Childhood and literary apprenticeship (1896-1917)
As with many writers, the first circumstance that Fitzgerald had to overcome washis immediate family. As the New Yorkerpolitely put it in 1926, "His success was agreat surprise to the home circle... [for] the Fitzgeralds were not what is knownas literary people.4 Although Fitzgerald claimed that his father co-authoredan unpublished novel, Edward Fitzgerald (1853-1931) served him mainly asa symbol of failure. When his only son was born on September 24, 1896, thegenteel furniture manufacturer presided over an unprofitable wicker works inSt Paul, Minnesota. The firms closing two years later, coupled with Edwardssubsequent undistinguished career as a wholesale grocery salesman, ledFitzgerald to dismiss his father alternately as a "moron" and, more generously,as representative of that "good heart that came from another America" -that is, the Victorian age that modernity had rendered obsolete.5 The defin-ing event of Fitzgeralds childhood was Edwards 1908 firing from Procter andGamble, for whom the family had relocated to Buffalo and Syracuse, New York,during his infancy. Memories of that humiliation would resurface whenever theson doubted his own merits. "He had lost his essential drive, his immaculate-ness of purpose," Fitzgerald reflected. "He was a failure the rest of his days" (InHis Own Time 297). Defeatism was not merely a personal flaw; it was indicativeof his fathers "tired old stock," which had "very little left of vitality and mentalenergy" (Apprentice Fiction 178). Edwards matrilineal lineage could be tracedto a founding pair of Maryland families, the Scotts and the Keys, which includedFitzgeralds namesake, Francis Scott Key, author of "The Star-Spangled Ban-ner." Yet the Civil War superannuated the legacy of Southern nobility in whichEdward was reared, leading Fitzgerald to ascribe his mediocrity to historicalupheaval. "I wonder how deep the Civil War was in [him]," he wrote in 1940,recalling tales of Edwards childhood days ferrying Confederate spies acrossthe Potomac. "What a sense of honor and duty... How lost [his generation]seemed in the changing world.., struggling to keep their children in the hautebourgeoisie when their like were sinking into obscur[ity] .
