F. Scott Fitzgerald

(1896-1940)

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Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was born on September 24,1896, in St. Paul Minnesota. He attended St. Paul's Academy, the Newman's School, and Princeton Unversity. In 1917, after dropping out of Princeton without a degree, he joined the army and was stationed in Montgomery, Alabama. This is where he met his wife, Zelda Sayre, and when he began his writing career.

Fitagerald wrote his first novel, This Side of Paradise, in 1920. His fame increased with another novel, The Beautiful and Damned, and two short stories, Flappers and Philosophers and Tales of the Jazz Age.

Fitzgerald then wrote The Great Gatsby, which was a lot less popular than his eariler novels, but it was one that gave him litterary importance even today. He then followed by writing his next novel, Tender is the Night, in 1934, about the decline of a couple Americans living in Europe. Fitzgerald died before finishing, The Last Tycoon, a novel about Hollywood life.

The success of his first novels, contributed to Fitzgerald's alcoholism and his wife's mental breakdown, when his later novels failed. He spent his last years years in Hollywood writing movie scripts until his death in 1941. A few years after his death, these novels that he wrote later in life, which were disliked at the one time, became the basis of his lasting fame.

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