F. Scott Fitzgerald 1896 – 1940

Biography

F. Scott Fitzgerald was an American novelist and short-story writer who became the defining chronicler of the Jazz Age. Born in St. Paul, Minnesota, he attended Princeton University, where he began writing, though he left without a degree. His first novel, This Side of Paradise, published in 1920, made him famous overnight and launched a dazzling, turbulent marriage to Zelda Sayre. The Beautiful and Damned followed, but his masterpiece, The Great Gatsby, published in 1925, was initially a commercial disappointment. Its portrait of wealth, longing and illusion in Long Island society later came to be regarded as one of the great American novels. Fitzgerald struggled with alcohol, debt and Zelda’s declining mental health, and spent his final years working as a Hollywood screenwriter. He died in Hollywood in 1940, believing himself a failure, before his reputation was revived in the decades after his death.