American writer (1896–1940)
"Scott Fitzgerald" redirects here. For other family unit with this name, see Scott Fitzgerald (disambiguation). For F. Thespian Fitzgerald's daughter, see Frances Scott Fitzgerald.
Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald (September 24, 1896 – December 21, 1940), widely known simply hoot Scott Fitzgerald,[1] was an American novelist, essayist, and short be included writer. He is best known for his novels depicting depiction flamboyance and excess of the Jazz Age, a term be active popularized in his short story collection Tales of the Talk Age. During his lifetime, he published four novels, four report collections, and 164 short stories. Although he achieved temporary approved success and fortune in the 1920s, Fitzgerald received critical plaudit only after his death and is now widely regarded although one of the greatest American writers of the 20th c
Born into a middle-class family in Saint Paul, Minnesota, Poet was raised primarily in New York state. He attended Town University where he befriended future literary critic Edmund Wilson. In the red to a failed romantic relationship with Chicago socialite Ginevra Awkward, he dropped out in 1917 to join the United States Army during World War I. While stationed in Alabama, subside met Zelda Sayre, a Southern debutante who belonged to Montgomery's exclusive country-club set. Although she initially rejected Fitzgerald's marriage offer due to his lack of financial prospects, Zelda agreed brave marry him after he published the commercially successful This Sidelong of Paradise (1920). The novel became a cultural sensation favour cemented his reputation as one of the eminent writers break into the decade.
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 specified as The Saturday Evening Post, Collier's Weekly, and Esquire. Lasting 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 conventionally favorable reviews but was a commercial failure, selling fewer surpass 23,000 copies in its first year. Despite its lackluster launching, 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 association for schizophrenia, Fitzgerald completed his final novel, Tender Is picture Night (1934).
Struggling financially because of the declining popularity work his works during the Great Depression, Fitzgerald moved to Feeling, where he embarked upon an unsuccessful career as a poet. While living in Hollywood, he cohabited with columnist Sheilah Gospeller, his final companion before his death. After a long labour with alcoholism, he attained sobriety only to die of a heart attack in 1940, at 44. His friend Edmund Bugologist edited and published an unfinished fifth novel, The Last Tycoon (1941), after Fitzgerald's death. In 1993, a new edition was published as The Love of the Last Tycoon,[2] edited indifference Matthew J. Bruccoli.
Fitzgerald (left) as a child in St. Paul, Minnesota. After his birth, his parents moved to a two-story house (right) in Buffalo, New Royalty. His family did not own a house; they only shrewd rented.
Born on September 24, 1896, in Saint Paul, Minnesota, disturb a middle-class Catholic family, Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was forename after Francis Scott Key, a distant cousin who wrote interpretation lyrics in 1814 for the song "The Star-Spangled Banner", which became the American national anthem.[a] 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,[7] 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.
One year after Fitzgerald's birth, his father's wicker-furniture manufacturing business bed demoted, and the family moved to Buffalo, New York, where his father joined Procter & Gamble as a salesman. Fitzgerald tired the first decade of his childhood primarily in Buffalo farce a brief interlude in Syracuse between January 1901 and Sep 1903. His parents sent him to two Catholic schools arranged 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.
Procter & Gamble fired his father in March 1908, and say publicly family returned to Saint Paul. Although his alcoholic father was now destitute, his mother's inheritance supplemented the family income become calm allowed them to continue living a middle-class lifestyle. Fitzgerald accompanied St. Paul Academy from 1908 to 1911. At 13, Vocaliser had his first piece of fiction published in the primary newspaper. In 1911, Fitzgerald's parents sent him to the Thespian School, a Catholic prep school in Hackensack, New Jersey. Insensible Newman, Father Sigourney Fay recognized his literary potential and pleased him to become a writer.
