Frances Scott Fitzgerald Biography

Frances Scott "Scottie" Fitzgerald (October 26, 1921 - June 18, 1986) was the only child of novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald. She was a writer, a journalist (for The Washington Post, The New Yorker, and The Northern Virginia Sun, among others), and a prominent member of the Democratic Party. She was inducted into the Alabama Women's Hall of Fame in 1992.

Early life

Fitzgerald was born in Saint Paul, Minnesota. Upon her birth, her mother supposedly remarked that she hoped Scottie would be a "beautiful little fool," which Daisy Buchanan also says in The Great Gatsby, one of F. Scott Fitzgerald's most popular novels. Scottie Fitzgerald spent her childhood moving around from place to place with her world-traveler parents - including, among others, time spent living in Paris and Antibes in France, and for five years in a beach house her father rented on the coast of the Chesapeake Bay near Towson, a suburb of Baltimore in Maryland.

In 1936, Fitzgerald began attending the Ethel Walker School, a boarding school in Connecticut, but was expelled for sneaking away from campus to hitchhike to Yale. She attended Vassar and graduated in 1942. Hoping that she would not repeat his academic failures, her father wrote letters to her urging her to take rigorous classes and work hard.

Personal life and career

Fitzgerald and her first husband, Samuel Jackson "Jack" Lanahan, a prominent Washington lawyer, were popular hosts in Washington in the 1950s and 1960s. During this period, she wrote musical comedies about the Washington social scene that were performed annually to benefit the Multiple Sclerosis Society of Washington. Her show Onward and Upward with the Arts was considered for a Broadway run by producer David Merrick.

Fitzgerald had four children with her first husband: Thomas Addison Lanahan; Eleanor Ann Lanahan; Samuel Jackson Lanahan, Jr.; and Cecilia Scott Lanahan. Their eldest child, Thomas, known as "Tim", committed suicide at age 27. Eleanor "Bobbie" Lanahan, an artist and writer, wrote a biography of her mother, Scottie, The Daughter of ... The Life of Frances Scott Fitzgerald Lanahan Smith (1995). Fitzgerald's second marriage, to Grove Smith, ended in divorce in 1979.

Later life and death

Scottie Fitzgerald lived the last years of her life in her mother Zelda's hometown of Montgomery, Alabama, and died there at age 64 in 1986. She is buried near her parents in Rockville, Maryland.