Mount Vernon Literary Tour: F. Scott Fitzgerald

Be Here Stories

The Mount Vernon Literary Tour is created by The Baltimore National Heritage Area (BNHA), which promotes, preserves, and enhances Baltimore's historic and cultural legacy and natural resources for current and future generations. A site-by-site walking tour of this and other destinations is available at www.https://bnha.visit.zone/ Located at Stafford Hotel, 718 Washington Place Transcript: Fitzgerald (b. 1896, d. 1940) is the second “Francis Scott” on this tour. Proud to be named in honor of Key, a distant relative, the celebrated author had many local connections. He lived here at the Stafford Hotel in 1936 during a five-year stay in Baltimore while his wife Zelda underwent treatment for mental illness. It was Fitzgerald who labeled the 1920s the “Jazz Age,” and he himself embodied the era he called “an age of art and an age of excess,” writing novels like This Side of Paradise and The Great Gatsby while living the party life. It all crashed in the 1930s with Zelda’s illness and his own alcoholism. During his Baltimore years, he explored the underside of his lifestyle in works like Tender is the Night and “The Crack-Up.” Despite his downward spiral, Fitzgerald loved Baltimore, writing, “I belong here, where everything is civilized and gay and rotted and polite.”