F. Scott Fitzgerald

Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald (1896–1940) was named for the author of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” a distant relation on his father’s side. Born in St. Paul, Minnesota, to a father of genteel Southern stock and a mother whose Irish Catholic family had made money in the wholesale grocery business, Fitzgerald grew up acutely conscious of social class — the central subject of nearly everything he wrote. He attended Princeton (1913–1917) without graduating, served as an Army officer during the First World War without seeing combat, and in 1920, at twenty-three, published This Side of Paradise and married Zelda Sayre in the same dazzling week.

Life and Career

The 1920s made Fitzgerald famous. This Side of Paradise (1920) was the first novel to capture the mood of the post-war generation — its restlessness, its cynicism, its determination to live intensely — and it made Fitzgerald the spokesman of the Jazz Age, a term he essentially coined. He and Zelda became the decade’s most photographed literary couple, living extravagantly in New York, Great Neck, and the Riviera on a combination of novel advances, short story sales to the Saturday Evening Post, and borrowings against future work.

The Beautiful and Damned (1922) followed, an uneven novel of dissolution that reflected the Fitzgeralds’ own reckless spending and drinking. Then came The Great Gatsby (1925), written largely in a rented villa near Saint-Raphaël on the Côte d’Azur. Fitzgerald considered it his finest work — and posterity has agreed — but initial sales were disappointing: roughly 20,000 copies, well below his publisher’s expectations. The reviews were mixed; many critics preferred his earlier, livelier work. Fitzgerald never recovered, commercially or psychologically, from the mismatch between his ambition and Gatsby’s reception.

The late 1920s and 1930s were years of increasing difficulty. Zelda’s first mental breakdown came in 1930; she was diagnosed with schizophrenia and spent much of the next decade in and out of clinics. Fitzgerald’s drinking intensified. Tender Is the Night (1934), a novel about the disintegration of an American psychiatrist on the Riviera, was nine years in the making and sold poorly. By 1936 Fitzgerald was writing confessional essays — “The Crack-Up” series in Esquire — that advertised his collapse to the literary world.

He moved to Hollywood in 1937, working as a screenwriter for MGM (he received credit on only one film, Three Comrades). He began The Last Tycoon, a novel about a Hollywood producer modelled on Irving Thalberg. He died of a heart attack on 21 December 1940 in the apartment of his companion, the gossip columnist Sheilah Graham, in Hollywood. He was forty-four. The Last Tycoon was published unfinished in 1941, edited by Edmund Wilson.

Major Works and Themes

Fitzgerald’s fiction circles a single obsessive theme: the American dream and its corruption. His protagonists are men of romantic imagination who pursue an ideal — wealth, status, the perfect woman — that proves hollow or destructive on attainment. The prose style is lyrical, precise, and shot through with a melancholy awareness that the beautiful is always passing.

The Great Gatsby (1925) is his undisputed masterpiece and one of the most analysed novels in the English language. Jay Gatsby, a self-invented millionaire, throws enormous parties at his Long Island mansion in an attempt to win back Daisy Buchanan, the woman he loved before the war. The novel is narrated by Nick Carraway, whose unreliable perspective — part admiration, part moral recoil — gives the story its characteristic ambiguity. Gatsby’s green light, the eyes of Doctor T.J. Eckleburg, and the last page’s meditation on “the orgastic future” are among the most discussed images in American literature.

Tender Is the Night (1934) is the more autobiographical novel — Dick Diver’s trajectory from brilliant young psychiatrist to alcoholic ruin mirrors Fitzgerald’s own decline — and is regarded by some critics as the richer, more emotionally complex work. Its commercial failure devastated Fitzgerald, and it was not widely reappraised until the 1950s.

The short stories are an essential part of the Fitzgerald canon. “Babylon Revisited,” “The Rich Boy,” “Winter Dreams,” “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz,” and “Bernice Bobs Her Hair” are masterpieces of the form. Fitzgerald published 164 stories, mostly in the Saturday Evening Post, and considered many of them hack work written for money; the best are anything but.

Critical Reception and Legacy

Fitzgerald died believing himself a failure. His books were out of print; his income had dwindled to a fraction of its 1920s peak. The revival began almost immediately after his death. Edmund Wilson’s edition of The Last Tycoon (1941) and Arthur Mizener’s biography The Far Side of Paradise (1951) rekindled interest. By the 1960s, The Great Gatsby was a fixture of high school and university curricula, and it has remained the most widely assigned novel in American education ever since.

Today Fitzgerald’s reputation rests securely alongside Hemingway and Faulkner in the first rank of American modernism. His influence is pervasive — in the novels of John Cheever, Richard Yates, Jay McInerney, Donna Tartt, and many others. Baz Luhrmann’s 2013 film adaptation of Gatsby introduced the novel to a new generation, pushing sales past 500,000 copies annually.

Key Works

• This Side of Paradise (1920)
• Flappers and Philosophers (1920) — stories
• The Beautiful and Damned (1922)
• Tales of the Jazz Age (1922) — stories
• The Great Gatsby (1925)
• All the Sad Young Men (1926) — stories
• Tender Is the Night (1934)
• Taps at Reveille (1935) — stories
• The Last Tycoon (1941, posthumous, unfinished)
• The Crack-Up (1945, posthumous) — essays

Collecting Fitzgerald

Fitzgerald is the most intensely collected American novelist of the Jazz Age, and The Great Gatsby is arguably the single most sought-after twentieth-century American first edition. The collecting market is deep, well-documented, and driven by both institutional libraries and private collectors worldwide.

The Great Gatsby (1925, Scribner’s) was published in a first printing of approximately 20,870 copies. The first edition is identified by the Scribner’s seal on the copyright page and “First Printing” on the verso. The dust jacket, designed by Francis Cugat, is one of the most famous in book collecting: a pair of disembodied eyes and lips floating above a carnival-lit skyline. The jacket was completed before the novel and so perfectly captured its spirit that Fitzgerald wrote to his editor Maxwell Perkins, “I’ve written it into the book.” Fine copies in the Cugat jacket are among the most expensive modern first editions: recent sales have ranged from $150,000 to over $400,000 depending on condition. Without jacket, the green cloth first edition is a $5,000–$15,000 book.

This Side of Paradise (1920, Scribner’s) was Fitzgerald’s first novel and first success. First editions in the dark green cloth binding with the Scribner’s seal bring $3,000–$8,000 without jacket; fine copies in the rare first-issue jacket (price of $1.75, reviews of other Scribner’s titles on rear panel) can exceed $30,000.

Tender Is the Night (1934, Scribner’s) is more available — the Depression-era print run was larger relative to demand — and fine copies in jacket typically trade between $5,000 and $15,000. The Beautiful and Damned (1922, Scribner’s) in jacket is a $4,000–$10,000 book.

Fitzgerald was a willing inscriber, and signed copies surface with some regularity. He inscribed enthusiastically to friends, fellow writers, and social acquaintances — the dedicatory style ranges from brief signatures to elaborate inscriptions with drawings and in-jokes. Association copies to Hemingway, Edmund Wilson, Maxwell Perkins, Ring Lardner, and Zelda are museum-quality items that rarely appear at auction. Typed letters signed are available in the $3,000–$10,000 range; holograph letters command more, particularly those discussing his work or his relationship with Zelda.

The short story collections — Flappers and Philosophers (1920), Tales of the Jazz Age (1922), All the Sad Young Men (1926), and Taps at Reveille (1935) — are undervalued relative to the novels and represent strong collecting opportunities. Fine copies in jacket range from $1,000 to $5,000.