It is impossible to think of the roaring twenties without thinking of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Facile chronicler of the wealthy, master of English prose, exacting portrait artist of his times, he explored the lies behind the “American Dream,” helped Modernism find its romantic voice, and remains an iconic member of what Gertrude Stein called “The Lost Generation.”  

Fitzgerald was born in Saint Paul, Minnesota on September 24, 1896, the son of a failed wicker furniture businessman. Most of his early life was spent in Buffalo, New York, where he published his first piece, a detective story, at the age of 13. He began his undergraduate studies at Princeton, but never took a degree. During his time at university, he fell in love with the socialite Ginevra King, but she rejected Fitzgerald’s marriage proposal because of his déclassé social status. King later served partial inspiration for the character Daisy Buchanan in Fitzgerald’s most important novel, The Great Gatsby. 

In 1917, the same year the United States entered World War I, Fitzgerald left Princeton to join the Army. While based at Camp Sheridan, near Montgomery, Alabama, he met his future wife, Zelda Sayre, a southern debutante and the granddaughter of an affluent, former Confederate general.  Fitzgerald never saw combat, and upon the conclusion of the war he moved to New York City where, for about a year, he submitted stories and book pitches to newspapers and publishers. He met with no success, and returned to Saint Paul, where he moved back in with his parents. There, he continued to revise the manuscript of his groundbreaking first novel, This Side of Paradise, and, in the fall of 1919, due to the champagning of future legendary editor Max Perkins, Scribner’s agreed to publish it.

Influenced by Fitzgerald’s time at Princeton, This Side of Paradise became an instant hit, selling 40,000 copies in the first year. Newly famous and financially secure, Fitzgerald finally had the means to marry Zelda, and the couple came to embody the Jazz Age. In fact, Fitzgerald is thought to have coined the term “Jazz Age,” describing it in his essay collection The Crack-Up as a time “racing along under its own power, served by great filling stations full of money.” 

Soon after the marriage, Zelda gave birth to their only child, Frances, and in 1922 the family moved to Long Island where their next-door neighbor provided the inspiration for the titular character in The Great Gatsby. Fitzgerald, however, only turned to writing the novel in earnest when the family moved to Europe, in 1925. That April, The Great Gatsby released to unenthusiastic reviews, partially due to its length (clocking at under 50,000 words, one reviewer called it a “glorified anecdote”), and was deemed a flop. The novel gained new life during World War II, during which it was distributed to GIs serving overseas, but it was not until the 1970s that Gatsby began to receive the critical recognition that precipitated its enshrinement as a “Great American Novel.”

While in Europe, the couple’s marital issues worsened considerably, as did Zelda’s mental health. In Paris, Fitzgerald fell in with a community of expatriate authors, artists, and poets that included Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, and James Joyce. In 1926, after two years in Europe, the Fitzgeralds returned to America, where F. Scott made a largely unsuccessful foray into screenwriting. The family moved to Delaware in 1929, where Fitzgerald tried to write another novel, but his increasing alcoholism and depression stymied his progress. That spring the Fitzgeralds emigrated to Europe once again, but by the fall of 1931 they had returned to the U.S., where Zelda, diagnosed as schizophrenic, was committed to a psychiatric ward. She was occasionally given leave to travel with F. Scott; during these final stages of the marriage, he wrote and rewrote his last completed novel and least successful novel, Tender Is The Night, inspired by Gerald and Sara Murphy, glamorous expats who started the trend of “summering” on the French Riviera. 

With the emergence of The Great Depression, opinion turned on Fitzgerald’s works, which came to be seen as anachronistic, unrelatable and elitist. Finding himself broke once again—his remaining royalties spent on his wife’s medical bills and various hotels near her sanitarium—Fitzgerald returned to Hollywood, leaving Zelda in North Carolina.He worked as a screenwriter for the remainder of his life, and this time in the movie industry provided inspiration for his incomplete novel The Last Tycoon (the title character of which was based on studio executive Irving Thalberg).During his forties, Fitzgerald’s health declined precipitously. He was sober for the final year of his life, a time which Sheilah Graham, his partner in Hollywood, referred to as the happiest of their lives.

Throughout his writing career, despite distractions, F. Scott kept up a vigorous writing schedule that rivaled any one of his peers, churning out short stories for syndication, in addition to the novels, with the prolificacy that supported a truly extravagant lifestyle. To understand Fitzgerald, perhaps it is best to know how he described himself: “a poor boy in a rich town; a poor boy in a rich boy’s school; a poor boy in a rich man’s club at Princeton …. However, I have never been able to forgive the rich for being rich, and it has colored my entire life and works.” On December 20, 1940, F. Scott Fitzgerald died of coronary arteriosclerosis. He was 44 years old.