F Scott Fitzgerald Research Paper

F. Scott Fitzgerald was one of the most unrecognized authors of the 20th century. He wrote many novels throughout his lifetime, many of which had terrible critic reviews. Although his fame was withering away from him, he still continued to write, but unfortunately, was never credited for his later work until after his death. F. Scott Fitzgerald chose to write about the Roaring Twenties since he lived during that time and was a witness to the era of partying, drinking, and flappers. Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was born September 24, 1896 in St. Paul, Minnesota. He was the son of Mary McQuillan and Edward Fitzgerald. He grew up wealthy and privileged after growing up on his mother’s family’s inheritance. He attended St. Paul Academy and was

While in Alabama, he met and fell in love with the woman who would soon become his wife, Zelda Sayre. Zelda was the daughter of an Alabama Supreme Court judge and was 18 years old when she met Fitzgerald. Once the war ended and Fitzgerald was discharged, Zelda moved to New York City with him. Then, in 1920, a week after his first novel, This Side of Paradise, was published, they married. They had one child, a daughter named Frances Scott Fitzgerald, in 1921. His first novel, This Side of Paradise, had the setting of Princeton University, the college Fitzgerald attended. Upon getting married and publishing his first novel, Zelda and Fitzgerald moved to Paris, France, where Fitzgerald soon became an alcoholic and a partier. The following novel he published, The Beautiful and the Damned, in 1922 made Fitzgerald a great chronicler of that era (F. Scott Fitzgerald Biography). The 1920s brought much more than fame to Fitzgerald’s

The society differences during this era had a major impact on Fitzgerald and his writing. In this era, there was a dramatic social and political change following World War 1 (The Roaring Twenties A&E). Americans had more money to spend on consumer products, which they never had before. The technology of the era was something the world had never seen before; radios, movie theaters, automobiles. The first automobile to hit the scene was Henry Ford’s Model-T, built by an assembly line. Although the era seemed full of prosperity, it had one major drawback, the Prohibition. The prohibition was the illegal sale of alcohol with more than a 0.5% alcohol content. Due to the prohibition, many Americans began to go to speakeasies for their alcohol (The Roaring Twenties Gilder). Since the prohibition made most alcoholic drinks illegal, they soon became cheaper and easier to