Beautiful and Damned (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) Read Free Page B

produce magnificent writing.
    From the beginning, Fitzgerald felt that he was destined to be a writer. He was born in 1896 in St. Paul, Minnesota, to Edward Fitzgerald and his wife, Mollie, a middle-class Irish-American Catholic couple. Just three months before he was born, Scott’s parents had lost their two young daughters; although Mollie never talked about the dead children, the loss endowed her son with a heightened sensitivity to the past and to the fragile nature of life.
    In an effort to quell her grief, Mollie spoiled and indulged her young son, and Scott quickly developed into a precocious and perceptive child. While his mother was an outspoken and ambitious woman, his father was a shy, retiring man. A southern gentleman and a distant relative of Francis Scott Key—the author of “The Star Spangled Banner” and Scott’s namesake—Edward told tales of the old South and the Civil War that fascinated Scott and invested him with romantic ideals at a young age.
    When Scott was still a boy, Edward moved the family to Buffalo, New York, where he started a new business. The business failed, and then Edward was fired from a position as a salesman at Procter and Gamble. Fitzgerald later remembered that his father was never the same. While he had left in the morning a confident, capable person, “He came home that evening, an old man, a completely broken man. He had lost his essential drive.... He was a failure the rest of his days” (quoted in Some Sort of Epic Grandeur, p. 20). The family returned to St. Paul, moved in with Mollie’s wealthy mother, and lived off a substantial inheritance from Mollie’s father, who had been a well-to-do grocer and businessman.
    Although her husband had failed, Mollie was determined that her son would succeed. She dressed Scott in the finest clothes, enrolled him in dance school and the St. Paul Academy, and made sure that he was introduced to the best families in town. Scott was an articulate, attractive, and sophisticated young man who knew very well how to sweet-talk the girls and please the parents. He fit right into St. Paul, where he joined in the rounds of sleigh rides, picnics, and dances. But like Basil Lee—his fictional alter ego in the “Basil and Josephine” short stories—Scott often had a hard time reining in his intelligence and his “fresh” know-it-all manner. He once corrected his teacher, admonishing her that Mexico City wasn’t the capital of Central America, and often endeavored to tell other children how they could improve themselves to become more popular. When he was twelve, the school magazine asked if someone would find a way to shut up Scott or poison him please! (Turnbull, Scott Fitzgerald, p. 21). A naturally dramatic child and somewhat of an exhibitionist, Scott was interested in the theater and would often, along with his friends, act out plays he had seen. He also displayed an early gift for writing, and had his literary debut at thirteen when his first piece was published in the school’s magazine, St. Paul Academy Now and Then. Scott could hardly contain himself and hung around after classes, excitedly asking students if they had read it.
    When he was fifteen, Scott’s mother sent him to the Newman School, a Catholic boarding school in Hackensack, New Jersey, in order to improve his chances to attend a top university. Scott showed off his vast knowledge in class, bossed people around on the football field, boasted a few too many times, and quickly became persona non grata at the school. He encapsulated his position there wonderfully in the short story “The Freshest Boy”: “He had, indeed, become the scapegoat, the immediate villain, the sponge which absorbed all malice and irritability abroad” (The Basil and Josephine Stories, p. 61). While it may have been painful at the time, his pariah status helped foster Scott’s development as an artist, in that it allowed him to channel most of his energy into writing short stories and plays.