Brain Snacks: Tasty Tidbits of Knowledge
Fitzgerald was the second cousin three times removed of Francis Scott Key, author of The Star-Spangled Banner.16
Always a natty dresser, Fitzgerald had his Army uniform tailored by Brooks Brothers. He dressed many of his characters in attire by the same clothier.17
In 1921 he wrote the short story "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," which in 2008 was made into a movie starring . . . some guy. We can't remember his name.18
Ernest Hemingway was paranoid that Fitzgerald (and pretty much everyone else) was gay, writing of their time in Paris, "he was cynical and funny and very jolly and charming and endearing, even if you were careful about anyone becoming endearing."19
In 1932 Zelda Fitzgerald wrote an autobiographical novel entitled Save Me the Waltz. F. Scott Fitzgerald was furious—because he thought it stole material from his upcoming novel.20
The final line of The Great Gatsby—"So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past—is also the epitaph on Fitzgerald's grave in Rockville, Maryland.21
Zelda Fitzgerald died in a fire at Highland Mental Hospital in North Carolina in 1948.22