Babylon Revisited | Author Biography

F. Scott Fitzgerald was born in September, 1896, in St. Paul, Minnesota, the son of an entrepreneur and salesman and his wife, a distant cousin of Francis Scott Key, author of ''The Star-Spangled Banner,'' for whom he was named. He displayed an interest in writing early on and in 1911, he moved to New Jersey to attend the Newman College Preparatory School. Two years later he entered Princeton University, and in 1917 he received a commission as a lieutenant in the U.S. Army. Hoping to eventually see combat in World War I Fitzgerald was assigned to Camp Sheridan in Montgomery, Alabama, where he met Zelda Sayre, the daughter of an Alabama supreme court justice. He was smitten by Zelda's charm, but was forced to turn his attention fully toward earning a living as a writer. Fitzgerald sold his first short story in 1919, and in September of that year Scribner's accepted his first novel, This Side of Paradise, for publication. It immediately became a financial and critical success, and Fitzgerald was suddenly a literary figure of national prominence.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
F. Scott Fitzgerald

Having achieved success as a writer, Fitzgerald resumed his courtship of Zelda Sayre, and they married in 1920. Their only child, a daughter named Scottie, was born in 1921. That same year, the Fitzgeralds undertook the first of several extended trips to Europe. On one such trip in 1925, Fitzgerald met aspiring novelist Ernest Hemingway whose career and work he championed until Hemingway's own fame and Fitzgerald's troubled personal life weakened their friendship. Fitzgerald's second novel, The Beautiful and Damned, was published to mixed critical reviews in 1922. Three years later, he published The Great Gatsby, his most popular and admired work, though it received several disappointing reviews upon publication, which discouraged him deeply. Although Fitzgerald had begun drinking heavily at Princeton, he became severely alcoholic in the mid 1920s, and his drinking, combined with his expensive tastes and Zelda's mental instability, began to seriously affect his health, finances, and productivity. After Gatsby in 1925, for example, he did not publish another novel until Tender Is the Night in 1934. The bulk of his income came from advances sent by his legendary editor at Scribner's, Maxwell Perkins, and from the sale of his short stories to high-paying magazines such as the Saturday Evening Post and Esquire. Between 1919 and 1939 he sold 160 stories, primarily to pay his bills and thus buy him small windows of time to work on his novels.

Desperate for income to support his lifestyle and psychologically taxed by Zelda's treatment at mental sanitariums, Fitzgerald moved to Hollywood in 1937 to work as a screenwriter for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) studios. Although he saw only one of his screenplays produced as a finished film, he continued to work on film treatments, short stories, and his last major work, the unfinished novel The Last Tycoon, until he died of a heart attack in December of 1940. In a posthumous collection of confessional Esquire pieces, The Crack-Up, Fitzgerald succinctly offered his own harsh epitaph for his last years: "Then I was drunk for many years, and then I died.''

Many autobiographical details shaped the content of ‘‘Babylon Revisited.’’ Like Charlie Wale's daughter Honoria, Fitzgerald's only child, Scottie (who was also nicknamed ‘‘Pie’’), was about nine years old at the time of the story's composition, and, like Charlie, Fitzgerald was confronted with the problem of Scottie's custody after Zelda's mental instability began to accelerate in 1930. Also like Charlie, Fitzgerald was also a prosperous Irish-American expatriate, and, as the evocative description of 1930 Paris in the story suggests, Fitzgerald was also intimately familiar with such Parisian landmarks as the Hotel Ritz, Josephine Baker's nude revue, and the club scene and restaurants of Paris nightlife. Most centrally, however, Fitzgerald, like Charlie, also wrestled painfully with his alcoholism, and his skillful evocation of the self-delusions and strategies Charlie adopts to convince himself of his rehabilitation were drawn directly from Fitzgerald's lifelong struggle with heavy drinking. Charlie's pre-1929 Paris escapades, alluded to throughout "Babylon Revisited''—squandered money, bitter marital disputes, and alcohol-fueled decline—are sharply autobiographical. Fitzgerald biographer Matthew Bruccoli has also pointed out that the baleful Marion Peters, Charlie's sister-in-law, was "obviously" based on Fitzgerald's own sister-in-law, Zelda's older sister Rosalind Smith, who questioned Fitzgerald's ability to raise Scottie properly.