F. Scott Fitzgerald (Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald)

F. Scott Fitzgerald was one of the defining voices of twentieth-century American literature, whose lyrical prose and bittersweet portraits of wealth, ambition, and disillusionment captured the glittering contradictions of the Jazz Age. Born in Saint Paul, Minnesota, he attended Princeton University before leaving to join the army during the First World War. His first novel, This Side of Paradise (1920), brought him immediate fame and helped establish him as the literary voice of a restless postwar generation. That same year, he married Zelda Sayre, beginning a celebrated and turbulent partnership that would become inseparable from the mythology of the Roaring Twenties.

During the 1920s, Fitzgerald and Zelda lived between New York, Paris, and the French Riviera, moving among the expatriate writers and artists of the Lost Generation. His masterpiece, The Great Gatsby (1925), transformed the glamour and extravagance of the American dream into a haunting meditation on longing, class, and the impossibility of recovering the past. Later works, including Tender Is the Night and the essays collected in The Crack-Up, revealed an increasingly intimate understanding of failure, emotional fragility, and the cost of ambition. Troubled by alcoholism, financial difficulties, and Zelda's psychiatric illness, Fitzgerald spent his final years working in Hollywood, where he died at forty-four. Though his reputation had faded during his lifetime, he would be rediscovered after his death as one of the great stylists of American fiction.