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He was far too busy with extracurricular affairs to be a good student. His big effort for three years was working on the Triangle Club shows. He never graduated. But he knew what he wanted to become. Said he to his fellow student Edmund Wilson: "I want to be one of the greatest writers who have ever lived, don't you?"
"World's Worst." The drinking had begun. During a college vacation at home he barged into St. John's Episcopal church during a Christmas service, staggered up to the pulpit and casually said to the rector: "Don't mind me, go on with the sermon." It was the first of many Fitzgerald toots that made the papers. From Princeton, in 1917, he went into the Army, never got overseas, but left a reputation at Fort Leavenworth as "the world's worst second lieutenant." In the Army he wrote his first novel, which was rejected by Scribner. And while at camp in Alabama he met his future wife and drinking partner, Zelda Sayre, "just 18, a beautiful girl with marvelous golden hair and that air of innocent assurance attractive Southern girls have."
What Zelda wanted was fun and money, lots of both, and she wouldn't marry Scott until he had the money to pay for the fun. This Side of Paradise reassured them both. The barely disguised story of Fitzgerald's Princeton experience, it made its author famous overnight. The magazines, chiefly the Satevepost, bought his stories at top rates as fast as he could turn them out. Yet This Side of Paradise was far from a great novel. It was crude, snobbish, awkward and frequently juvenile. Critic Harry Hansen exclaimed: "My, how that boy Fitzgerald can write!" But an abler critic, Fitzgerald's old Princeton friend, Edmund Wilson, wrote: "It is one of the most illiterate books of any merit ever published .. . full of bogus ideas and faked literary references . . ." Read today, the book's account of youthful behavior seems almost a burlesque.
Novelist John Marquand once wished "that one's own children behaved as sensibly and nicely."
"They Beat Me." For the Fitzgeralds, as for many of their contemporaries, the big toot was on—what Scott called "the greatest, gaudiest spree in history." In New York, Scott fought with waiters, and Zelda danced on dinner tables. They went wading in public fountains and tried to undress at the Scandals. No matter how much he wrote, Fitzgerald was continually in debt. By 1924, he was living at a $36,000-a-year clip. Two years earlier, he had published The Beautiful and Damned, the story of a rich idler's moral collapse. It had the same faults as Paradise, and most sound critics, Wilson included, gave it the raps it deserved. But his short stories, some of them excellent, sold as well as ever.