F. Scott Fitzgerald was born in St. Paul, Minnesota (1896). In April of 1920, at the age of 23, he published his first novel, This Side of Paradise, which made him an overnight sensation. A week later, he married his sweetheart, the belle of Montgomery, Alabama, Zelda Sayre, in St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York City. They were young and beautiful, and they were emblems of the Jazz Age, a name Fitzgerald himself had coined. Dorothy Parker said they looked "as though they had just stepped out of the sun." By the time the stock market crashed in 1929, Fitzgerald had started to crash too. His marriage was coming apart—Zelda had her first nervous breakdown in 1930. The changes that came with the Great Depression made F. Scott Fitzgerald seem like ancient history, along with everything else from the "Roaring Twenties." He had written about the lives of the rich, and now he remained associated with them and had fallen out of favor. His books, including The Great Gatsby (1925), did not sell well. In 1929, the Saturday Evening Post paid him $4,000 per story, but his total royalties on seven books that year were only $31.77.
In 1932, as the Great Depression was approaching its worst point, Fitzgerald was living in New York, a city that he loved. He said, "New York had all the iridescence of the beginning of the world." One evening he did what a lot of New Yorkers did that year—he went to the top of the newly built Empire State Building. He wrote about it in his essay "My Lost City": "Full of vaunting pride the New Yorker had climbed here and seen with dismay what he had never suspected, that the city was not the endless succession of canyons that he had supposed but that it had limits—from the tallest structure he saw for the first time that it faded out into the country on all sides, into an expanse of green and blue that alone was limitless. And with the awful realization that New York was a city after all and not a universe, the whole shining edifice that he had reared in his imagination came crashing to the ground."
After The Great Gatsby, it took Fitzgerald nine years to write his next novel, Tender is the Night. When it came out in 1934, it got a mixed reaction. In the spring of 1936 he was broke, looking for advances from Esquire magazine, but the editor told him he'd have to write something, anything, just to show the accountants. So Fitzgerald looked at his problems, his situation as a writer, and wrote a series of personal essays called "The Crack-Up," about what it was like to hit bottom. The essays were shocking; it was a time when people didn't air their own dirty laundry in public. Fitzgerald's writer friends—Hemingway, Maxwell Perkins, John Dos Passos—didn't understand why he would expose himself in that way. But "The Crack-Up" not only put Fitzgerald's name back out in front of the public, it also paved the way for a new confessional style in American writing. It begins: "Of course all life is a process of breaking down, but the blows that do the dramatic side of the work—the big sudden blows that come, or seem to come, from outside—the ones you remember and blame things on and, in moments of weakness, tell your friends about, don't show their effect all at once. There is another sort of blow that comes from within—that you don't feel until it's too late to do anything about it, until you realize with finality that in some regard you will never be as good a man again." Fitzgerald died in 1940 at the age of 44. That year, all of his books sold a total of 72 copies, with royalties of $13. Today, The Great Gatsby alone sells about 300,000 copies a year.
Either you think, or else others have to think for you and take power from you, pervert and discipline your natural tastes, civilize and sterilize you.
First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you.
Genius is the ability to put into effect what is on your mind.
In a real dark night of the soul, it is always three o'clock in the morning, day after day.
It is in the thirties that we want friends. In the forties we know they won't save us any more than love did.
It takes a genius to whine appealingly.
Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat.
No such thing as a man willing to be honest - that would be like a blind man willing to see.
Show me a hero and I'll write you a tragedy.
The rhythm of the weekend, with its birth, its planned gaieties, and its announced end, followed the rhythm of life and was a substitute for it.
The test of a first rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.
The world, as a rule, does not live on beaches and in country clubs.
Vitality shows in not only the ability to persist but the ability to start over.
You don't write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say.
All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.
That was always my experience-- a poor boy in a rich town; a poor boy in a rich boy's school; a poor boy in a rich man's club at Princeton ... . However, I have never been able to forgive the rich for being rich, and it has colored my entire life and works.
THE DIAMOND AS BIG AS THE RITZ by F. Scott Fitzgerald
http://www.sc.edu/fitzgerald/diamond/diamond.html
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