Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald (September 24, 1896 – December 21, 1940) was an American novelist, essayist, screenwriter, and short story writer. He was best known for his novels depicting the flamboyance and excess of the Jazz Age—a term which he popularized. During his lifetime, he published four novels, four collections of short stories, and 164 short stories. Although he temporarily achieved popular success and fortune in the 1920s, Fitzgerald only received critical acclaim 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 primarily raised in New York. He attended Princeton University, but due 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 romantically pursued Zelda Sayre, a Southern debutante who belonged to Montgomery's exclusive country club set. Although she initially rejected him due to his lack of financial prospects, Zelda agreed to marry Fitzgerald after he had published the commercially successful This Side of Paradise (1920). The novel became a cultural sensation and cemented Fitzgerald's reputation as one of the eminent writers of the decade. His second novel, The Beautiful and Damned (1922), further propelled him 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). Struggling financially due to the declining popularity of his works amid the Great Depression, Fitzgerald turned to Hollywood, writing and revising screenplays. While residing in Hollywood, he cohabited with columnist Sheilah Graham, his final companion before his death. After a long struggle with alcoholism, he finally attained sobriety only to die of a heart attack in 1940, at the age of 44. An unfinished fifth novel, The Last Tycoon (1941), was completed by his friend Edmund Wilson and published after Fitzgerald's death. Born on September 24, 1896, in Saint Paul, Minnesota, to a middle-class family, Fitzgerald was named after his second cousin thrice removed, Francis Scott Key, but was always known as Scott Fitzgerald.[1] Fitzgerald was also named after his deceased sister, Louise Scott Fitzgerald, one of two sisters who died shortly before his birth.[2] "Well, three months before I was born," he wrote as an adult, "my mother lost her other two children ... I think I started then to be a writer".[3] His father, Edward Fitzgerald, descended from Irish and English ancestry,[4] and moved to St. Paul from Maryland after the American Civil War.[5] His mother was Mary "Molly" McQuillan Fitzgerald, the daughter of an Irish immigrant who had made his fortune in the wholesale grocery business.[6] Edward's first cousin twice removed, Mary Surratt, was hanged in 1865 for conspiring to assassinate Abraham Lincoln.[7]

The Fitzgeralds' home in Buffalo. The Fitzgerald family never owned a house; they only rented.[8] Edward Fitzgerald had earlier worked as a wicker furniture salesman; when the business failed, he joined Procter & Gamble in Buffalo, New York.[9] Fitzgerald spent the first decade of his childhood primarily in Buffalo with a short interlude in Syracuse between January 1901 and September 1903.[10] His parents, both Catholic, sent him to two Catholic schools on the West Side of Buffalo, first Holy Angels Convent (1903–1904, now disused) and then Nardin Academy (1905–1908).[11] Fitzgerald's formative years revealed him to be a boy of unusual intelligence with a keen early interest in literature.[12] His mother's money supplemented the family income and enabled the family to live in a comfortable lifestyle.[13] In a rather unconventional style of parenting, Fitzgerald attended Holy Angels with the arrangement that he go for only half a day—and allowed to choose which half.[14] In March 1908, Procter & Gamble fired his father, and the family returned to Minnesota, where Fitzgerald attended St. Paul Academy from 1908 to 1911.[15] At the age of 13, Fitzgerald had his first work, a detective story, published in the school newspaper.[16] In 1911, Fitzgerald's parents sent him to the Newman School, a Catholic prep school in Hackensack, New Jersey.[17] At Newman, Father Sigourney Fay recognized his literary potential and encouraged him to become a writer.[18] Mentored by Fay, Fitzgerald played on Newman's football team.[19] After graduating from Newman in 1913, Fitzgerald enrolled at Princeton University and became one of the few Catholics in the student body.[20] Trying out for the football team, the coach rejected him the first day of practice.[21] At Princeton, Fitzgerald's classmates included future writers, critics, historians, and aviators such as Edmund Wilson, John Peale Bishop, George R. Stewart, and Elliott White Springs.[22] As the semesters passed, he formed close friendships with Wilson and Bishop, both of whom would later aid his literary career.[22] Fitzgerald wrote for the Princeton Triangle Club, the Princeton Tiger, and the Nassau Lit.[23] He became involved in the American Whig-Cliosophic Society, which ran the Nassau Lit.[24] Four of the University's eating clubs sent him bids at midyear, and he chose the University Cottage Club where Fitzgerald's desk and writing materials are still displayed in its library.[25]

F. Scott Fitzgerald in his army uniform (left) and Chicago socialite Ginevra King (right) Amid his sophomore year at Princeton, Fitzgerald returned home to Saint Paul during Christmas break.[26] At a winter sledding party on Summit Avenue,[27] the 19-year-old Fitzgerald met 16-year-old Chicago beauty and debutanteGinevra King with whom he fell deeply[a] in love.[29][30] The couple began a romantic relationship that would span several years.[31] Obsessed with Ginevra, Fitzgerald inundated her with passionate love letters and insisted he would be devoted to her for the remainder of his life.[32] She would become his literary model for the characters of Isabelle Borgé in This Side of Paradise and Daisy Buchanan in The Great Gatsby as well as many other characters in his novels and short stories.[33][34] While Fitzgerald attended Princeton, Ginevra attended Westover, a nearby Connecticut women's school.[35] He visited Ginevra at Westover until her abrupt expulsion for flirting with a crowd of young male admirers from her dormitory window.[36] Her immediate return to Lake Forest, Illinois, prevented further weekly courtship.[36] Despite the great distance now separating them, Fitzgerald still attempted to pursue Ginevra, and he traveled across the country to visit her family's lavish estate at Lake Forest.[37] Although Ginevra loved him,[38] her upper-class family belittled Scott's courtship due to his lower-class status.[39] In contrast to Ginevra's other suitors who were the wealthy scions of business executives, Fitzgerald's relative poverty precluded him as a match in the eyes of her parents.[39] Her imperious father Charles Garfield King purportedly told a young Fitzgerald that "poor boys shouldn't think of marrying rich girls".[40][41] When Ginevra ended the relationship in January 1917, a distraught Fitzgerald requested that Ginevra destroy his romantic letters professing his love.[42][31] Despite this demand, he never destroyed King's letters and, after his death in 1940, the letters were returned to King who kept them until her death.[43][44] Rejected by Ginevra as a suitor and discouraged by his lack of success at Princeton, a suicidal Fitzgerald enlisted in the United States Army amid World War I and received a commission as a second lieutenant.[45][46] While awaiting deployment[b] to the Western front where he hoped to die in combat,[46] he was stationed in a training camp at Fort Leavenworth under the command of Captain Dwight Eisenhower, the future General of the Army and United States President.[48] Fitzgerald purportedly chafed under Eisenhower's authority and intensely disliked him.[49] Hoping to have a novel published before his departure for Europe, Fitzgerald hastily wrote a 120,000-word manuscript entitled The Romantic Egotist in three months.[50] Upon submitting the manuscript to publishers, Scribners rejected it,[51] although the impressed reviewer Max Perkins praised Fitzgerald's writing and encouraged him to resubmit the novel after further revisions.

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