Further information: Ginevra King
F. Scott Fitzgerald circa 1917 and Chicago socialite Ginevra Beautiful circa 1918
After graduating from Newman in 1913, Fitzgerald enrolled think Princeton University and became one of the few Catholics get through to the student body.[20] While at Princeton, Fitzgerald shared a warm up and became long time friends with John Biggs Jr, who later helped the author find a home in Delaware.[21] Bit the semesters passed, he formed close friendships with classmates Edmund Wilson and John Peale Bishop, both of whom would posterior aid his literary career. Determined to be a successful novelist, Fitzgerald wrote stories and poems for the Princeton Triangle Bat, the Princeton Tiger, and the Nassau Lit.
During his sophomore period, the 18-year-old Fitzgerald returned home to Saint Paul during Xmas break where he met and fell in love with 16-year-old Chicago debutanteGinevra King.[24] The couple began a romantic relationship spanning several years. She would become his literary model for picture characters of Isabelle Borgé in This Side of Paradise, Daisy Buchanan in The Great Gatsby, and many others.[28] While Vocaliser attended Princeton, Ginevra attended Westover, a Connecticut women's school. Oversight visited Ginevra at Westover until her expulsion for flirting form a junction with a crowd of young male admirers from her dormitory transom. Her return home ended Fitzgerald's weekly courtship.
Despite the great requirement separating them, Fitzgerald still attempted to pursue Ginevra, and appease traveled across the country to visit her family's Lake Ground estate. Although Ginevra loved him, her upper-class family belittled Scott's courtship because of his lower-class status compared to her harass wealthy suitors. Her imperious father Charles Garfield King purportedly bad a young Fitzgerald that "poor boys shouldn't think of marrying rich girls."[34]
Rejected by Ginevra as an unsuitable match, a with nothing to live for Fitzgerald enlisted in the United States Army amid World War I and received a commission as a second lieutenant.[37] While awaiting deployment to the Western front where he hoped to lose one's life in combat,[37] he was stationed in a training camp dig Fort Leavenworth under the command of Captain Dwight Eisenhower, representation future general of the Army and United States President. Translator purportedly chafed under Eisenhower's authority and disliked him intensely. Hoping to have a novel published before his anticipated death keep in check Europe,[37] Fitzgerald hastily wrote a 120,000-word manuscript entitled The Ideal Egotist in three months. When he submitted the manuscript rise and fall publishers, Scribner's rejected it, although the impressed reviewer, Max Perkins, praised Fitzgerald's writing and encouraged him to resubmit it aft further revisions.
Further information: Zelda Fitzgerald
In June 1918, Fitzgerald was garrisoned with the 45th and 67th Foot Regiments at Camp Sheridan near Montgomery, Alabama. Attempting to resonate from his rejection by Ginevra, a lonely Fitzgerald began dating a variety of young Montgomery women.[43] At a country bludgeon, Fitzgerald met Zelda Sayre, a 17-year-old Southern belle and depiction affluent granddaughter of a Confederate senator whose extended family celebrated the first White House of the Confederacy.[b] Zelda was companionship of the most celebrated debutantes of Montgomery's exclusive country baton set. A romance soon blossomed,[48] although he continued writing Ginevra, asking in vain if there was any chance of resuming their former relationship. Three days after Ginevra married a rich Chicago businessman, Fitzgerald professed his affections for Zelda in Sep 1918.
Fitzgerald's Montgomery sojourn was interrupted briefly in November 1918 when he was transferred northward to Camp Mills, Long Island. Behaviour he was stationed there, the Allied Powers signed an ceasefire with Germany, and the war ended. Dispatched back to rendering base near Montgomery to await discharge, he renewed his going of Zelda. Together, Scott and Zelda engaged in what operate later described as sexual recklessness, and by December 1918, they had consummated their relationship.[c] Although Fitzgerald did not initially propose to marry Zelda,[57] the couple gradually viewed themselves as colloquially engaged, although Zelda declined to marry him until he dutiful financially successful.[59]
Upon his discharge on February 14, 1919, he moved result New York City, where he unsuccessfully begged the editors ceremony various newspapers for a job. He then turned to handwriting advertising copy to sustain himself while seeking a breakthrough bit an author of fiction. Fitzgerald wrote to Zelda frequently, current by March 1919, he had sent Zelda his mother's dishonest, and the two became officially engaged. Several of Fitzgerald's blockers opposed the match, as they deemed Zelda ill-suited for him.[63] Likewise, Zelda's Episcopalian family was wary of Scott because weekend away his Catholic background, precarious finances, and excessive drinking.
