Getting your questions ready
Getting your questions ready
Beat the crowd
10 questions No timer
60 free F. Scott Fitzgerald trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This F. Scott Fitzgerald trivia quiz covers the life behind The Great Gatsby, from a middle-class Catholic childhood in St Paul, Minnesota to a forgotten death in Hollywood at 44. The easy questions cover the four novels, the wife, the city he was born in, the term he gave the 1920s and the friend who edited his unfinished last book. From there it moves through the biography: Princeton, the Chicago heiress who turned him down, the training camp commanded by Dwight Eisenhower, the 120 rejection slips, the telegram from Scribner's, the Biltmore handstands and the Riviera aviator. The harder end covers the bootlegger neighbour who inspired Gatsby, the working title Trimalchio, the play that emptied a theatre, the boiled watches at a Hollywood party, the $80 royalty year, the Coca-Cola habit, the sole screenplay credit and the line Dorothy Parker murmured at his coffin. Nothing here asks about the plot of the novels; the focus is the man. Every answer was checked against Fitzgerald's encyclopaedia entry before publishing and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. If you want the book itself, our Great Gatsby quiz is the natural next stop, and our Ernest Hemingway quiz covers his most famous friend.
30 of 60 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In which city was F. Scott Fitzgerald born in 1896?
Saint Paul, Minnesota
His childhood home on Summit Terrace became a National Historic Landmark in 1971, though he thought it an architectural monstrosity.
Q 02Fitzgerald was named after which distant cousin?
Francis Scott Key, who wrote 'The Star-Spangled Banner'
Another cousin, Mary Surratt, was hanged in 1865 for conspiring to assassinate Lincoln, a connection he preferred not to mention.
Q 03Which company employed Fitzgerald's father as a salesman in Buffalo before firing him in 1908?
Procter & Gamble
His father's wicker-furniture business had already failed; his mother's inheritance kept the family middle-class.
Q 04Which university did Fitzgerald attend, and drop out of in 1917?
Princeton
He was one of the few Catholics in the student body and wrote for the Triangle Club, the Tiger and the Nassau Lit.
Q 05Which future literary critic befriended Fitzgerald at university and edited his unfinished last novel?
Edmund Wilson
Wilson published The Last Tycoon within a year of Fitzgerald's death and bundled it with Gatsby, restarting critical interest.
Q 06Which Chicago debutante, Fitzgerald's first love, was the model for Daisy Buchanan?
Ginevra King
He met her when he was 18 and she 16; her father purportedly told him 'poor boys shouldn't think of marrying rich girls'.
Q 07Under whose command was Lieutenant Fitzgerald stationed at Fort Leavenworth, an officer he reportedly disliked?
Captain Dwight D. Eisenhower
He hoped to die in combat in Europe and dashed off a 120,000-word novel in three months before he could be shipped out.
Q 08What was the title of the manuscript Fitzgerald wrote in the army, later reworked into his first novel?
The Romantic Egotist
Scribner's rejected it, but reader Max Perkins praised the writing and urged him to revise and resubmit.
Q 09Fitzgerald met Zelda Sayre while stationed at Camp Sheridan near which city?
Montgomery, Alabama
She was a 17-year-old belle whose grandfather had been a Confederate senator.
Q 10For which Iowa business did Fitzgerald write the 1919 slogan 'We keep you clean in Muscatine'?
A laundry
It earned him a small raise at the Barron Collier agency, but he still lived in near-poverty in a single Manhattan room.
Q 11How much did Fitzgerald get for 'Babes in the Woods', his only story sold during his 1919 New York struggle?
$30
He had been rejected more than 120 times and took to carrying a revolver while contemplating suicide.
Q 12From the window ledge of which New York institution did Fitzgerald publicly threaten to jump in 1919?
The Yale Club
Two women had rejected him in succession, his stories would not sell and he could not afford new clothes.
Q 13What manual job did Fitzgerald take in St Paul while revising his first novel in 1919?
Repairing train car roofs
When Scribner's acceptance telegram arrived he ran down the street flagging down cars to tell strangers.
Q 21Fitzgerald's 1923 play The Vegetable flopped so badly that what happened during the second act?
The bored audience walked out
Fitzgerald asked the star whether he intended to finish the show, then fled to the nearest bar.
Q 22Which bootlegging Long Island neighbour who said 'old sport' helped inspire Jay Gatsby?
Max Gerlach
Gerlach fostered myths about himself, including a claimed relation to the German Kaiser.
Q 23What was the working title of The Great Gatsby, an allusion to the Satyricon?
Trimalchio
Q 14What was Fitzgerald's debut novel, published in March 1920?
This Side of Paradise
It sold about 40,000 copies in its first year and Mencken called it the best American novel of the year.
Q 15Where did Scott and Zelda marry on 3 April 1920?
St Patrick's Cathedral, New York
He later claimed neither still loved the other at the time; the early years were 'more akin to a friendship'.
Q 16Which New York hotel asked the newlywed Fitzgeralds to leave after Scott's lobby handstands and Zelda's banister slides?
The Biltmore
They moved two blocks to the Commodore and spent half an hour spinning in its revolving door.
Q 17Which writer first encountered the Fitzgeralds riding on the roof of a taxi?
Dorothy Parker
'They did both look as though they had just stepped out of the sun', she recalled.
Q 18Which term for the 1920s did Fitzgerald popularise, using it in the title of a 1922 story collection?
The Jazz Age
He described the era as racing along 'served by great filling stations full of money'.
Q 19What was the name of the Fitzgeralds' only child, born in October 1921?
Frances Scott 'Scottie' Fitzgerald
Zelda's rambling as she came round from the anaesthetic gave Daisy Buchanan her 'beautiful little fool' line.
Q 20What is Fitzgerald's second novel, about a young artist and his wife going bankrupt while partying?
The Beautiful and Damned
He based Anthony Patch on himself and Gloria Patch on what he called Zelda's 'chill-mindedness and selfishness'.
Trimalchio is the vulgar, feast-throwing freedman of Petronius's Latin novel.
Q 24On the Riviera in 1924, Zelda became infatuated with Édouard Jozan, who was what?
A French naval aviator
After six weeks she asked for a divorce; Jozan later insisted the whole affair was invented by two people 'in need of drama'.
Q 25Roughly how many copies did The Great Gatsby sell in its first year, a commercial disappointment?
Fewer than 23,000
By 1960 it was selling 100,000 copies a year, helped by 123,000 free Armed Services Editions handed to troops in the war.
Q 26How much did Fitzgerald turn down for the serial rights to The Great Gatsby, so as not to delay the book?
$10,000
Willa Cather, T. S. Eliot and Edith Wharton praised the novel on its release in April 1925.
Q 27What is the famous dust-jacket painting on The Great Gatsby called?
Celestial Eyes
Francis Cugat's floating eyes over a carnival skyline are among the most recognised covers in American publishing.
Q 28In which month and year did Fitzgerald first meet Ernest Hemingway in Paris?
May 1925
Hemingway later recalled that Fitzgerald became his most loyal friend in that early period.
Q 29In which memoir did Hemingway describe Zelda Fitzgerald as 'insane'?
A Moveable Feast
He also called Fitzgerald's rewriting of stories for magazine sales 'whoring', a sore point between them.
Q 30At a 1927 Hollywood party, the Fitzgeralds boiled guests' watches in what?
Tomato sauce
They had asked for the expensive timepieces, retreated to the kitchen and cooked them.