F. Scott Fitzgerald

Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald (1896-1940) was an American novelist and short-story writer whose work captured the glamour and disillusionment of the era he named the Jazz Age. Born in St. Paul, Minnesota, he attended Princeton University, where he devoted himself to writing rather than his studies and left without a degree before serving in the army during the First World War.

His first novel, This Side of Paradise, published in 1920, made him famous almost overnight and allowed him to marry Zelda Sayre, the woman who became both his muse and, through her own struggles and their turbulent marriage, a source of lasting pain. The couple became emblems of the reckless prosperity of the 1920s, living lavishly in New York, on Long Island, and among the American expatriates in France.

Fitzgerald is best known for The Great Gatsby, published in 1925, a short novel about wealth, longing, and the corruption of the American Dream that is now regarded as one of the finest works in American literature. His other novels include The Beautiful and Damned and Tender Is the Night, and he left a fifth, The Love of the Last Tycoon, unfinished at his death.

He was also a prolific and highly paid writer of short stories for magazines, work that funded his expensive life but that he often regarded as a distraction from his serious fiction. Many of these stories treat the same themes of youth, promise, and decline that run through his novels.

Fitzgerald's reputation faded in his later years, and he died believing himself a failure while working in Hollywood. In the decades since, his standing has risen enormously, and he is now considered one of the defining voices of twentieth-century American writing.