Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald Biographical Timeline

1896:  F. Scott Fitzgerald is born in St. Paul, Minnesota.

1913:  Fitzgerald goes to Princeton where he neglects his studies in order to write scripts and lyrics for the Princeton Triangle Club musicals and contributes to the literary magazine.

1917:  Fitzgerald, on academic probation, leaves Princeton to become a second lieutenant in the infantry.  Convinced that he would die in the war, he writes a novel calledThe Romantic Egotist, which later would become This Side of Paradise.

1918:  Fitzgerald is sent to Camp Sheridan near Montgomery, Alabama, where he meets  Zelda Sayre, the 18-year-old daughter of an Alabama Supreme Court judge.  Fitzgerald hopes to persuade Zelda to marry him by becoming a published novelist.

1919: Fitzgerald is discharged from the Army. He gets a job with an advertising agency in New York City, but Zelda is unwilling to live off his small salary and breaks with him. Fitzgerald quits his job and goes back to St. Paul to rewrite his novel. Maxwell Perkins becomes his editor at Scribner’s.

1920:  This Side of Paradise is published. Saturday Evening Post and The Smart Set publish his short stories. The novel is an immediate success and makes Fitzgerald famous almost overnight. A week after the novel’s publication he and Zelda are married in New York City.

1921:  Zelda becomes pregnant and the Fitzgeralds take their first trip to Europe.  By now they have become celebrities and are launched on an extravagant, hard-drinking life.  They return to St. Paul for the birth of their daughter Scottie in October.

1922:  The Fitzgeralds move to Great Neck, Long Island.  Publication of his second novel, The Beautiful and Damned.

1923:  Fitzgerald’s play, The Vegetable, a political satire, fails. Fitzgerald’s drinking begins to be a real problem, but he himself becomes identified with the Jazz Age.

1924:  Scott and Zelda go to France where he writes The Great Gatsby .  Zelda has an affair with a French naval aviator and damages the marriage.

1925:  The Great Gatsby is published to great critical acclaim. Scott continues to write commercial stories in order to remain solvent. In his lifetime Fitzgerald wrote 160 stories.

1926:  The Fitzgeralds divide their time between Paris and the Riviera.  Scott’s friendship with Ernest Hemingway is formed, and he recommends Hemingway’s work to Maxwell Perkins, who becomes Hemingway’s editor.  Scott begins his fourth novel.  Zelda’s behavior becomes increasingly eccentric.

1927:   Fitzgerald embarks on a brief, unsuccessful attempt at screenwriting in Hollywood.  Zelda begins ballet training with the intention of becoming a professional dancer.

1929:  The Fitzgeralds return to France. Zelda suffers a breakdown and is hospitalized in Switzerland.  Fitzgerald’s work on the fourth novel is suspended while he writes stories to pay for the psychiatric treatment.

1931:  Zelda and Scott return to America and move to Montgomery, Alabama, to be near Zelda’s mother.  Fitzgerald again tries unsuccessfully to make it as a screenwriter in Hollywood. 

1932:  Zelda suffers a relapse and is hospitalized again. Except for brief intervals as an outpatient, Zelda remains in institutions for the rest of her life.  Zelda writes her autobiographical novel, Save Me the Waltz, which causes bitterness between her and Scott, who had been using the same material for his novel, Tender Is The Night.

1934:  Nine years after he began it, Tender Is The Night is finally published to mixed reviews.  It is a commercial failure.

1935:  Fitzgerald’s drinking becomes excessive.  He is in ill health and heavily in debt.  He lives in hotels near Asheville, North Carolina, where Zelda is hospitalized.  At this point he ceases to make a home for his daughter, who goes to boarding school.  The Harold Obers (Scott’s agent) become her surrogate family.

1936:  Fitzgerald writes three self-analytic essays called collectively The Crack-Up  which Esquire publishes.  Hemingway mocks him for being so confessional.

1937:  Fitzgerald goes to Hollywood with a contract to write screenplays.  He completes the work on Three Comrades, produced by Joseph Mankiewicz. He meets and falls in love with Sheilah Graham, a Hollywood columnist.

1938:  MGM does not renew Fitzgerald’s contract. Sheilah Graham (a Hollywood gossip columnist with whom Scott has begun a relationship) stands by him even as his drinking episodes become worse.

1939:  Fitzgerald begins work on his Hollywood novel, The Last Tycoon.

1940:  Fitzgerald has mild heart attack, moves in with Sheilah Graham and continues writing The Last Tycoon.  In December he suffers a second and fatal heart attack. Zelda lives until 1948 and dies in a hospital fire.

When Fitzgerald died, all of his books were out of print and he believed himself to be a complete failure. Five years after his death, his literary resurrection had begun and he is now considered to be pre-eminent among America’s best novelists.

Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald (July 24, 1900 – March 10, 1948), born Zelda Sayre in Montgomery, Alabama, was an American novelist and the wife of writer F. Scott Fitzgerald. She was an icon of the 1920s—dubbed by her husband "the first American Flapper". After the success of his first novel, This Side of Paradise (1920), the Fitzgeralds became celebrities. The newspapers of New York saw them as embodiments of the Jazz Age and the Roaring Twenties: young, seemingly wealthy, beautiful, and energetic.

Even as a child her audacious behavior was the subject of Montgomery gossip. Shortly after finishing high school, she met F. Scott Fitzgerald at a dance. A whirlwind courtship ensued. Though he had professed his infatuation, she continued seeing other men. Despite fights and a prolonged break-up, they married in 1920, and spent the early part of the decade as literary celebrities in New York. Later in the 1920s, they moved to Europe, recast as famous expatriates of the Lost Generation. While Scott received acclaim for The Great Gatsby and his short stories, and the couple socialized with literary luminaries like Ernest Hemingway. Scott used their relationship as material in his novels, even lifting snippets from Zelda's diary and assigning them to his fictional heroines. Seeking an artistic identity of her own, Zelda wrote magazine articles and short stories, and at 27 became obsessed with a career as a ballerina, practicing to exhaustion.

The strain of her tempestuous marriage, Scott's increasing alcoholism, and her growing instability presaged Zelda's admittance to the Sheppard Pratt sanatorium in 1930. She was diagnosed with schizophrenia. While in the Towson, Maryland, clinic, she wrote a semi-autobiographical novel, Save Me the Waltz, which was published in 1932. Scott was furious that she had used material from their life together, though he would go on to do the same, as in Tender Is the Night, published in 1934; the two novels provide contrasting portrayals of the couple's failing marriage.

Back in America, Scott went to Hollywood where he tried screenwriting and began an affair with the movie columnist Sheilah Graham. In 1936, Zelda entered the Highland Mental Hospital in Asheville, North Carolina. Scott died in Hollywood in 1940, having last seen Zelda a year and a half earlier. She spent her remaining years working on a second novel, which she never completed, and she painted extensively. In 1948, the hospital at which she was a patient caught fire, causing her death. Interest in the Fitzgeralds resurged shortly after her death. After a life as an emblem of the Jazz Age, Roaring Twenties, and Lost Generation, Zelda Fitzgerald posthumously found a new role: after a popular 1970 biography by Nancy Milford, she became a feminist icon.

Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald (September 24, 1896 – December 21, 1940) was an American author of novels and short stories, whose works are evocative of the Jazz Age, a term he coined himself. He is widely regarded as one of the twentieth century's greatest writers. Considered a member of the "Lost Generation" of the Twenties, he finished four novels including This Side of Paradise, The Beautiful and Damned, Tender Is the Night and his most famous, the celebrated classic, The Great Gatsby. A fifth, unfinished novel, The Last Tycoon was published posthumously. Fitzgerald also wrote many short stories that treat themes of youth and promise along with despair and age.

Born in St. Paul, Minnesota, Fitzgerald was named after his famous second cousin, twice removed, Francis Scott Key, but was referred to as "Scott".  He spent 1898–1901 in Syracuse and 1903–1908 in Buffalo, New York. When his father was fired at Procter & Gamble, the family returned to Minnesota, where Fitzgerald attended St. Paul Academy in St. Paul. His first literary effort, a detective story, was published in the school newspaper when he was 12. He entered Princeton University in 1913 as a member of the Class of 1917 and became friends with future critics and writers Edmund Wilson and John Peale Bishop.  Fitzgerald wrote for the Princeton Triangle Club —a kind of musical-comedy society— and his experiences led to the creation and submission of a novel, The Romantic Egotist, to Charles Scribner's Sons where the editor praised the writing but ultimately rejected the book. A poor student, Fitzgerald left Princeton in 1917 to enlist in the US during WWI; however, the war ended shortly after Fitzgerald's enlistment.

While at Camp Sheridan, Fitzgerald met Zelda Sayre, the "golden girl", in Fitzgerald's words, of Montgomery, Alabama society. The two were engaged in 1919, and Fitzgerald moved into an apartment in New York City to try to lay a foundation for his life with Zelda.  Unable to convince Zelda that he would be able to support her, she broke off the engagement.

Scott returned to his parents' house at 599 Summit Avenue in St. Paul, to revise The Romantic Egoist.  Retitled This Side of Paradise, the book beautifully captured the post-WWI generation.  It was accepted by Scribner's in the fall of 1919 and published on March 26, 1920, becoming one of the most popular books of the year.  Zelda and Scott resumed their engagement and were married in St. Patrick's Cathedral.  Their only child, Frances Scott "Scottie" Fitzgerald, was born on October 26, 1921.

The 1920s proved the most influential decade of Fitzgerald's development. The Great Gatsby, considered his masterpiece, was published in 1925. Fitzgerald made several excursions to Europe, notably Paris and the French Riviera, and became friends with many members of the American expatriate community in Paris, most notably Ernest Hemingway.

