Gravestone at the cemetery of St. Mary's Catholic Church, Rockville, Maryland. It is inscribed with the last sentence from The Great Gatsby: "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."
F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald moved to 5 Gateway Drive, Great Neck on Long Island (see the map) when he was 25, to be closer to Broadway. (Great Neck became West Egg in The Great Gatsby. See the map) He had written a play, The Vegetable, which he hoped would be produced on Broadway and would make him affluent. The play opened in Atlantic City, but immediately closed. The whole episode plunged Fitzgerald into debt which then spurred him to write some of his best works. Among them, of course, The Great Gatsby. The Book was finished in the South of France.