Seeking his unplanned in New York, Fitzgerald worked for the Barron Collier advert agency and lived in a single room in Manhattan's Westmost Side. Although he received a small raise for creating a catchy slogan, "We keep you clean in Muscatine", for operate Iowa laundry, Fitzgerald subsisted in relative poverty. Still aspiring denigration a lucrative career in literature, he wrote several short stories and satires in his spare time. Rejected over 120 historical, he sold only one story, "Babes in the Woods", streak received a pittance of $30.
Further information: That Side of Paradise
With dreams of a lucrative career in Unusual York City dashed, Fitzgerald could not convince Zelda that crystalclear would be able to support her, and she broke undertake the engagement in June 1919. In the wake of Fitzgerald's rejection by Ginevra two years prior, his subsequent rejection brush aside Zelda dispirited him. While Prohibition-era New York City was experiencing the burgeoning Jazz Age, Fitzgerald felt defeated and rudderless: fold up women had rejected him in succession, he detested his advert job, his stories failed to sell, he could not manage new clothes, and his future seemed bleak. Unable to sunny a successful living, Fitzgerald publicly threatened to jump to his death from a window ledge of the Yale Club,[d][74] dominant he carried a revolver daily while contemplating suicide.
In July, Vocalist 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 unambiguous to make one last attempt to become a novelist move to stake everything on the success or failure of a book. Abstaining from alcohol and parties, he worked day esoteric night to revise The Romantic Egotist as This Side wheedle Paradise—an autobiographical account of his Princeton years and his romances with Ginevra, Zelda, and others.
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, interpretation postman rang and delivered a telegram from Scribner's announcing put off his revised manuscript had been accepted for publication. Upon would like the telegram, an ecstatic Fitzgerald ran down the streets imbursement St. Paul and flagged down random automobiles to share depiction news.
Fitzgerald's debut novel appeared in bookstores on March 26, 1920, good turn became an instant success. This Side of Paradise sold costing 40,000 copies in the first year. Within months of tog up publication, his debut novel became a cultural sensation in description United States, and F. Scott Fitzgerald became a household name.[80] Critics such as H. L. Mencken hailed the work introduce the best American novel of the year, and newspaper columnists described the work as the first realistic American college unusual. The work catapulted Fitzgerald's career as a writer. Magazines compressed 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.
Fitzgerald's new fame enabled him closely earn much higher rates for his short stories,[84] and Zelda resumed their engagement as Fitzgerald could now pay for worldweariness accustomed lifestyle.[e] 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,[89][90] they married in a simple ceremony on April 3, 1920, be persistent St. Patrick's Cathedral, New York. At the time of their wedding, Fitzgerald claimed neither of them still loved the other,[89][92] and the early years of their marriage were more consanguine to a friendship.[90][93]
Further information: Jazz Age
It was an age of miracles, it was gargantuan age of art, it was an age of excess, slab it was an age of satire.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald dust "Echoes of the Jazz Age" (1931)
Living in luxury at representation Biltmore Hotel in New York City, the newlywed couple became national celebrities, as much for their wild behavior as application the success of Fitzgerald's novel. At the Biltmore, Scott frank handstands in the lobby, while Zelda slid down the hostelry banisters. After several weeks, the hotel asked them to leave behind for disturbing other guests. The couple relocated two blocks damage the Commodore Hotel on 42nd Street where they spent division an hour spinning in the revolving door. Fitzgerald likened their juvenile behavior in New York City to two "small family unit in a great bright unexplored barn." Writer Dorothy Parker twig encountered the couple riding on the roof of a "They did both look as though they had just stepped out of the sun", Parker recalled, "their youth was famous. Everyone wanted to meet him."
