F. Scott Fitzgerald
Dead at 44 in the time honoured tradition of the “tortured artist”
When F. Scott Fitzgerald suffered his second heart attack of 1942 and died three weeks later at the offensively young age of 44, The New York Times ran an obituary lamenting his wasted life.
He came to epitomise, they said, “all the sad young men” of the post-war generation.
They said he’d barely produced any work.
This Side of Paradise was published in 1921 — “that decade of skyscrapers and short skirts” — but “only six others came between it and his last, which, not without irony, he called Taps at Reveille.”
“The promise of his brilliant career was never fulfilled.”
Why do we always do this?
Putting people on a plinth, then taking pot shots at them when we think they don’t deliver.
Showing a bit of early promise has been the kiss of death for many a career.
It happens in all the professions — I’ve met many a burnt out banker in my time — but in the arts, the predicament really does come with the territory.
It is the trope of the tortured artist.
