F Scott Fitzgerald This Side Of Paradise Book Analysis
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On March 26, 1920, Scribner’s publishing house released “This Side of Paradise,” the debut novel by author F. Scott Fitzgerald. The book sold out its first print run in only three days, vaulting the 23-year-old writer to literary stardom. Fitzgerald would spend spent the rest of the 1920s and 30s chronicling the excesses of the “Jazz Age” in short story collections and novels like “The Great Gatsby” and “Tender is the Night.” Along the way, he struggled with alcoholism and engaged in an emotionally fraught love affair with his wife, Zelda. Explore 10 surprising facts about the glamorous and tragic life of one of the 20th century’s most celebrated writers.
1. He was named after a famous ancestor.
Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was born in St. Paul Minnesota on September 24, 1896. He was named for Francis Scott Key, the lawyer and writer who penned the lyrics to “The Star Spangled Banner” during the War of 1812. The two were only distantly related—Key was a second cousin three times removed—but Fitzgerald was known to play up the family connection. While driving past a statue of Key in an alcoholic haze in 1934, he supposedly hopped from the car and hid in the bushes, yelling to a friend, “Don’t let Frank see me drunk!”
2. He was a poor student and an atrocious speller.…show more content… He was in debt and still struggling to remain sober, but he believed his work-in-progress showed considerable promise. “It will, at any rate, be nothing like anything else as I’m digging it out of myself like uranium,” he wrote to Zelda in November. Only a month later, Fitzgerald suffered a heart attack and died at the age of 44, leaving his comeback novel incomplete. A version of “The Love of the Last Tycoon” was published a year later, however, and even though the book was only half-finished, many critics hailed it as Fitzgerald’s most accomplished