F. Scott Fitzgerald

Born on September 24, 1896, in St. Paul, Minnesota, Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was named after the author of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” a distant relative on his father’s side. His father’s furniture business failed when Scott was two, and the family subsisted on the money of his mother’s family, a circumstance that left him acutely conscious of wealth he did not possess. He attended Princeton, where he wrote lyrics for the Triangle Club musicals and befriended Edmund Wilson, but left without a degree to join the army in 1917. Stationed at Camp Sheridan near Montgomery, Alabama, he met Zelda Sayre, a judge’s daughter whose beauty and recklessness matched his own ambitions. This Side of Paradise (1920) made him famous overnight at twenty-three, and Zelda agreed to marry him a week after its publication. They became the golden couple of the Jazz Age, living extravagantly in New York, on Long Island, and on the French Riviera, burning through money as fast as he could earn it from The Saturday Evening Post. The Great Gatsby (1925), a novel of just fifty thousand words about a mysterious millionaire’s doomed pursuit of a lost love across the waters of Long Island Sound, received favorable reviews but sold fewer than twenty-three thousand copies in its first year. Zelda’s mental collapse and institutionalization for schizophrenia in 1930 shattered their marriage. Tender Is the Night (1934) drew on their disintegration and was a commercial failure. He moved to Hollywood, wrote screenplays, struggled with alcoholism, and began The Last Tycoon. He died of a heart attack on December 21, 1940, at the age of forty-four, in the apartment of his companion Sheila Graham. At his death he believed himself forgotten; the Armed Services Editions of Gatsby, distributed to soldiers during World War II, began the revival that made him immortal.

In the summer of 1919, Zelda had broken their engagement and Scribner's had turned down his first novel. Fitzgerald quit his New York advertising job, went home to St. Paul, and rewrote the book. When the acceptance telegram finally came that September, he ran into the street, stopping passing cars to tell strangers he was going to be published.