Fitzgerald's Childhood In The Great Gatsby

1. Fitzgerald’s boyhood

Much of Fitzgerald’s boyhood was spent in Buffalo and Syracuse, New York

2. American Expatriates

The American expatriates were family friends to Fitzgerald in Europe. They were Hemingway, Stein, Pound and many others.

3. Fitzgerald’s life

Fitzgerald was born in an average rank society in St. Paul, Minnesota although he spent most of his boyhood in Buffalo and Syracuse, New York. Being born in a less fortunate family, his aunt had to support his education. He was enrolled in a Catholic boarding school in New Jersey in 1911 after which he furthered his studies at the Princeton University two years later. He got involved in extracurricular literary and dramatic activities, where he developed his extensive writing skills.

In 1919 at Montgomery, Alabama, he met, courted and eventually married Zelda Sayre. At the age of twenty-four, in 1920, Fitzgerald revised and published his first best-selling novel This Side of Paradise which made him prosperous and popular(Baym and Levine, 2013). Their only-begotten child was born to them in the year 1921.Basically, in the twenties, Fitzgerald became a prolific writer and wrote three novels and 178 short stories, which were well paying.

During the thirties, he engaged in partying and drinking which made him bankrupt.

A panic that he had lost something precious. As though unbelievable that the dream was over, he covers his eyes with the palm of his hands and tries to remember the picture of the lapping waters at Lake Erminie, the moonlight veranda, the gingham on the golf links, the dry sun and the gold color of Judy Jone’s soft neck(Baym and Levine, 2013). He also remembers her damp mouth as a result of his kisses, her sorrowful eyes and her freshness like new fine linen in the morning. However those things never existed anymore. He was crying because all the incidents including the grief that he could have borne in the dream, would never come