F. Scott Fitzgerald Trivia
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57 free F. Scott Fitzgerald trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Sep 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 57 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In which city was F. Scott Fitzgerald born in 1896?
Saint Paul, Minnesota
Saint Paul, Minnesota is where he rewrote his first novel in 1919, in his parents' Summit Avenue row house, which became a National Historic Landmark in 1971.
Q 02Fitzgerald was named after which distant cousin?
Francis Scott Key, who wrote 'The Star-Spangled Banner'
Francis Scott Key, who wrote 'The Star-Spangled Banner', was his second cousin three times removed; after his father lost his sales job, the family lived on his mother's inheritance.
Q 03Which Brad Pitt film was adapted from a Fitzgerald story?
Benjamin Button
Benjamin Button began as a Fitzgerald story in which the hero, aged 18 but looking about 50, is thrown out of Yale as a lunatic.
Q 04Which university did Fitzgerald attend, and drop out of in 1917?
Princeton
Princeton is where he spent most of his first year writing a Triangle Club operetta and flunked several subjects; on academic probation, he left to join the Army.
Q 05Which future literary critic befriended Fitzgerald at university and edited his unfinished last novel?
Edmund Wilson
Edmund Wilson's edition led reviewers to see what might have been: some critics judged the fragment would have been Fitzgerald's best novel.
Q 06Which wealthy Lake Forest socialite, whom Fitzgerald courted as a student, was a model for Daisy Buchanan?
Ginevra King
Ginevra King's family discouraged the match, and one of them (accounts differ as to whom) remarked that poor boys shouldn't think of marrying rich girls.
Q 07Under whose command was Lieutenant Fitzgerald stationed at Fort Leavenworth during World War I?
Captain Dwight D. Eisenhower
Captain Dwight D. Eisenhower commanded him there; convinced he would die in the war, Fitzgerald spent three months of weekends writing a 120,000-word novel.
Q 08What was the title of the manuscript Fitzgerald wrote in the army, later reworked into his first novel?
The Romantic Egotist
The Romantic Egotist was rejected by Scribner's, but the rejection letter praised its originality and asked him to resubmit it once revised.
Q 09Fitzgerald met Zelda Sayre while stationed at Camp Sheridan near which city?
Montgomery, Alabama
Montgomery, Alabama was Zelda's hometown; she at first turned down his proposal because of his poor financial prospects.
Q 10For which Iowa business did Fitzgerald write the 1919 slogan 'We keep you clean in Muscatine'?
A laundry
A laundry got the slogan, which earned him a raise at the Barron Collier agency, though his heart was not in writing cards for streetcars.
Q 11How much was Fitzgerald paid for the only story he sold during his 1919 spell in New York?
$30
$30 was all it earned him, and he soon quit New York in disgust and went home to rewrite his novel.
Q 12In The Great Gatsby, in which Long Island village does Gatsby have his mansion?
West Egg
West Egg is where Nick, renting next door, first sees Gatsby alone on his lawn, stretching his arms toward a green light across the bay.
Q 13What manual job did Fitzgerald take in 1919, shortly before Scribner's accepted his first novel?
Repairing train car roofs
Repairing train car roofs was the job he quit the day Scribner's acceptance arrived, running along the streets stopping cars to tell friends.
Q 21At the disastrous 1923 tryout of Fitzgerald's play The Vegetable, what happened during the second act?
Audience members walked out
Audience members walked out, and the flop left him so deep in debt that he spent months writing magazine stories to pay it off.
Q 22Which bootlegging Long Island neighbour who said 'old sport' helped inspire Jay Gatsby?
Max Gerlach
Max Gerlach was only part of the mix: Fitzgerald said Gatsby 'started as one man I knew and then changed into myself'.
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
This Side of Paradise made the 24-year-old famous almost overnight, but the playboy image that came with it hindered his standing as a serious writer.
Q 15Where did Scott and Zelda marry on 3 April 1920?
St Patrick's Cathedral, New York
St Patrick's Cathedral, New York hosted the simple ceremony; Scribner's acceptance of his first novel had finally persuaded Zelda to marry him.
Q 16In front of which New York hotel did Scott and Zelda famously jump into a fountain?
The Plaza
The Plaza's fountain was only one of their stunts; Zelda also once spent half an hour spinning in the Commodore Hotel's revolving door.
Q 17Who played Jay Gatsby in Baz Luhrmann's 2013 film of The Great Gatsby?
Leonardo DiCaprio
Leonardo DiCaprio starred for Luhrmann, and Jay-Z executive-produced the film's soundtrack.
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
Frances Scott 'Scottie' Fitzgerald's birth drew Zelda's hope that the baby would be 'a beautiful little fool', a line Scott is said to have given Daisy Buchanan.
Q 20Which Fitzgerald book chronicles a hard-partying New York couple's slide into dissipation?
The Beautiful and Damned
The Beautiful and Damned lifted some of Zelda's own words, and in a newspaper review she joked that he 'seems to believe that plagiarism begins at home'.
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
A French naval aviator romanced her while Scott wrote Gatsby; whether the affair went further is unknown, but she asked Scott for a divorce.
Q 25Why did Fitzgerald turn down $10,000 to serialize Gatsby?
It would delay the book
Serializing it would delay the book, and though Eliot, Wharton and Cather praised the novel, sales fell far short of his hopes.
Q 26What is the famous dust-jacket painting on The Great Gatsby called?
Celestial Eyes
Celestial Eyes was painted before the manuscript was finished, and Fitzgerald told his editor to hold on to the jacket because he had 'written it into the book'.
Q 27Which Hemingway short story slighted Fitzgerald by name?
The Snows of Kilimanjaro
The Snows of Kilimanjaro used his name slightingly, though years earlier Fitzgerald had championed the young Hemingway.
Q 28In which memoir did Hemingway portray Zelda Fitzgerald as an unstable woman who derailed Scott's career?
A Moveable Feast
A Moveable Feast appeared after Hemingway's death, and six years later Nancy Milford's bestselling biography recast Zelda as a symbol of thwarted artistry.
Q 29Which 1922 Fitzgerald short story did he call a first draft of 'the Gatsby idea'?
Winter Dreams
Winter Dreams follows a caddie who grows rich yet cannot hold on to Judy Jones, the careless rich girl he adores, the same poor-boy theme as Gatsby.
Q 30Which 17-year-old starlet, met in 1927, was Fitzgerald's model for Rosemary Hoyt in Tender Is the Night?
Lois Moran
A jealous Zelda burned her own clothes in a bathtub and called the girl 'a breakfast food'.