Other Side of Fitzgerald

An artist's life is often filled with struggle and pain and etched in tragedy. In the case of novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald, during the last year of his life he made only $13 and change in royalties. He felt he was a failure. In a letter to his wife Zelda he wrote: "My God, I am a forgotten man." And when he died in 1940, only a handful of people attended his funeral.

The recognition Fitzgerald desired ultimately occurred after his death of a heart attack at the age of 44. His five novels--"This Side of Paradise," "The Beautiful and the Damned," "The Great Gatsby," "Tender Is the Night" and "The Last Tycoon"--have sold more than 10 million copies worldwide.

Fitzgerald's turbulent, tragic life is explored in the new "American Masters" documentary, "F. Scott Fitzgerald: Winter Dreams," premiering Sunday on PBS. Directed by Oscar-winning filmmaker DeWitt Sage, "Winter Dreams" explores the writer's life and literature through his own words. The literary biography features excerpts from private letters and scrapbooks, photos from family albums, interviews with Fitzgerald's friends, scholars and novelist E.L. Doctorow. Amy Irving reads excerpts from Fitzgerald's novels and short stories; Campbell Scott provides Fitzgerald's voice and Laura Linney is the voice of his mentally disturbed wife, Zelda.

Susan Lacy, creator and executive producer of the "American Masters" series, had long wanted to do a film on Fitzgerald. "The thing most people know about Fitzgerald is that he was a drunk and he wrote 'The Great Gatsby,' " Lacy says. "The truth is that he was an incredibly serious writer. He wrote every day he got up. I think his lifestyle in a way in the public mind overshadowed his recognition as a really important writer. We wanted to bring that to the fore."

"For all of his lack of confidence and his mortification over his behavior while he was drunk, one thing [Fitzgerald] knew about himself--he was a writer," Sage adds. Fitzgerald's work and life were about the American dream, Sage says. "He had a particular ear for the American dream," he adds. "He just had his finger on the pulse. He also wrote about American class better than almost anyone. American class did exist and it does exist, but we don't like to talk about it."

In the case of Fitzgerald, he was attracted to the upper class, but was also able to see through it "objectively as an outsider," Sage says. "He was both inside and outside at the same time. He wasn't about glitz and glamour, but he happened to be attracted to that."