F. Scott Fitzgerald

Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1896. He left Princeton for the army, and in 1920 published his first novel, This Side of Paradise, which made him famous at twenty-three. That same year he married Zelda Sayre, and together they became the brightest couple of the decade Fitzgerald himself named: the Jazz Age.

The Great Gatsby followed in 1925. Set among the mansions of Long Island and the speakeasies of Prohibition-era New York, it pressed the era’s wealth, ambition, and disappointment into a single short novel. Reviewers admired it, but it sold modestly while he lived.

Fitzgerald spent his final years in Hollywood, writing for the studios and struggling with his health. He died in 1940, convinced he had been forgotten. In the decades since, The Great Gatsby has become one of the most widely read American novels ever written, taught in classrooms and reread by millions.

Major works

• This Side of Paradise 1920
• The Beautiful and Damned 1922
• The Great Gatsby 1925
• Tender Is the Night 1934
• The Last Tycoon 1941, unfinished