Hot or Not?

F. Scott Fitzgerald

By Caroline Ray

Ah yes, the age old question: Is F. Scott Fitzgerald hot or not? I came here excited to spread pure Fitzgerald hate, unfortunately something terrible has happened: I changed my mind. Don’t get me wrong, Fitzgerald is still only lukewarm at best, but I cannot truthfully come here and tell you that he was evil.

Fitzgerald was born in St. Paul Minnesota and would grow up to become the author of The Great Gatsby–a specific type of torture that every American highschooler now has to endure. He moved to New York to pursue writing; however his early life was unsuccessful, both in his professional pursuits and failed proposals to Zelda Sayre who rejected him for being poor and untalented. After the successful publication of his first novel, Zelda finally agreed to marry him. By this time Fitzgerald’s enamour had cooled, remarking close to their engagement that he “wouldn’t care if she died.”

Thus begins the most dubious sector of his life, his marriage. Throughout their years together, the two had a competitive and often contentious relationship. Both pursued writing and both “borrowed” each other’s work. In the beginning Zelda appears to have taken the “sharing of ideas” in jest and even published a review of “The Beautiful and the Damned” in the New York Tribune saying, “In fact, Mr. Fitzgerald—I believe that is how he spells his name—seems to believe that plagiarism begins at home.”

While it would be satisfying to blame Zelda’s chronic struggles with mental illness and eventual death on the couple’s unstable relationship and Fitzgerald’s spiral into chronic alcoholism, the truth is more complicated and perhaps much sadder. Zelda Fitzerald died in a fire, sedated and locked inside Highland Hospital. Her medical treatment has been criticized, and she existed in an era of rampant psychiatric abuse which has preserved in varying forms into the contemporary. So, no, we cannot make a villain out of Fitzgerald just as we cannot rewrite history into simplicity.