The only child of
Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald
was born October 26, 1921
Two months later, Scott
wrote the following letter
to his literary agent:
When the baby was much older, her full name became
Frances Scott "Scottie" Fitzgerald Lanahan Smith.
But less than two months after her 19th birthday...
Dated December 15, 1940...Scottie received
what would be her last letter from her father.
He advised his daughter to "be sweet
to your mother at Xmas..."
In the same paragraph, Scott's last letter
to his daughter included more advice:
You have got two beautiful bad examples
of parents. Just do everything we didn't
and you will be perfectly safe.
He ended that paragraph with this sentence:
The insane are always mere guests on earth,
eternal strangers carrying around broken
decalogues that they cannot read.
F. Scott Fitzgerald died on December 21, 1940.
He was forty-four years old.
For more than forty-four years after that,
Scottie lived a perfectly respectable, fully
responsible and eminently educated life.
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Footnotes
The first quoted letter is from As Ever, Scott Fitz.
The second quoted letter is from A Life In Letters: F. Scott Fitzgerald.
The next Fitzgerald page is here.
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