OHIO CHAUTAUQUA Workshop examines F. Scott Fitzgerald's life

Ohio Chautauqua activities run through Saturday.
By DENISE DICK
VINDICATOR TRUMBULL STAFF
WARREN -- F. Scott Fitzgerald, one of the country's most well-known writers of the 1920s, died in relative obscurity, his work mostly forgotten.
His popularity was resurrected after his death. Debra Conner, a performer with "Ohio Chautauqua 2004: The Roaring Twenties," discussed at a workshop Thursday morning Fitzgerald's life and the self-examination he did in a series of three articles known as "The Crack Up," published late in his life.
Ohio Chautauqua, which combines education, music and theater, runs through Saturday.
Conner, of Parkersburg, W.Va., had portrayed Zelda Fitzgerald, the writer's wife, in the Wednesday evening program.
Sad endings
Fitzgerald, author of "The Great Gatsby," and "This Side of Paradise," died of a heart attack at 44, believing himself a failure. Zelda died eight years later in a fire at the mental institution where she had been hospitalized.
In the three articles published in Esquire in 1936, the writer wrote about what had gone wrong in his life and did a sort of self-examination, Conner said. He wrote the articles, which were criticized by some of his contemporaries, in a seedy hotel in Hendersonville, N.C.
"At the time he had $11 in the bank and he ate saltine crackers and potted meat," Conner said.
One of the aspects of his life absent in the articles, though, is his heavy drinking. Fitzgerald was said to sometimes drink as much as 30 beers and a quart of gin a day.
The couple lived lavishly and in the public eye. Conner likened the attention received by the pair to that focused on President Kennedy and his wife, Jacqueline, during the early 1960s.
"At one time, [newspaper publisher] William Randolph Hearst hired a reporter to follow them around," she said.
Small estate
Despite earning healthy sums for his short stories, Fitzgerald regarded that writing as hack work, believing novel writing the greater work. When he died, he left only a small estate to his wife and their daughter, Scottie.
When Scottie tried to sell her father's papers to Princeton University for less than $4,000, the university, where Fitzgerald had attended but didn't graduate, refused.
"They said they had 'no obligation to squander funds on a second-rate Midwestern hack who was lucky enough to have attended Princeton,'" Conner said.
Chautauqua work
Conner has been with Ohio Chautauqua for three years and started portraying figures from history in 1997, playing poet Emily Dickinson. She gives presentations at schools and libraries and is a poetry consultant with the Ohio Arts Council and teaches at a branch of West Virginia University.
denise_dick@vindy.com