After three months as a junior, he withdrew because of ill health and poor grades. Following nine months of rustication and recuperation at home in St. Paul, Minnesota, he re-entered as a beginning junior in the fall of 1916. He managed to complete that academic year and one month of his senior year before withdrawing again to enter Officers Training in October 1917. The fact that he was never graduated failed to expunge and indeed probably enhanced his golden memories of Princeton, Cottage Club, Princeton football, the Triangle Club, The Nassau Lit, and the Tiger, to say nothing of the look and feel of Prospect Street in all seasons, and the mossy spires and gargoyles of the neo-Gothic campus.
Apart from Princeton, two great forces guided his tragically abbreviated life. One was writing, which enthralled him in childhood, took up many college hours, supported and harassed him in maturity, and continued to engage his devotion until his dying day. The other was his romance with Zelda Sayre, a southern belle from Montgomery, Alabama, whom he coveted, courted, and at last married, sharing with her a characteristically hectic life in America and Europe during their great heyday of the 1920s. It was a manner of life that his chief biographer, Arthur Mizener has called ``at once representative and dramatic, at moments a charmed and beautiful success to which he and Zelda were brilliantly equal, and at moments disastrous beyond the invention of the most macabre imagination.''
This Side of Paradise, which Scribner's published March 26, 1920, and advertised in the Daily Princetonian as a ``Story about a Princeton Man,'' shows Fitzgerald making all he could of his years at Princeton. Dean Gauss once wrote of Fitzgerald that he had ``a truly Apollonian profile like the head on some Greek medallion.'' The same might have been written of Amory Blaine, Fitzgerald's handsome and insouciant hero, who invents his way through various love affairs and much bad poetry and indulges his awakening brain with high intellectual bull sessions. However banal the novel may seem today, it set Fitzgerald off and running, and he became a regular contributor of short stories to The Smart Set, The Saturday Evening Post, and Scribner's Magazine. Selections from these appeared in Flappers and Philosophers and Tales of the Jazz Age, which helped to stamp Fitzgerald forever as a chief spokesman for the roaring twenties, while his second novel, The Beautiful and Damned, accurately summarized in its title if not in its substance the present and future course of his life with Zelda. There was also a satirical play, The Vegetable: or From President to Postman, published in 1923. Two further short-story collections, All the Sad Young Men and Taps at Reveille, appeared in 1926 and 1935.
Fitzgerald's best work in fiction owed little or nothing to Princeton. The Great Gatsby (1925), generally regarded as his finest novel, eschewed the Princeton scene in favor of Long Island and New York City. Tender Is the Night (1934) borrowed its title from Keats and its locale and characters from Fitzgerald's experiences on the French Riviera in the middle 1920s. Behind the stories of Gatsby's longing for Daisy Buchanan and Dick Diver's for the beautiful Nicole, one can discern some of the tragic implications of Fitzgerald's love for Zelda, the gradual advance of whose mental illness darkened the last years of their marriage. From time to time he overcame his overdrinking and worked with some success as filmwriter in Hollywood, where he gathered the material for his final though unfinished novel, The Last Tycoon. This was posthumously published in 1941 under the editorship of Edmund Wilson '16, with whom Fitzgerald had collaborated on ``The Evil Eye'' for the Triangle Club twenty-five years earlier, and whom he always revered as his ``intellectual conscience.'' Besides Wilson, the best critics of Fitzgerald's work have nearly all been Princetonians, with biographies by Arthur Mizener '30, and Andrew Turnbull '42, and critical studies by Henry Dan Piper '39, and Robert Sklar '58. Turnbull also edited a volume of Fitzgerald's letters.
The eternal note of promise which everyone found in Fitzgerald's early work was well summarized by his classmate, John Peale Bishop '17, in a requiem called ``The Hours.''
``No promise such as yours when like the spring
You came, colors of jonquils in your hair,
Inspired as the wind, when woods are bare
and every silence is about to sing.''
The tragic circumstances of his life, and they were many, did not prevent his partial fulfillment of that promise because his heart was always in his best writing. Although he sometimes uttered harsh words about his Alma Mater, its image stayed undimmed until the end. When his heart ceased to beat, indeed at the very moment of his death far away in the city of Hollywood, he was scribbling notes in the margin of his copy of the Alumni Weekly beside an article about the Princeton football team.
The Manuscripts Division of the Library contains Fitzgerald's papers, which were given to the University by his daughter Mrs. C. Grove Smith in 1946.
Carlos Baker