December 21, 1940: F. Scott Fitzgerald dies of a heart attack in Los Angeles, where he had gone to write for movies. He was 44 years old.
Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald had been born on September 24, 1896 in St. Paul, Minnesota. He became known as part of the "Lost Generation" writers, disillusioned by their experiences in World War I, and willing to critique American society where mainstream writers went out of their way to praise it.
Although he wrote many short stories, including The Curious Case of Benjamin Button in 1922, he only published 5 novels. This Side of Paradise was published in 1920, and was a runaway success. The Beautiful and the Damned came in 1922, and was considerably less successful. The Great Gatsby was published in 1925, and did well at the time, but not well enough that people then would have considered it an all-time classic.
Fitzgerald stuck to writing short stories for a while, then went back to novels with Tender Is the Night in 1934. It didn't sell well. He moved west, thinking writing screenplays would make him a lot of money. He was right. But he had begun working on another novel, The Last Tycoon. It was unfinished at the time of his death. Edmund Wilson, a writer and literary critic who was a close friend, finished it and published it.
As with many creative people, death was a great career move for Fitzgerald. He could no longer disappoint people with weak new product, and what little he left behind left people wondering what more he could have done. His books became popular among U.S. soldiers in World War II. By the 1950s, the nostalgia wave for the "Roaring Twenties" was underway, and Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda Sayre, the archetypal "flapper," became icons. The other 4 novels are afterthoughts: It is The Great Gatsby that everyone remembers.
He was played by Gregory Peck in Beloved Infidel in 1959, Richard Chamberlain in Last of the Belles (which focused on Zelda) in 1974, Jason Miller in F. Scott Fitzgerald in Hollywood in 1976, Timothy Hutton in Zelda in 1993, Malcolm Gets in Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle (about the Algonquin Round Table, of which he was a semi-member) in 1994, Jeremy Irons in Last Call in 2002, Tom Hiddleston in Midnight in Paris in 2011, David Hoflin in Z: The Beginning of Everything in 2016, and Guy Pearce in Genius in 2016.
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December 21, 1940 was a Saturday. Baseball was out of season. College football was between the regular season and the bowls. The NFL season was over. And there was no NBA yet.
But there were 2 games played in the NHL. The New York Americans played the Toronto Maple Leafs to a tie, 2-2 at Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto. And the Montreal Canadiens beat the Boston Bruins, 3-1 at the Boston Garden.