F.SCOTT FITZGERALD: THE LOST AMERICAN GENERATION

Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald

The Grandma is in Vienna. She arrived on The Orient Express and today she has been visiting the bookshops looking for a special book: The Gran Gastby. After walking across the downtown of the Austrian capital, she has found the book and she wants to talk to you about its author, F.Scott Fitzgerald.

Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald (September 24, 1896–December 21, 1940) was an American novelist and short story writer, whose works illustrate the Jazz Age. While he achieved limited success in his lifetime, he is now widely regarded as one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century. Fitzgerald is considered a member of the Lost Generation of the 1920s. He finished four novels: This Side of Paradise, The Beautiful and Damned, The Great Gatsby, and Tender is the Night. A fifth, unfinished novel, The Love of the Last Tycoon, was published posthumously. Fitzgerald also wrote numerous short stories, many of which treat themes of youth and promise, and age and despair.

More information: History.com

Born in 1896 in Saint Paul, Minnesota, to an upper-middle-class family, Fitzgerald was named after his famous second cousin, three times removed on his father's side, Francis Scott Key, but was always known as plain Scott Fitzgerald. He was also named after his deceased sister, Louise Scott Fitzgerald, one of two sisters who died shortly before his birth. Well, three months before I was born, he wrote as an adult, my mother lost her other two children... I think I started then to be a writer.

His father was Edward Fitzgerald, of Irish and English ancestry, who had moved to St. Paul from Maryland after the Civil War and his mother was Mary McQuillan Fitzgerald, the daughter of an Irish immigrant who had made his fortune in the wholesale grocery business. Fitzgerald was the first cousin once removed of Mary Surratt, hanged in 1865 for conspiring to assassinate Abraham Lincoln.

Fitzgerald died of a heart attack. Fitzgerald's body was moved to the Pierce Brothers Mortuary.

More information: Open Culture

At the time of his death, the Church declined the family's request that Fitzgerald, a non-practicing Catholic celebrated for his risqué and provocative Jazz Age writings, be buried in the family plot in the Roman Catholic Saint Mary's Cemetery. Fitzgerald was originally buried in Rockville Union Cemetery. 

Fitzgerald died before he could complete The Love of the Last Tycoon. His manuscript, which included extensive notes for the unwritten part of the novel's story, was edited by his friend, the literary critic Edmund Wilson, and published in 1941 as The Last Tycoon.

 After all, life hasn't much to offer except youth, and I suppose for older people, the love of youth in others. 

F. Scott Fitzgerald