F. Scott Fitzgerald

F. Scott Fitzgerald was born in Saint Paul, Minnesota, into a middle-class Catholic family. He went to Princeton University but left without a degree and joined the US Army in 1917. While stationed in Alabama he met Zelda Sayre. They married in 1920.

His first novel, This Side of Paradise (1920), made him famous almost overnight. He and Zelda became public symbols of the Jazz Age, a phrase he made popular. He paid for their life with short stories for magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post.

The Great Gatsby (1925) follows Jay Gatsby, who builds a fortune and throws huge parties to win back Daisy Buchanan. The novel argues that the American dream of self-invention through money cannot buy back the past or a place among old wealth. It sold fewer copies than his earlier books and became a standard school text only after World War II.

In the 1930s Zelda spent long periods in psychiatric hospitals, and Fitzgerald struggled with alcohol and debt. He published Tender Is the Night (1934) and then worked as a Hollywood screenwriter. He died of a heart attack in Hollywood in 1940, aged 44.