Camino Island

F. Scott Fitzgerald is an American novelist, short story writer, and essayist. He is most famous for his novel The Great Gatsby (1925), which is widely considered one of the greatest American novels. Born in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1896, Fitzgerald entered Princeton at the age of 16, but dropped out to enlist in the Army during World War I. He began his writing career in 1920 at the age of 24, with the publication of This Side of Paradise, an immediate success that established him as the voice of the Jazz Age generation. He followed it with The Beautiful and the Damned in 1922, which only brought him more success.

Fitzgerald worked on and published his third novel, The Great Gatsby (1925), while he, his wife Zelda, and their daughter lived in Europe. Although it was received well critically, sales were disappointing, and the decline in Fitzgerald’s popularity began. Tender Is the Night, his fourth novel, was not financially successful, and its publication in 1934, during the height of the Depression, caused many to dismiss Fitzgerald as belonging to an era that had passed. Fitzgerald died before his fifth novel, The Last Tycoon, was finished, but it was completed and published posthumously in 1941 by writer Edmund Wilson.

Much of Fitzgerald’s work is highly autobiographical, and This Side of Paradise touches on his history at Princeton University, as well as his relationships with Zelda Sayre and others. After enlisting in the Army, Fitzgerald was posted in Montgomery, Alabama, where he met Zelda. They married in 1920 and together led a famously flamboyant life. They were known for a lifestyle and attitude that captured the spirit of post-World War I America, known as the Jazz Age, during the 1920s.

In Camino Island, Bruce relates a story that an ex-girlfriend wrote, in which Zelda Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway have an affair. He offers this reimagined history to Mercer as a possible plot for her new novel, prompting a discussion about fictionalizing historical characters. In fact, the Fitzgeralds were in contact with Hemingway, who was one of many American expatriates who lived and traveled in Europe post-World War I, known as the “Lost Generation.”

While Fitzgerald and Zelda lived in Europe, they spent quite a bit of time in Paris, becoming friends with Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, and other members of the Lost Generation. As Bruce tells Mercer, “There was a story, one that was never verified and is probably not true, that Ernest Hemingway had a quick romance with Zelda Fitzgerald when they were living in Paris” (219). However, according to reports, Hemingway and Zelda hated each other. In 1930, Zelda was diagnosed with schizophrenia, and she and her family returned to the United States, where she was committed to a psychiatric hospital. Fitzgerald’s popularity declined, and his alcohol addiction deeply affected his health. He died in 1940, at the age of 44, and Zelda died in a fire in 1948, at the age of 47.