1996-2023

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The F. Scott Fitzgerald Literary Conference was founded in 1996 to commemorate the 100th birthday of celebrated American author F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose paternal ancestors were from Montgomery County, Maryland.; Fitzgerald is buried, along with his wife Zelda and his daughter Scottie, in the cemetery of St. Mary’s Roman Catholic Church in Rockville, Maryland. In 2013, the name of the event was officially changed to the F. Scott Fitzgerald Literary Festival.

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Its announced purposes are: 1. To honor the works of F. Scott Fitzgerald and to honor prominent American fiction writers, poets, playwrights, screenwriters, and other literary figures and artists; 2. To enhance the literary arts by conducting an annual event which includes seminars, lectures, and other educational activities promoting the written word; and 3. To support, encourage, and assist aspiring and emerging writers and students interested in the literary arts.

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In accordance with these purposes, the twenty-six annual Fitzgerald Festivals held to date have regularly included writing workshops, keynote speakers, panel discussions, films, short story contests, and, as its centerpiece, the presentation of the F. Scott Fitzgerald Award for Achievement in American Literature.

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Since 1996, recipients of the Fitzgerald Award have included many of America’s most distinguished writers, all of whom, prior to Covid, have been present to accept the Award: 1996: William Styron; 1997: John Barth; 1998: Joyce Carol Oates; 1999: E. L. Doctorow; 2000: Norman Mailer; 2001: Ernest J. Gaines; 2002: John Updike; 2003: Edward Albee; 2004: Grace Paley; 2005: Pat Conroy; 2006: Jane Smiley; 2007: William Kennedy; 2008: Elmore Leonard; 2009: Julia Alvarez; 2010: Alice McDermott; 2011: Maxine Hong Kingston; 2013: Robert Olen Butler; 2014: James Salter; 2015: Richard Ford; 2016: Garrison Keillor; 2017: Annie Proulx; 2018: Richard Russo; 2019: Amy Tan; 2020: Barbara Kingsolver; 2021:John Edgar Wideman; 2022: Richard Powers. The 2023 honoree will be Jonathan Franzen. Fitzgerald Award honorees have received 16 Pulitzer Prizes.

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Speakers, panelists, and workshop leaders at the Literary Conference have also included many distinguished writers, scholars, and persons associated with Fitzgerald. Among the latter have been his granddaughters, Eleanor Lanahan and Cecelia Ross, and his great-granddaughter, Blake Hazard; the late Frances Kroll Ring, his secretary during his last years in Hollywood; the late Honoria Murphy Donnelly, the daughter of Fitzgerald’s friends Gerald and Sara Murphy; and the late Budd Schulberg, a distinguished American writer in his own right (author of the Academy Award-winning screenplay for the film On the Waterfront), with whom Fitzgerald collaborated on an ill-fated film project in the late 1930s.

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Writers who have participated as workshop leaders, seminar panelists, or keynote speakers include Jim Lehrer, Kate Lehrer, Susan Richards Shreve, Azar Nafisi, Alan Cheuse, Patricia Browning Griffith, Olga Grushin, Merle Collins, George Pelacanos, H. G. Carrillo, Richard Peabody, Mark Childress, Michael Dirda, Francisco Goldman, Henry Allen, E. Ethelbert Miller, Alexandra Zapruder, Kim Stanley Robinson, Caroline Bock, Tara Campbell, Eugenia Kim, James Grady, Richard Morris, Sylvia Morris, Jonathan Yardley, Marie Arana, Evan Thomas, Susan Cheever, Murray Horwitz, Bob Mondello, Mary Kay Zuravleff, Gary Krist, Jay Parini, Laura Lipman, Maureen Corrigan, Tope Folarin, Stewart O’Nan, Clint Smith, Margaret Talbot, Alexandra Petri, Tom Toles, Susan Coll, Paul Goldberg, Calvin Trillin, Jennifer Finney Boylan, Kirk Curnutt, and A. Scott Berg.

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The Fitzgerald scholars who have participated include James L. W. West, Scott Donaldson, Alan Margolies, Jackson R. Bryer, David S. Brown, Anne Margaret Daniel, Kirk Curnutt, William Blazek, David W. Ullrich, Martina Mastandrea, David Page, and Ruth Prigozy— the leading Fitzgerald scholars in the world.

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In 2012, the Literary Conference, reimagined as a Fitzgerald Birthday Celebration, was held at Rockville Town Center. It featured a reading by Alice McDermott, a seminar on “What Makes The Great Gatsby Great,” and the showing of two films based on Fitzgerald short stories. Due to Covid-19, the events of the 2020 and 2021 Festival were held virtually. The Festival resumed as an in-person event in 2022.