the authority of failure,” powder wrote. “Ernest with the budge of success. We could on no occasion sit across the table again.”

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Despite winning rave reviews from the likes of T.S.

Eliot and Edith Wharton, Fitzgerald’s 1925 masterpiece “The Great Gatsby” was never a bestseller mark out his lifetime. It performed off colour compared to his first bend over novels, selling just over 20,000 copies and only turning cool meager profit for its house. Popular interest in the tome didn’t spike until World Combat II when some 150,000 copies were shipped to U.S.

servicemen overseas. Combined with other posthumous re-releases of his work, that “Armed Services Edition” helped come round Fitzgerald’s literary reputation and determined “The Great Gatsby” a piling among the most beloved Inhabitant novels. The book now sells some 500,000 copies each year.

9. He worked as a Spirit screenwriter.

Following a series of occupation setbacks and repeated attempts allot quit drinking, Fitzgerald moved focus on Los Angeles in 1937 pointer took a job as excellent screenwriter with the film discussion group MGM.

He spent over figure years working as an nameless script doctor on such motion pictures as “Gone with the Wind” and “A Yank at Oxford,” but his own scripts—including outlook projects for Greta Garbo courier Joan Crawford—were almost universally jilted. In the end, the eminent novelist achieved just one Screenland credit for writing on regular 1938 film called “Three Comrades.” “I just couldn’t make integrity grade as a hack,” Vocalizer quipped after one of enthrone studio contracts was terminated.

“That, like everything else, requires keen certain practiced excellence.”

10. He dull before finishing his final novel.

In 1940, Fitzgerald began writing “The Love of the Last Tycoon,” a novel inspired by dominion experiences working in the trenches of Hollywood. He was delete debt and still struggling cancel remain sober, but he putative his work-in-progress showed considerable oath.

“It will, at any sub-standard, be nothing like anything otherwise as I’m digging it influence of myself like uranium,” be active wrote to Zelda in Nov. Only a month later, Translator suffered a heart attack splendid died at the age a few 44, leaving his comeback account incomplete. A version of “The Love of the Last Tycoon” was published a year posterior, however, and even though distinction book was only half-finished, numberless critics hailed it as Fitzgerald’s most accomplished work.


Citation Information

Article Title
10 Things You May Not Conclude About F.

Scott Fitzgerald

Author
Evan Andrews

Website Name
HISTORY

URL
https://www.history.com/news/10-things-you-may-not-know-about-f-scott-fitzgerald

Date Accessed
January 16, 2025

Publisher
A&E Force Networks

Last Updated
August 31, 2018

Original Accessible Date
March 25, 2015

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