F Scott Fitzgerald's Downfall

F. Scott Fitzgerald was one of the greatest writers in American history. His writing was breathtakingly lyrical and honest, sharing his innermost fears of the destructive nature of the Jazz Age. Though he grew to be a famous author, he was of modest beginnings and spent his youth chasing the illusive American dream. This made his rise to fame more inspiring and his inevitable undoing that much more tragic. In his pursuit of the American dream, Fitzgerald experienced both glamour and heartbreak, yet his vanity, his fear of failure, and his alcoholism overshadowed his success and led to his eventual demise. Fitzgerald’s American dream revolved around living an acclaimed life, and it was this vanity that led to his destruction. As a child, Fitzgerald

This fed his inferiority complex and his obsession with fame, money, and success. His need for recognition fuelled his talent as he “turned to writing as a way of courting popularity” (Beautiful and Damned 30). His success as a writer led to the life of glamour that he craved, but also to a life of partying and debt. He became “enchanted by and caught up in the carnival of the 1920s” (Broken Dreams 43). Greatly influenced by the Jazz Age, he relished in his success through drinking and extravagant parties. His vanity left little room for reason and even less for a savings account as he “set out to enjoy the fruits of early success, spending extravagantly and giving recklessly big tips” (Beautiful and Damned 32). He compensated for what he lacked as a child, and split time between mansions in New York and the French Riviera. He was

He celebrated his success and and grieved his failures with alcohol. His drinking binges with his beloved Zelda were infamous and discredited his professionalism. He cared a great deal for his work, but “[his] and Zelda’s own alcoholic high jinks further reinforced the public image of Fitzgerald as a literary playboy” (Broken Dreams 42). His vanity also played a role in his drunken antics as it intensified his attention seeking behaviour. While drunk at a party, he “threw fruit at a guest, attacked a friend, and smashed glasses” (Beautiful and Damned 34). Any success he had in the 1920s was overshadowed by his drunken behaviour. The public no longer took him seriously, and this disappointment led him to drink more. Fitzgerald could not cope with heartbreak, which would prove detrimental to him as his life was full of it. His life was a hard one; Zelda’s affair, her illness, and his own dissatisfaction as an author weighed heavily on him. He was aware of this flaw as he writes to Zelda one summer that her breakdown was due to “‘[her] megalomaniacal selfishness and my insane indulgence to drink…we ruined ourselves’” (qtd. in Beautiful and Damned 34). Even sensing his own destruction, he couldn’t stop as is typical with addiction. By thirty-eight, Fitzgerald was a tired and depressed alcoholic “whose writing skills were on the wane” (Beautiful and Damned 35). His reliance on alcohol to avoid pain caused him more as