Ruth Benedict
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About the F. Scott Fitzgerald
Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald (September 24, 1896 – December 21, 1940), widely known simply as Scott Fitzgerald, was an American novelist, essayist, and short story writer. He is best known for his novels depicting the flamboyance and excess of the Jazz Age, a term he popularized in his short story collection Tales of the Jazz Age. During his lifetime, he published four novels, four story collections, and 164 short stories. Although he achieved temporary popular success and fortune in the 1920s, Fitzgerald received critical acclaim only after his death and is now widely regarded as one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century.
Born into a middle class family in Saint Paul, Minnesota, Fitzgerald was raised primarily in New York state. He attended Princeton University where he befriended future literary critic Edmund Wilson. Owing to a failed romantic relationship with Chicago socialite Ginevra King, he dropped out in 1917 to join the United States Army during World War I. While stationed in Alabama, he met Zelda Sayre, a Southern debutante who belonged to Montgomery’s exclusive country-club set. Although she initially rejected Fitzgerald’s marriage proposal due to his lack of financial prospects, Zelda agreed to marry him after he published the commercially successful This Side of Paradise (1920). The novel became a cultural sensation and cemented his reputation as one of the eminent writers of 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 such as The Saturday Evening Post, Collier’s Weekly, and Esquire. During 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 generally favorable reviews but was a commercial failure, selling fewer than 23,000 copies in its first year. Despite its lackluster debut, 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 institute for schizophrenia, Fitzgerald completed his final novel, Tender Is the Night (1934).
Struggling financially because of the declining popularity of his works during the Great Depression, Fitzgerald moved to Hollywood, where he embarked upon an unsuccessful career as a screenwriter. While living in Hollywood, he cohabited with columnist Sheilah Graham, his final companion before his death. After a long struggle with alcoholism, he attained sobriety only to die of a heart attack in 1940, at 44. His friend Edmund Wilson 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, edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli.
Frequently Asked Questions
{mb_by_number_of_quotes} Quotes by F. Scott Fitzgerald
- 1.
His was a great sin who first invented consciousness. Let us lose it for a few hours.
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- 2.
A big man has no time really to do anything but just sit and be big.
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- 3.
Personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures.
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- 4.
No grand idea was ever born in a conference, but a lot of foolish ideas have died there.
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- 5.
It’s not a slam at you when people are rude, it’s a slam at the people they’ve met before.
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- 6.
Her body calculated to a millimeter to suggest a bud yet guarantee a flower.
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- 7.
The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.
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- 8.
Scratch a Yale man with both hands and you’ll be lucky to find a coast-guard. Usually you find nothing at all.
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- 9.
Every one suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues.
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- 10.
A great social success is a pretty girl who plays her cards as carefully as if she were plain.
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- 11.
What’ll we do with ourselves this afternoon? And the day after that, and the next thirty years?
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- 12.
Everybody’s youth is a dream, a form of chemical madness.
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- 13.
It is in the thirties that we want friends. In the forties we know they won’t save us any more than love did.
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- 14.
Cut out all these exclamation points. An exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke.
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- 15.
Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat.
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- 16.
There are no second acts in American lives.
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- 17.
Show me a hero and I’ll write you a tragedy.
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- 18.
Some men have a necessity to be mean, as if they were exercising a faculty which they had to partially neglect since early childhood.
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- 19.
Action is character.
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- 20.
The victor belongs to the spoils.
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- 21.
The easiest way to get a reputation is to go outside the fold, shout around for a few years as a violent atheist or a dangerous radical, and then crawl back to the shelter.
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- 22.
Though the Jazz Age continued it became less and less an affair of youth. The sequel was like a children’s party taken over by the elders.
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- 23.
You don’t write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say.
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- 24.
Vitality shows in not only the ability to persist but the ability to start over.
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- 25.
After all, life hasn’t much to offer except youth, and I suppose for older people, the love of youth in others.
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- 26.
I like people and I like them to like me, but I wear my heart where God put it, on the inside.
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- 27.
Genius goes around the world in its youth incessantly apologizing for having large feet. What wonder that later in life it should be inclined to raise those feet too swiftly to fools and bores.
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- 28.
