F. Scott Fitzgerald

F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote The Great Gatsby and died believing himself a failure. Born in St Paul, Minnesota in 1896 and named after a distant relative who wrote the national anthem, he was the son of a furniture salesman who failed and a mother with inherited money, which put him among the wealthy without being of them — the position from which he wrote everything. He went to Princeton, neglected his studies for the theatrical club, and left without a degree to take a commission in 1917. The war ended before he was sent abroad. Stationed in Alabama, he met Zelda Sayre, who refused to marry him until he could support her. He rewrote his novel, and This Side of Paradise was published in March 1920; they married a week later, and he became the spokesman of what he named the Jazz Age at twenty-three. They lived expensively in New York, on Long Island and in France, and he funded it by selling short stories to the Saturday Evening Post at high prices — work he regarded as prostitution of his talent and which took time from the novels. The Great Gatsby, published in 1925, sold poorly and was out of print at his death. Its narrator watches a bootlegger reinvent himself for a woman who is not worth it, and it has since been read as the central American novel about class and self-invention. Zelda had her first breakdown in 1930 and spent much of the rest of her life in institutions; Tender Is the Night draws on it. He worked as a Hollywood screenwriter, drank heavily, and died of a heart attack in 1940 at forty-four.

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