If you want to visit the final resting place of William Shakespeare, you would have to fly to England and travel to Stratford-upon-Avon.
Idaho is where you would have to go to see Ernest Hemingway’s grave.
But a quick trip on Metro’s Red Line is all you have to do to visit the grave of the author behind one of America’s greatest novels, ‘The Great Gatsby’.
WTOP turned to an expert to find out why F. Scott Fitzgerald is buried in Rockville, Maryland.
“Because his father’s family was from Rockville,” said Jackson Brier, professor emeritus of English at the University of Maryland, and co-founder and president of the F. Scott Fitzgerald Society.
Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was named after his distant cousin who wrote The Star Spangled Banner.
“Even though he grew up in the Midwest, and he is very much a person of the midwest of St. Paul, he was very proud of his roots in the sort of Gentry of Maryland, and that’s where he wanted to be buried,” said Brier.
At the age of 44, Fitzgerald died of a heart attack on the first day of winter in 1940. Six days later, the 44-year-old was buried at the Rockville Cemetery — instead of the family plot at St. Mary’s Cemetery.
“He was denied burial at the Catholic Church because he was not considered a good Catholic,” said Brier. “He was not thought of as the way he is now, he was remembered as a kind of radical writer.”
Gatsby, according to Brier, was not the novel most identified with Fitzgerald at the time of his death.
“It was the novel he wrote in 1920 called ‘This Side of Paradise’, which was all about the high jinks of young people, college age kids kissing and holding all sorts of liquor soaked parties, which was a big revelation in 1920,” said Brier, laughing.
It would take the second World War for ‘The Great Gatsby’ to take off in popularity.
“The American government circulated paperback copies of American novels to American servicemen, and one of them was Gatsby. And because it was so short and so accessible, a lot of servicemen read that novel,” Brier explained.
It would take 35 years for Fitzgerald to move to his final resting place at St. Mary’s Cemetery.
“His daughter petitioned the Diocese of Washington and he was transferred to the Catholic cemetery,” said Brier.
A 1979 article in The Washington Post quoted a statement from Archbishop William Baum of Washington about Fitzgerald’s move to the Catholic Cemetery.
“An artist who was able with lucidity and poetic imagination to portray the struggle between grace and death … His characters are involved in this great drama, seeking God and seeking love,” the statement from Baum read.
Now, a century after ‘The Great Gatsby’ was first published, and 85 years after his death, people from all around the world come to Rockville to visit the graves of Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda, leaving flowers, booze, corks and pens.
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