Often people display a curious respect for a man drunk, rather like the respect of simple races for the insane… There is something awe-inspiring in one who has lost all inhibitions.
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- 29.
When people are taken out of their depths they lose their heads, no matter how charming a bluff they may put up.
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- 30.
Life is essentially a cheat and its conditions are those of defeat; the redeeming things are not happiness and pleasure but the deeper satisfactions that come out of struggle.
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- 31.
My idea is always to reach my generation. The wise writer writes for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterward.
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- 32.
Family quarrels are bitter things. They don’t go according to any rules. They’re not like aches or wounds, they’re more like splits in the skin that won’t heal because there’s not enough material.
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- 33.
For awhile after you quit Keats all other poetry seems to be only whistling or humming.
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- 34.
Riches have never fascinated me, unless combined with the greatest charm or distinction.
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- 35.
Men get to be a mixture of the charming mannerisms of the women they have known.
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- 36.
At eighteen our convictions are hills from which we look; at forty-five they are caves in which we hide.
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- 37.
Advertising is a racket, like the movies and the brokerage business. You cannot be honest without admitting that its constructive contribution to humanity is exactly minus zero.
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- 38.
Either you think, or else others have to think for you and take power from you, pervert and discipline your natural tastes, civilize and sterilize you.
F. Scott Fitzgerald{mb_by_description:plain}
- 39.
Genius is the ability to put into effect what is on your mind.
F. Scott Fitzgerald{mb_by_description:plain}
- 40.
It occurred to me that there was no difference between men, in intelligence or race, so profound as the difference between the sick and the well.
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- 41.
The faces of most American women over thirty are relief maps of petulant and bewildered unhappiness.
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- 42.
Nothing is as obnoxious as other people’s luck.
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- 43.
The world, as a rule, does not live on beaches and in country clubs.
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- 44.
I’m a romantic; a sentimental person thinks things will last, a romantic person hopes against hope that they won’t.
F. Scott Fitzgerald{mb_by_description:plain}
- 45.
Forgotten is forgiven.
F. Scott Fitzgerald{mb_by_description:plain}
- 46.
An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmaster of ever afterwards.
F. Scott Fitzgerald{mb_by_description:plain}
- 47.
The idea that to make a man work you’ve got to hold gold in front of his eyes is a growth, not an axiom. We’ve done that for so long that we’ve forgotten there’s any other way.
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- 48.
You can stroke people with words.
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- 49.
First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you.
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- 50.
The compensation of a very early success is a conviction that life is a romantic matter. In the best sense one stays young.
F. Scott Fitzgerald{mb_by_description:plain}
- 51.
I’ve been drunk for about a week now, and I thought it might sober me up to sit in a library.
F. Scott Fitzgerald{mb_by_description:plain}
- 52.
All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.
F. Scott Fitzgerald{mb_by_description:plain}
- 53.
Switzerland is a country where very few things begin, but many things end.
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- 54.
Great art is the contempt of a great man for small art.
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- 55.
It is sadder to find the past again and find it inadequate to the present than it is to have it elude you and remain forever a harmonious conception of memory.
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- 56.
In a real dark night of the soul, it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day.
F. Scott Fitzgerald{mb_by_description:plain}
- 57.
To a profound pessimist about life, being in danger is not depressing.
F. Scott Fitzgerald{mb_by_description:plain}
- 58.
No decent career was ever founded on a public.
F. Scott Fitzgerald{mb_by_description:plain}
- 59.
No such thing as a man willing to be honest – that would be like a blind man willing to see.
F. Scott Fitzgerald{mb_by_description:plain}
- 60.
Trouble has no necessary connection with discouragement. Discouragement has a germ of its own, as different from trouble as arthritis is different from a stiff joint.
F. Scott Fitzgerald{mb_by_description:plain}
- 61.
Only remember west of the Mississippi it’s a little more look, see, act. A little less rationalize, comment, talk.
F. Scott Fitzgerald{mb_by_description:plain}
- 62.
To write it, it took three months; to conceive it three minutes; to collect the data in it all my life.
F. Scott Fitzgerald{mb_by_description:plain}
- 63.
Speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again.
F. Scott Fitzgerald{mb_by_description:plain}