'Gatsby' Author Fitzgerald Rests In A D.C. Suburb
The grave of Great Gatsby author F. Scott Fitzgerald lies
next to a major thoroughfare for commuters between Rockville, Md., and
Washington, D.C.
F. Scott Fitzgerald was born in St. Paul, Minn.; he's
associated with that city, as well with Paris, the Riviera, and New York. But
the author of The Great Gatsby is buried in suburban Maryland, next to a
highway between stripmalls and train tracks.
Fitzgerald's grave lies in Rockville, Md., and every
weekday, thousands of Washington, D.C., commuters drive past his grave, not
realizing the celebrated author is buried nearby.
Scott Fitzgerald, as he was known, was the prime chronicler
of the Jazz Age of the Roaring '20s. He wrote of insouciant youth, flappers and
millionaires — a postwar generation of young Americans skeptical of its elders
and eager to embrace a prosperous age.
With his wife Zelda, Fitzgerald became an emblem of the era,
living out many of its excesses. His first novel, This Side of Paradise, begun
while he was an undergraduate at Princeton University, earned acclaim among
critics and instantly brought the author wealth and notoriety.
He would follow that with The Beautiful and the Damned and
The Great Gatsby, one of the most celebrated books of American literature.
Gatsby was followed by two other novels and 180 short stories.
But Fitzgerald's heavy drinking took a toll on his health
and wealth, as well as his critical reputation. He died at age 44 of a heart
attack, while writing screenplays in Hollywood.
After the Great Depression, readers and publishers were no
longer interested in more tales of the Jazz Age. Fitzgerald was hard-pressed to
find his novels on bookstore shelves. At the time of his death, he considered
himself a failure.
Fitzgerald's family had deep roots in Maryland. He was named
for distant relative Francis Scott Key, author of "The Star-Spangled
Banner."
When Fitzgerald died unexpectedly before Christmas in 1940,
his wife, Zelda, and his lawyer arranged for the writer's body to be sent from
California to Maryland, to be buried next to his father in a family plot at St.
Mary's Catholic Church.
Writer Maureen Corrigan has visited Fitzgerald's grave
often. The book critic for WHYY's Fresh Air is also a professor of literature
at Georgetown University, who comes to Rockville to get her car fixed at a
garage near the cemetery.
Corrigan says she always finds fresh gifts and tokens next
to the grave.
"The two things that I've seen almost consistently at
the gravesite," she says, "are small bottles of alcohol, that you
would get on an airplane, and spare change."
Corrigan is at work on a book about how Americans read The
Great Gatsby. She finds eerie similarities in Fitzgerald's burial and that of
his most famous character.
Fitzgerald was initially refused burial at St. Mary's, on
the grounds that he wasn't a "practicing" Catholic at his death.
Instead, after an impersonal service, he was interred at another cemetery
nearby.
"It was raining," says Corrigan, "and there
were about 25 people, so he got more than Gatsby. But the Protestant minister
who performed the service didn't know who he was. So when you read Gatsby's
burial, you really do get a chill, because it almost seems to anticipate what
would happen to the author."
And as for a grave marker for this landmark American author?
"I doubt there was one," says his granddaughter,
Eleanor Lanahan. "He was totally broke when he died. I don't think anyone
had much money to spend on a gravestone."
Lanahan's mother, Scottie, was Scott and Zelda's only child.
In family pictures, Scottie looks likes a Third Musketeer to her dashing
parents.
Eventually, Zelda's mental illness led to her being
institutionalized in Maryland; Scott and Scottie moved nearby. Granddaughter
Eleanor Lanahan says Zelda wrote that her husband "always thought he'd be
going back to the rolling hills of Maryland."
Indeed, Scott wrote a friend, "I wouldn't mind a bit if
Zelda and I could snuggle up under a stone in some old graveyard here."
Seven years later, Zelda did join him in that cemetery,
after she died in a fire at an asylum. Their graves were virtually forgotten
for almost three decades, until a local women's group contacted Scottie about
erecting a plaque at her parents' grave.
Instead, the group and Scottie approached St. Mary's Church
again, 35 years after Fitzgerald had been turned away. The church agreed to
allow Scott and Zelda to be moved into the family plot.
And this time there was a headstone, chosen by Scottie, with
the famous last words of The Great Gatsby inscribed on it: "So we beat on,
boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."
Corrigan reads that last line as a challenge to Americans.
"What those last lines are asking us to think about is
whether or not it's a worthless effort to try to get ahead, run faster, be
stronger, in light of the fact that ultimately we all die and are pulled back
into the past, or whether that's what makes us great, that we do try."
In 1985, Scottie Fitzgerald was buried with her parents in
the family plot at St. Mary's churchyard. Her grave is at their feet.