Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was born in St. Paul, Minnesota on September 24, 1896. Prior to his birth, Fitzgerald's father moved the family from Maryland, intent on opening a wicker furniture manufacturing business.
He was a writer from an early age. His first novel, This Side of Paradise, was published in 1920, when he was just 24 years old. One week after its publication, he married Zelda Sayre, a fellow novelist and socialite.
Fitzgerald's most famous work, The Great Gatsby, was published in 1925. It's a tale of the jazz age, a term he coined himself, that is often hailed by literary critics as the great American novel. He'd eventually write four novels, four story collections, and 164 short stories.
On December 21, 1940, Fitzgerald died of a heart attack in Hollywood. He was just 44 years old. His will called for "the cheapest funeral" possible, something that Zelda, who was living in a sanatorium at the time, decided to honor. She had the body shipped east for burial in the family plot in Rockville, Maryland's Catholic Cemetery. Fitzgerald's reputation would follow him to the grave however, as the church deemed him "unfit to be buried alongside good Catholics in consecrated ground." Zelda subsequently arranged for him to be buried in Rockville Cemetery. Eight years later, she died in a hospital fire in North Carolina and was laid to rest atop her husband in the single plot.
Usually, this would be the end of the story. However, by 1975, the Fitzgeralds' grave was in great disrepair. A local fraternal organization petitioned the Archbishop of Washington to reconsider Fitzgerald's 1940 request for internment in the family plot at Catholic Cemetery, since renamed St. Mary's Church Cemetery. The request was approved, and the Fitzgeralds' final resting place moved one mile down the road.
Trivia
- If you want to learn more about F. Scott Fitzgerald, take a voyage to Amazon. Its all in books.
- Fitzgerald was named after his distant relative Francis Scott Key. His second cousin, Mary Suratt, was hanged in 1865 for her role in the assassination of President Lincoln.
- At the time of his death, Fitzgerald was writing his novel The Last Tycoon, which was published unfinished. Its also available from Amazon.
- In addition to The Great Gatsby, a number of Fitzgerald's other stories have also been adapted for the silver screen, including The Beautiful and the Damned (2009) and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008).
- Among the many posthumous tributes to the author are his induction into the New Jersey Hall of Fame (2008), appearing on a 23-cent U.S. postage stamp (1996), and the creation of the F. Scott Fitzgerald Society at Hofstra University in New York (1990).
