F. Scott Fitzgerald

Rough Draft The Jazz Age was the rave of the ‘20s and the main guy of it all was young Francis Scott Fitzgerald. In his life he experienced poverty, love, alcoholism, marriage, and economic loss. The story of F. Scott Fitzgerald and his greatest stories revealing his life is what the 1920s give us. F. Scott Fitzgerald was born in St. Paul, Minnesota into an Irish-Catholic family. His father, Edward Fitzgerald, was the owner of a furniture business in St. Paul. He soon then lost the job and tried working as a salesman for Proctor and Gamble. This new job had the Fitzgeralds moving between Buffalo and Syracuse in upstate New York. But in 1908 Edward lost his job when F. Scott Fitzgerald was 12 years old. Fitzgerald’s mother, Mary McQuillan, came from a family that had a small fortune from wholesale grocers. The Fitzgerald family lived off of McQuillan’s fortune, which helped send Fitzgerald to a Catholic Preparatory School, Newman High School, when he was 15. There he wrote, directed, and sometimes acted in his plays. Fitzgerald graduated from Newman in 1913 and attended Princeton University in New Jersey. There he wrote for the Princeton Magazine, a humor magazine, and the Nassau Literary Magazine. His writing soon got in the way of his academic work and got put on academic probation. But instead of tackling his grades and getting on top of his grades, he attended a dance where he met Ginevra King. They dated for quite some time and exchanged love letters, but Fitzgerald was later told by her father, “Poor boys don’t marry rich girls”, and so Ginevra ended the relationship. In 1917, Fitzgerald’s junior year, he was failing so many classes that he dropped out of school to join the army.
He was stationed at Camp Sheridan in Montgomery, Alabama and ranked as Lieutenant. While he was waiting to be stationed overseas he attended a dance where he saw a girl that “made everything inside him melt.” It was 17-year-old Zelda Sayre, the daughter of an Alabama