Chapter 1 - Life

Summary

“The history of my life is the history of the struggle between an overwhelming urge to write and a combination of circumstances bent on keeping me from it,” Fitzgerald once admitted. Few writers have ever penned as apt an epitaph. From an early age – the quotation appeared in the Saturday Evening Post on September 18, 1920, a week before its author turned twenty-four – he recognized that literary accomplishment would require a dextrous balancing of the events inspiring his fiction and the hard work of actually producing it. The ledger in which he assessed his annual output reveals how poorly he felt he managed the task: June 1925 was a month of “1000 parties and no work,” while 1928–9 was written off as “no real progress in any way,” and March 1936 was notable only for “work going badly.” Such rebukes were not merely a private habit; Fitzgerald frequently criticized himself in print, mourning what “I might have been and done” were his talents not “lost, spent, gone, dissipated, unrecapturable.” Unfortunately, because he was so open about his perceived incapacities, after 1925 he became as famous for the “combination of circumstances” hampering his prolificacy as for the classics he did complete. Retellings of his life story often sensationalize these impediments – his precarious finances, marital instability, alcoholism, and Zelda's mental illness – forgetting that Fitzgerald was productive both in spite and because of them.