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Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald (1896–1940) was the novelist and short-story writer who named and defined the Jazz Age. The Great Gatsby is his masterpiece, but his life was as dramatic as anything in his fiction.

Fitzgerald at a Glance

Early Life

Fitzgerald was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, into a Catholic family. He was named after Francis Scott Key, the author of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” a distant relative. His father’s business ventures struggled, and much of the family’s security came from his mother’s side. Growing up close to wealth without fully belonging to it gave Fitzgerald the outsider’s view of the rich that runs through his fiction.

Princeton, the Army and Zelda

At Princeton, Fitzgerald threw himself into writing for student theatre and magazines but neglected his studies. In 1917 he left to join the US Army as the country entered the First World War. While stationed near Montgomery, Alabama, in 1918, he met Zelda Sayre, the daughter of a judge. The war ended before he was sent overseas.

Zelda at first broke off their engagement, unwilling to marry a man without money. Fitzgerald rewrote his novel, and when Scribner accepted it, she agreed to marry him. The pattern of a poor young man trying to win a rich, desirable girl would later shape the story of Gatsby and Daisy. Ginevra King, whom Fitzgerald loved as a student, is also seen as an inspiration for Daisy.

Sudden Fame

This Side of Paradise was published in March 1920 and made Fitzgerald famous almost overnight at the age of 23. He married Zelda in New York the following month. They became celebrities, the glamorous, hard-drinking young couple of the new decade. Fitzgerald earned large sums writing short stories for popular magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post, and his collection Tales of the Jazz Age (1922) helped give the era its name.

Long Island and The Great Gatsby

From 1922 to 1924 the Fitzgeralds lived in Great Neck, Long Island, among new-money mansions and lavish parties, the world that became West Egg. In 1924 they moved to the French Riviera, where Fitzgerald did much of the writing of The Great Gatsby. Working closely with his editor at Scribner, Maxwell Perkins, he revised heavily at the proof stage. The novel was published in April 1925.

Fitzgerald believed it was his best work, and he was disappointed when it sold less well than his earlier novels.

Paris, Decline and Tender Is the Night

In the later 1920s the Fitzgeralds spent much of their time in Europe, where they knew Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein and other American expatriates. Fitzgerald’s drinking worsened, and in 1930 Zelda suffered a mental breakdown. She spent much of the rest of her life in psychiatric hospitals. Her own novel, Save Me the Waltz, appeared in 1932.

Fitzgerald drew on these painful years in Tender Is the Night (1934), the story of a psychiatrist and his troubled wife on the Riviera. It too disappointed commercially. In a series of essays later collected as The Crack-Up, he wrote frankly about his own collapse.

Hollywood and the Last Years

In 1937 Fitzgerald moved to Hollywood to work as a screenwriter, chiefly for MGM. He earned a good salary but had little success there. He began a novel about the film industry, The Last Tycoon, and was still working on it when he died of a heart attack on December 21, 1940, aged 44. His friend Edmund Wilson edited the unfinished novel for publication in 1941.

Zelda died in 1948 in a fire at a hospital in Asheville, North Carolina. The couple are buried together in Rockville, Maryland. The final sentence of The Great Gatsby is engraved on their gravestone.

Short Stories

Fitzgerald wrote more than 150 short stories. Among the best known are:

• “Bernice Bobs Her Hair” (1920), a comic story of a shy girl and a daring haircut
• “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz” (1922), a fantasy about a family who own a mountain made of diamond
• “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” (1922), about a man who ages backwards
• “Winter Dreams” (1922), often called a forerunner of Gatsby
• “Babylon Revisited” (1931), a father’s attempt to regain his daughter after the crash

His story collections include Flappers and Philosophers (1920), Tales of the Jazz Age (1922), All the Sad Young Men (1926) and Taps at Reveille (1935).

Legacy

Fitzgerald died believing his work was largely forgotten. Within a generation he was recognised as one of the great American writers, and The Great Gatsby became one of the most widely read novels in the country. Phrases he made famous, from “the Jazz Age” to the closing image of “boats against the current,” are part of American culture.

Read his masterpiece free on this site, starting with Chapter 1, or explore how critics have judged it in our criticism guide.