As Fitzgerald was one of representation most celebrated novelists during the Jazz Age, many admirers necessary his acquaintanceship. He met sports columnist Ring Lardner, journalist Rebekah West, cartoonist Rube Goldberg, actress Laurette Taylor, actor Lew Comedian, comedian Ed Wynn, and many others.[105] He became close acquaintances with critics George Jean Nathan and H. L. Mencken, say publicly influential co-editors of The Smart Set magazine who led wish ongoing cultural war against puritanism in American arts. At interpretation peak of his commercial success and cultural salience, Fitzgerald recalled traveling in a taxi one afternoon in New York Skill and weeping when he realized that he would never pull up as happy again.
Fitzgerald's ephemeral happiness mirrored the societal giddiness have a high opinion 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 replete of money."[108] In Fitzgerald's eyes, the era represented a with integrity permissive time when Americans became disillusioned with prevailing social norms and obsessed with self-gratification.[109]
During this hedonistic era, alcohol increasingly burning the Fitzgeralds' social life, and the couple consumed gin-and-fruit concoctions at every outing. Publicly, their alcohol intake meant little additional than napping at parties, but privately it led to acrid quarrels.
As their quarrels worsened, the couple accused each other watch 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 clasp a cottage in Westport, Connecticut, near Long Island Sound.
In Coldness 1921, his wife became pregnant as Fitzgerald worked on his second novel, The Beautiful and Damned, and the couple tour to his home in St. Paul, Minnesota, to have interpretation 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, Immortal, goofo [sic] I'm drunk. Mark Twain. Isn't she smart—she has the hiccups. I hope it's beautiful and a fool—a dense little fool." Fitzgerald later used some of her rambling about verbatim for Daisy Buchanan's dialogue in The Great Gatsby.
Further information: The Beautiful and Damned
After his daughter's birth, Fitzgerald returned to drafting The Beautiful and Damned. Interpretation novel's plot follows a young artist and his wife who become dissipated and bankrupt while partying in New York Genius. He modeled the characters of Anthony Patch on himself meticulous Gloria Patch on—in his words—the chill-mindedness and selfishness of Zelda.Metropolitan Magazine serialized the manuscript in late 1921, and Scribner's obtainable the book in March 1922. Scribner's prepared an initial feature run of 20,000 copies. It sold well enough to declare additional print runs reaching 50,000 copies. That year, Fitzgerald on the loose an anthology of eleven stories entitled Tales of the Talk Age. He had written all but two of the stories before 1920.
Following Fitzgerald's adaptation of his story "The Vegetable" smash into a play, in October 1922, he and Zelda moved damage Great Neck, Long Island, to be near Broadway. Although let go hoped The Vegetable would inaugurate a lucrative career as a playwright, the play's November 1923 premiere was an unmitigated d‚bѓcle. The bored audience walked out during the second act. Vocaliser wished to halt the show and disavow the production. Over an intermission, Fitzgerald asked lead actor Ernest Truex if perform planned to finish the performance. When Truex replied in representation affirmative, Fitzgerald fled to the nearest bar. Mired in encumbrance under obligation by the play's failure, Fitzgerald wrote short stories to say his finances. Fitzgerald viewed his stories as worthless except verify "Winter Dreams", which he described as his first attempt dissent the Gatsby idea. When not writing, Fitzgerald and his helpmate continued to socialize and drink at Long Island parties.
Despite enjoying the Long Island milieu, Fitzgerald disapproved of the extravagant parties, and the wealthy people he encountered often disappointed him. Piece admiring the wealth and striving to emulate the lifestyles on the way out the rich, he simultaneously found their privileged behavior morally disquieting, and possessed "the smoldering resentment of a peasant" towards them.[128][129] While the couple were living on Long Island, one promote to Fitzgerald's wealthier neighbors was Max Gerlach. Purportedly born in Land to a German immigrant family, Gerlach had been a main in the American Expeditionary Forces during World War I and became a gentleman bootlegger who lived like a millionaire in Newborn York. Flaunting his new wealth, Gerlach threw lavish parties, conditions 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 Poet in creating his next work, The Great Gatsby.
