The Curious Case of Benjamin Fitzgerald (1778–1828): Ancestry and Racial Anxiety in Fitzgerald

This article reassesses the sources used for an initial investigation into received accounts of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s ancestry in Burke’s 2023 study, Race, Politics, and Irish America: A Gothic History. Fitzgerald traced the Maryland lineage of his father Edward (1853–1931) no further back than the 1850 marriage of his grandfather, Michael Fitzgerald (1805–1855), into the Scott family. This union allowed Fitzgerald to claim affiliation with colonial America’s elite, in particular by overemphasizing his connection to distant cousin Francis Scott Key, author of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” By contrast, Fitzgerald expressed embarrassment regarding the arriviste mercantile background of his maternal grandfather, who emigrated from Ireland in the 1840s when the Irish were considered “off-white.” However, Michael Fitzgerald’s ancestry has been ignored, though his father—F. Scott Fitzgerald’s paternal great-grandfather—was almost certainly born in Ireland and resident in America by the late eighteenth century. These roots complicate F. Scott Fitzgerald’s inference that his maternal line alone came from Ireland and that the Keys were his sole eighteenth-century American ancestors. This article links Fitzgerald’s obfuscated Irish ancestry to racial and social anxieties in “The Camel’s Back,” “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” The Beautiful and Damned, and Tender Is the Night.