F. Scott Fitzgerald

An American novelist, essayist, short story and screenwriter. He was best known for his novels depicting the flamboyance and excess of the Jazz Age—a term he popularized. During his lifetime, he published four novels, four collections of short stories, and 164 short stories. Although he achieved temporary popular success and fortune in the 1920s, Fitzgerald received critical acclaim only after his death, and is now widely regarded as one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century.Born into a middle-class family in St. Paul, Minnesota, Fitzgerald was raised primarily in New York. He attended Princeton University, but owing to a failed relationship with socialite Ginevra King and a preoccupation with writing, he dropped out in 1917 to join the United States Army. While stationed in Alabama, he romanced Zelda Sayre, a Southern debutante who belonged to Montgomery's exclusive country-club set. Although she rejected Fitzgerald initially, because of his lack of financial prospects, Zelda agreed to marry him after he published the commercially successful This Side of Paradise (1920). The novel became a cultural sensation and cemented his reputation as one of the eminent writers of the decade.His second novel, The Beautiful and Damned (1922), propelled him further into the cultural elite. To maintain his affluent lifestyle, he wrote numerous stories for popular magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post, Collier's Weekly, and Esquire. During this period, Fitzgerald frequented Europe, where he befriended modernist writers and artists of the "Lost Generation" expatriate community, including Ernest Hemingway. His third novel, The Great Gatsby (1925), received generally favorable reviews but was a commercial failure, selling fewer than 23,000 copies in its first year. Despite its lackluster debut, The Great Gatsby is now widely praised, with some labeling it the "Great American Novel". Following the deterioration of his wife's mental health and her placement in a mental institute for schizophrenia, Fitzgerald completed his final novel, Tender Is the Night (1934).