Winter Dreams | Author Biography
F. Scott Fitzgerald was born on September 24, 1896, in St. Paul, Minnesota, to Edward and Mary McQuillan Fitzgerald. From his father, a businessman, he inherited his predisposition for alcoholism and his romantic imagination; from his mother, an heiress, he developed an attraction to wealth, all of which would become major themes in his work. At a young age, Fitzgerald expressed an interest and a talent in writing as he began to write stories that echoed ones from popular magazines. The school magazines at St. Paul Academy and Newman School, where he attended school, published several of his short stories. Every summer from 1911 to 1914 he wrote plays that neighborhood children performed for charity groups.
He entered Princeton in 1913, where he wrote short stories, poetry, plays, and book reviews for the Nassau Literary Magazine and the Princeton Tiger, and wrote plays for the school's shows. His concentration on writing took him away from his studies, and as a result, he left in January, 1916. He returned a year later but never finished his degree. When World War I broke out, he was appointed second lieutenant in the army, although he never served overseas. During his stint in the army, he completed a draft of a novel, The Romantic Egotist. Scribner's publishers did not accept the manuscript, but they suggested that he continue working on it.
While stationed in Montgomery, Alabama, he met Zelda Sayre, daughter of an Alabama Supreme Court judge. He soon fell in love with the beautiful but troubled Zelda and married her. Their life together would come to epitomize the excitement and tragedy of the Jazz Age, as often fictionalized in his work.
After his discharge in 1919, he returned to St. Paul determined to be, as he told a friend, one of the greatest writers who has ever lived. He began his literary career with a rewrite of The Romantic Egotist, renaming it as This Side of Paradise, which was accepted by Scribner's. The novel was well received by critics and the public, who applauded its accurate portrait of American society in the 1920s. In December 1922 Metropolitan Magazine published ‘‘Winter Dreams,’’ which was later included in his collection of short stories, All The Sad Young Men in 1926. The collection was a popular and critical success, cementing Fitzgerald's reputation as a chronicler of the destructive nature of the American dream.
Fitzgerald's subsequent novels and short stories were well received, but his and Zelda's extravagant lifestyle kept him constantly in debt. Eventually, Zelda would be hospitalized for mental illness and Fitzgerald would suffer a breakdown. At the end of his career, with few copies of his works being sold, he turned to script writing in Hollywood, where he worked on, among others, the script for Gone with the Wind. He died there of a heart attack, probably brought on by his alcoholism, on December 21, 1940.
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