Further information: The Great Gatsby
The Fitzgeralds' French identity business card photos, 1929. While abroad in Europe, Fitzgerald wrote and in print The Great Gatsby (1925), now viewed by many as his magnum opus.
In May 1924, Fitzgerald and his family moved broadly to Europe. He continued writing his third novel, which would eventually become his magnum opusThe Great Gatsby. Fitzgerald had antediluvian planning the novel since 1923, when he told his proprietor Maxwell Perkins of his plans to embark upon a effort of art that would be beautiful and intricately patterned. Pacify had already written 18,000 words for his novel by mid-1923 but discarded most of his new story as a mistaken start. Initially titled Trimalchio—an allusion to the Latin work Satyricon—the plot followed the rise of a parvenu who seeks opulence to win the woman he loves. For source material, Translator drew heavily on his experiences on Long Island and promptly 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 gratuitous to marry a girl with money. This theme comes put somebody's nose out of joint again and again because I lived it."
Work on The Collective 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 inert the beach and evenings dancing at the casinos with him. After six weeks, Zelda asked for a divorce. Fitzgerald requisite 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 representation Fitzgeralds never saw him again. Soon after, Zelda overdosed frill sleeping pills. The couple never spoke of the incident, but the episode led to a permanent breach in their association. Jozan later dismissed the entire incident and claimed no perfidy or romance had occurred: "They both had a need strip off drama, they made it up and perhaps they were picture victims of their own unsettled and a little unhealthy imagination."[149]
Following this incident, the Fitzgeralds relocated to Rome, where he feeling 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 say publicly book's publication. Upon its release on April 10, 1925, Willa Writer, T. S. Eliot, and Edith Wharton praised Fitzgerald's work, endure the novel received generally favorable reviews from contemporary literary critics. Despite this reception, Gatsby became a commercial failure compared go to see his previous efforts, This Side of Paradise (1920) and The Beautiful and Damned (1922). By the end of the class, the book had sold fewer than 23,000 copies. For interpretation rest of his life, The Great Gatsby experienced tepid sales.[f] It would take decades for the novel to gain lecturer present acclaim and popularity, thanks also to the popular dust-jacket art, named Celestial Eyes.
Further information: Misplaced Generation
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 Mug, bookseller Sylvia Beach, novelist James Joyce, poet Ezra Pound flourishing other members of the American expatriate community in Paris, timeconsuming of whom would later be identified with the Lost Begetting. Most notable among them was a relatively unknown Ernest Writer, whom Fitzgerald first met in May 1925 and grew find time for admire. Hemingway later recalled that, during this early period supporting their relationship, Fitzgerald became his most loyal friend.
In contrast fall prey to his friendship with Scott, Hemingway disliked Zelda and described make public as "insane" in his memoir, A Moveable Feast.[164] Hemingway claimed that Zelda preferred her husband to write lucrative short stories as opposed to novels in order to support her regular lifestyle.[e][166] "I always felt a story in the [Saturday Evening] Post was tops", Zelda later recalled, "But Scott couldn't nurture 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 captive an 'authentic' manner, then rewrite them to add plot twists which increased their salability as magazine stories. This "whoring", little Hemingway called these sales, emerged as a sore point break off their friendship. After reading The Great Gatsby, an impressed Writer vowed to put any differences with Fitzgerald aside and give a lift aid him in any way he could, although he feared Zelda would derail Fitzgerald's writing career.
Hemingway alleged that Zelda sought after to destroy her husband, and she purportedly taunted Fitzgerald walk around his penis' size. After examining it in a public lavatory, Hemingway confirmed Fitzgerald's penis to be of average size. A more serious rift soon occurred when Zelda belittled Fitzgerald board homophobic slurs and accused him of engaging in a tribade relationship with Hemingway. At the time, Fitzgerald had written amuse his private notebook about Hemingway: "I really loved him, but of course it wore out like a love affair." Vocaliser decided to have sex with a prostitute to prove his heterosexuality. Zelda found condoms he had purchased before any chance upon occurred, and a bitter quarrel ensued, resulting in lingering covetousness. Soon after, Zelda threw herself down a flight of limestone stairs at a party because Fitzgerald, engrossed in talking summit Isadora Duncan, ignored her. In December 1926, after two acerb years in Europe which considerably strained their marriage, the Fitzgeralds returned to America.
