F. Scott Fitzgerald

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) was an American novelist and short-story writer whose work defined and dissected the Jazz Age. His masterpiece The Great Gatsby (1925) — a shimmering portrait of wealth, longing and the American dream on Long Island — is regularly ranked among the greatest novels of the twentieth century and has inspired screen, stage and television adaptations ever since.

Born in St. Paul, Minnesota, Fitzgerald achieved fame at twenty-four with his first novel, This Side of Paradise, and lived through the prosperous decade he chronicled so unforgettably, publishing Tender Is the Night and dozens of acclaimed stories for magazines like The Saturday Evening Post. His later years were shadowed by alcohol, money troubles and his wife Zelda's illness, yet his writing deepened in honesty. Posthumously gathered fragments of his unfinished novel, The Last Tycoon, confirmed the rare talent that made Hemingway praise the pure gift of his sentences.