ROCKVILLE, Md. — Celebrated author F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote, "There are no second acts in American lives."

Maybe so.

But there are second burials.

Born in St. Paul, Minn., in 1896, Fitzgerald attained fame during the Jazz Age in the 1920s for his novels This Side of Paradise, The Beautiful and the Damned and The Great Gatsby.

After Fitzgerald died from a heart attack in Hollywood, Calif., in December 1940, his wife, Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald, sought to have him buried at the family plot at the St. Mary's Catholic Church cemetery in Rockville, Md., a suburb of Washington, D.C.

The Fitzgerald family roots ran deep in Maryland. The family linage included a distant tie to Francis Scott Key, author of The Star-Spangled Banner.

Fitzgerald was not a practicing Catholic at the time of his death, however, and therefore was denied burial at St. Mary's. So his body was buried at the nearby Rockville Cemetery. A few years later, Zelda joined him there. Institutionalized for mental illness in Baltimore, she died in a fire at the sanitarium in 1948.

In 1975, the Fitzgerald's only child, daughter Frances — known as "Scottie" — decided to have her parents reinterred at St. Mary's. Her effort proved successful, and the Fitzgeralds were again laid to rest. But unlike the previous burial, the new grave included a headstone.

St. Mary's was built in 1817, and still hosts services today. The original church and cemetery are listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The sites lay a mere 10-minute amble from the nearby Metro train station, and reside near the busy intersection of Rockville Pike and Veirs Mill Road.

A gravel path meanders through the lovely little cemetery. Finding Fitzgerald's final resting place is not difficult. Just look for the gravesite covered with objects.

Admirers of Fitzgerald often place small liquor bottles, cigarettes and handwritten poems on his grave, as well as candles and flowers. Some visitors deposit spare change as token tributes to the author, who died penniless.

Along with the names and earthly years of the couple on the headstone, the gravesite also bears an inscription from Fitzgerald's most famous novel.

"So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past" — the final line of The Great Gatsby.

Scottie died in 1986. She lies in the family plot at the foot of her parent's grave.

McClatchy-Tribune News Service