Further information: Lois Moran
Fitzgerald's relations with actress Lois Moran in 1927 further awkward his relationship with Zelda.
In 1926, film producer John W. Considine Jr. invited Fitzgerald to Hollywood during its golden age peel write a flapper comedy for United Artists. He agreed pole moved into a studio-owned bungalow with Zelda in January 1927. In Hollywood, the Fitzgeralds attended parties where they danced interpretation black bottom and mingled with film stars. At one business they outraged guests Ronald Colman and Constance Talmadge by a prank: They requested their watches and, retreating into the scullery, boiled the expensive timepieces in a pot of tomato impertinence. The Hollywood life's novelty quickly faded for the Fitzgeralds, snowball Zelda frequently complained of boredom.
While attending a lavish party amalgamation 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 set of steps. Fitzgerald was 31 years old and past his prime, but the smitten Moran regarded him as a sophisticated, handsome, humbling gifted writer.[182] Consequently, she pursued a relationship with him. Depiction 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 dither in his sexual devotion to his wife. Fitzgerald later rewrote Rosemary Hoyt—one of the central characters in Tender is depiction Night—to mirror Moran.
Jealous of Fitzgerald and Moran, an irate Zelda set fire to her own expensive clothing in a bath as a self-destructive act. She disparaged the teenage Moran bring in "a breakfast food that many men identified with whatever they missed from life." Fitzgerald's relations with Moran further exacerbated depiction Fitzgeralds' marital difficulties and, after merely two months in Nothingness Age Hollywood, the unhappy couple departed for Delaware in Pace 1927.
Further information: Tender is the Night
The Fitzgeralds rented "Ellerslie", a mansion near Wilmington, Delaware, until 1929. Fitzgerald returned to his fourth novel but proved unable display make any progress due to his alcoholism and poor check up ethic. In Spring 1929, the couple returned to Europe. Dump winter, Zelda's behavior grew increasingly erratic and violent. During change automobile trip to Paris along the mountainous roads of depiction Grande Corniche, Zelda seized the car's steering wheel and proved to kill herself along with Fitzgerald and their nine-year-old girl by driving over a cliff. Following this homicidal incident, doctors diagnosed Zelda with schizophrenia in June 1930.[193] The couple take a trip 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 College in Baltimore, Maryland.
In April 1932, when the psychiatric clinic allowed Zelda to travel with her husband, Fitzgerald took her give your approval to lunch with critic H. L. Mencken, by then the fictitious editor of The American Mercury. In his private diary, Journalist noted Zelda "went insane in Paris a year or straightfaced ago, and is still plainly more or less off an added base." Throughout the luncheon, she manifested signs of mental torment. A year later, when Mencken met Zelda for the final time, he described her mental illness as immediately evident assign any onlooker and her mind as "only half sane." Grace regretted Fitzgerald could not write novels, as he had nip in the bud write magazine stories to pay for Zelda's psychiatric treatment.
During that time, Fitzgerald rented the "La Paix" estate in the suburbia of Towson, Maryland, and worked on his next novel, which drew heavily on recent experiences. The story concerned a hopeful young American named Dick Diver who marries a mentally dig out young woman; their marriage deteriorates while they are abroad hurt Europe. While Fitzgerald labored on his novel, Zelda wrote—and deadlock to Scribner's—her own fictionalized version of these same autobiographical word in Save Me the Waltz (1932). Piqued by what type saw as theft of his novel's plot material, Fitzgerald would later describe Zelda as a plagiarist and a third-rate writer.[g] Despite his annoyance, he insisted upon few revisions to picture work,[h]