September 24, 1896 ––
… Writers aren’t exactly people… they’re a whole bunch of people trying to be one person..
On this date in 1896, a young woman in Minnesota gave birth to a depressive, witty young alcoholic named Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald. He did poorly in school and went off to train for war in 1918. While stationed at Camp Sheridan in Alabama, he fell in love with Zelda Sayre, the mentally unstable daughter of an Alabama Supreme Court justice.
The war ended before Fitzgerald could be sent overseas and shot, so he went to New York to become rich and famous. He became neither, and Zelda broke off their engagement. Fitzgerald then returned to Minnesota. A year later, he became a famous writer. He moved to Connecticut, Zelda married him, and together they became drunken celebrity wrecks.
They spent much of their time in Europe, until Zelda went mad, dying in a fire and Fitzgerald drank himself to death.
Fitzgerald is best remembered for noting that the rich were different – though Hemingway kept telling him to act like a man, strip down, grease himself up, and get into a boxing ring.
Oh yeah, he also wrote several books.
… I must hold in balance the sense of the futility of effort and the sense of the necessity to struggle; the conviction of the inevitability of failure and still the determination to ‘succeed’-and, more than these, the contradiction between the dead hand of the past and the high intentions of the future. If I could do this through the common ills-domestic, professional and personal-then the ego would continue as an arrow shot from nothingness to nothingness with such force that only gravity would bring it to earth at last.
And so it goes
The Haus of Dcaligari 