F. Scott Fitzgerald

Biography

Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald (1896–1940) was an American novelist and short story writer whose work chronicled the aspirations and disillusionment of the post–World War I generation in the United States. Born in St. Paul, Minnesota, Fitzgerald attended Princeton University, where he devoted much of his energy to literary pursuits before leaving without a degree to join the army in 1917. Fitzgerald's first novel, This Side of Paradise (1920), drew on his Princeton experiences and achieved immediate commercial success, establishing him as a spokesman for the emerging youth culture of the 1920s. The novel's frank treatment of generational attitudes toward romance, ambition, and social convention marked a departure from prevailing literary decorum. His subsequent short fiction, published prolifically in The Saturday Evening Post and other magazines, explored the tensions between wealth, desire, and moral consequence that would define his literary preoccupations. The Great Gatsby (1925), now regarded as a central text of American literature, examines the corruption of the American Dream through the figure of Jay Gatsby, a self-invented millionaire pursuing an idealized past. The novel's precise prose style, symbolic structure, and narrative unreliability demonstrated Fitzgerald's mastery of fictional technique, though initial sales were modest. His fourth novel, Tender Is the Night (1934), drew on his deteriorating marriage to Zelda Sayre and their years among American expatriates on the French Riviera, presenting a complex portrait of psychological decline. Fitzgerald's later years were marked by financial difficulty, alcoholism, and diminished literary reputation. He moved to Hollywood in 1937 to write screenplays and began work on The Last Tycoon, an unfinished novel about the film industry. He died of a heart attack in Los Angeles at forty-four. Posthumous reassessment, particularly in the 1950s, elevated The Great Gatsby to canonical status, and Fitzgerald is now recognized as a defining voice of American modernist fiction.