Date of Award
Summer 7-16-2015
Degree Type
Capstone
Degree Name
Master of Arts in Professional Writing (MAPW)
Department
English
Committee Chair/First Advisor
Dr. Sergio Figueiredo
Co-Chair
Dr. Margaret B Walters
Abstract
“People who live entirely in the fertility of their imaginations are fascinating, brilliant, and often charming, but they should be sat next to at dinner parties, not lived with,” wrote Frances Scott Fitzgerald Smith, affectionately known to her close friends and family as “Scottie,” in the 1965 introduction to a collection of her father, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s, letters to her. With twenty-five years of hindsight chasing her down a highway of family legacy, Scottie offered a brief glimpse into her childhood—a subject she avoided discussing with anyone, including her own children. Even rarer, according to her daughter, Eleanor Lanahan, were the few moments Scottie allowed herself to feel the immensity of a childhood lived as “the daughter of F. Scott Fitzgerald” and to recall the painful discord of her schizophrenic mother and controlling, insecure father. She was born in to a world of imagination, excess, and privilege that often cast her as a supporting character in the tumultuous tabloid legacy of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald.