F. Scott Fitzgerald

Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald (1896–1940) was an American novelist and short story writer who immortalized the exuberance and eventual tragedy of the 1920s, a period he famously christened 'The Jazz Age'. Educated at Princeton University, he became an overnight celebrity at twenty-three with his debut novel This Side of Paradise (1920), marrying Zelda Sayre and living a whirlwind expatriate life between New York, Paris, and the French Riviera.

Fitzgerald's crowning achievement, The Great Gatsby (1925), set during the roaring boom of Long Island, anatomized the corrupting power of wealth and the tragic myth of reinvention embodied by Jay Gatsby and Daisy Buchanan. Despite commercial struggles with Tender Is the Night and his early death while working in Hollywood on The Last Tycoon, Gatsby is universally hailed as the definitive Great American Novel.