Greater Than Gatsby: The Struggles and Travails of F. Scott Fitzgerald

Question

Jared Levy 2023

It was while he was an undergraduate at Princeton that he met his first love, Ginevra King. A socialite and heiress from Chicago, many consider Ginevra to be his inspiration for the iconic character of Daisy Buchanan.

“Zelda [Fitzgerald’s wife] was the most important woman in his life,” says James L. West, a former professor of English at Pennsylvania State University. “But Ginevra was extremely important to his writing. He based character after character on her throughout his career, and yet we’ve known almost nothing of her.”

Despite their love for each other, it was not meant to be. King’s family intervened, feeling that Fitzgerald was not a suitable partner for their daughter. He was told by Ginevra’s father, “Poor boys don’t marry rich girls,” and turned away.

“I think Fitzgerald’s experience with Ginevra King… was just devastating,” says Richard Lehan, a former professor of English at UCLA. “He admired the rich, and on the other hand he distrusted them… and so much of his writing takes the position of someone who desperately wants to be a part of the rich but who is somehow cast outside of them.”

In 1918, Fitzgerald was stationed at Camp Sheridan in Montgomery, Alabama. It was there that he fell in love with Zelda Sayre, a young woman from a prominent Southern family. Infatuated with Zelda, he redrafted a character in his unpublished manuscript The Romantic Egotist to resemble her, telling her that “the heroine does resemble you in more ways than four.”

In fact, according to novelist Jay McInerney, “Scott was the hero, Amory Blaine. Zelda was the heroine, Rosalind. The classic flapper girl: flirting, kissing, viewing life lightly, saying ‘Damn!’ without a blush.” The Romantic Egotist became This Side of Paradise, and was published in 1920. It rose quickly to bestseller status, making Fitzgerald a literary sensation at the age of 24.

“It is no coincidence that within weeks of the publication of his first book, This Side of Paradise, he is married to Zelda Sayre,” says Berg. “So, this book was more than just launching a literary career, it was launching a marriage. It was launching the Fitzgeralds as we know them, the Fitzgeralds of legend.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald's relationship with Ginevra…

inspired him to join the army.

kept him from achieving his goals.

became an important part of his writing.

was the subject of his first successful novel.

Answer 1

F. Scott Fitzgerald's relationship with Ginevra King became an important part of his writing.