Fitzgerald’s friendship with Hemingway was vigorous, but Hemingway did not get on well with Zelda.  In addition to describing her as "insane" he claimed that she “encouraged her husband to drink so as to distract Scott from his ‘real’ work on his novel.  Scott’s other work was writing short stories which he sold to magazines for money. This “whoring”, as Fitzgerald, and subsequently Hemingway, called these sales, was a sore point in the authors’ friendship.

Fitzgerald's marriage was mixed—both destructive and constructive.  He would often draw upon his wife's intense and flamboyant personality in his writing, at times quoting direct passages from her letters and personal diaries in his work.  His tempestuous relationship with her would be reflected in many short stories and in his novels.

Their life together was a classic study of the American Dream in all its highs, lows, excesses, and joys. Highly lauded as a writer, Fitzgerald was often mired in debt because of his and Zelda's lavish lifestyle, living well beyond their means.  Although Fitzgerald's passion lay in writing novels, only his first novel sold well enough to support the opulent lifestyle that he and Zelda adopted as New York celebrities.  Because of this lifestyle, as well as the bills from Zelda's medical care, Fitzgerald was constantly in financial trouble and often required loans from his literary agent, Harold Ober, and his editor at Scribner's, Maxwell Perkins.

Fitzgerald began working on his fourth novel during the late 1920s but was sidetracked by financial difficulties that necessitated his writing commercial short stories, and by the mental illness that struck Zelda in 1930. Her emotional health would remain fragile for the rest of her life. His book was finally published in 1934 as Tender Is the Night. Critics who had waited nine years for the follow up to The Great Gatsby had mixed opinions about the novel, many feeling that Fitzgerald had not lived up to their expectations. The novel did not sell well upon publication, but like the Gatsby, its reputation has since risen significantly.

Although he reportedly found movie work degrading, Fitzgerald was once again in dire financial straits, and spent the second half of the 1930s in Hollywood, working on scripts for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (including some unfilmed work on Gone with the Wind), and his fifth and final novel, The Love of the Last Tycoon. Published posthumously as The Last Tycoon, it was based on the life of film executive Irving Thalberg.  Although Scott and Zelda became estranged, he continued to support her as she lived in mental institutions on the East Coast.  While in Hollywood, Scott would meet and fall in love with Sheilah Graham, a gossip columnist.  From 1939 until his death, Fitzgerald mocked himself as a Hollywood hack through the character of Pat Hobby in a sequence of 17 short stories, later collected as "The Pat Hobby Stories."

Fitzgerald had been an alcoholic since his college days, and became notorious during the 1920s for his extraordinarily heavy drinking, leaving him in poor health by the late 1930s.  Fitzgerald suffered two heart attacks in late 1940.  After the first, in Schwab's Drug Store, he was ordered by his doctor to avoid strenuous exertion.  He moved in with Sheilah Graham, who lived in a ground floor apartment.  (Scott’s apartment had required climbing two flights of stairs.)  On the night of December 20, 1940, Fitzgerald and Sheilah Graham attended a movie premiere at the Pantages Theater.  While exiting after the film, Fitzgerald experienced a dizzy spell and had trouble leaving the theater; upset, he said to Ms. Graham, "They think I am drunk, don't they?".

The following day, as Scott ate a candy bar and made notes in his newly arrived Princeton Alumni Weekly, Ms. Graham saw him jump from his armchair, grab the mantelpiece, gasp, and fall to the floor. Fitzgerald had died of a massive heart attack.

Among the attendants at a visitation held at a funeral home was Dorothy Parker, who reportedly cried and murmured "the poor son-of-a-bitch.”  His remains were shipped to Maryland, where his funeral was attended by twenty or thirty people.  Among the attendees were his only child Frances "Scottie" Fitzgerald and his editor, Maxwell Perkins.

Although at the time of his death, Fitzgerald’s writing had fallen completely out of favor and his books yielded almost no sales, his work would begin to be re-examined within five years of his death and he would eventually be acknowledged as one of the great writers of the twentieth century.

T. S. Eliot would write, in reference to Fitzgerald’s work: "It seems to me to be the first step that American fiction has taken since Henry James...".  J. D. Salinger expressed admiration of Fitzgerald, and his biographer Ian Hamilton wrote that Salinger even saw himself for some time as "Fitzgerald's successor." Richard Yates, a writer often compared to Fitzgerald, called The Great Gatsby "the most nourishing novel he ever read...a miracle of talent...a triumph of technique.”

In a New York Times editorial after his death, Fitzgerald was described as “….better than he knew, for in fact and in a literary sense he invented a generation…He interpreted them and even guided them, as in their middle years as they saw a noble freedom threatened with destruction."

Into the 21st century, millions of copies of his other work have been sold, and Gatsby, a constant best-seller, is required reading in many high school and college classes.