F. Scott Fitzgerald

Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was born in Saint Paul, Minnesota, in 1896, named after the composer of the national anthem, a distant ancestor. He enrolled at Princeton in 1913, spent more time writing musical comedies for the Triangle Club than attending class, and left without a degree when America entered World War I. He wrote his first novel while stationed at Camp Sheridan in Alabama — the novel that became This Side of Paradise (1920), published when he was twenty-three. Its immediate success allowed him to marry Zelda Sayre, the Alabama judge's daughter who had told him she wouldn't commit until he had money. They married weeks after the book came out.

This Side of Paradise was the novel that made him famous. Its sales were the peak of his commercial career. The Beautiful and Damned followed in 1922, a darker novel about a handsome man and his wife consuming their inheritance while waiting for more of it. Then came The Great Gatsby (1925), which sold modestly — around 20,000 copies in its first year, roughly a third of what This Side of Paradise had sold. Maxwell Perkins, his editor at Scribner's, thought it was his best work. Most readers disagreed by not reading it. Fitzgerald was disappointed.

The Great Gatsby is now the book by which he is measured, and the measure is very high. It is short — barely 47,000 words — and nearly every sentence is doing multiple things. The story of Jay Gatsby's doomed pursuit of Daisy Buchanan is also a story about the American mythology of reinvention, the way the past is never actually past, the violence underneath the glittering surface of the twenties, and the carelessness of the very rich. Nick Carraway, the narrator, is simultaneously enchanted and horrified by what he observes, and that double register gives the book its peculiar tone.

Tender is the Night (1934), the last novel he completed, is a flawed and brilliant account of a psychiatrist whose marriage to a wealthy former patient destroys him slowly. It drew heavily on the real disintegration of his marriage: Zelda had suffered a severe mental breakdown in 1930 and spent the rest of her life in and out of psychiatric institutions. The novel was not well received. By the mid-1930s Fitzgerald was perceived as a Jazz Age relic, a writer whose moment had passed.

He spent his last years in Hollywood writing screenplays, drinking heavily, and working on a novel about a movie producer — The Last Tycoon, left unfinished when he died of a heart attack in December 1940 at 44. He believed himself a failure. His books were out of print at his death; he received one letter from a fan in his final years.

The rehabilitation of his reputation began during World War II, when the Armed Services Editions — paperbacks distributed free to American soldiers — included The Great Gatsby. Soldiers read it; it didn't die. By the 1950s it was in high school curricula across the country, where it has remained ever since.

The critical conversation around Fitzgerald now includes sustained attention to Zelda. Her novel Save Me the Waltz (1932), written in six weeks while he was working on Tender is the Night, was published to indifference and his active hostility — he felt she was cannibalizing their shared material. Scholars have argued, with justification, that her voice and experience shaped his fiction more than he acknowledged, and that his management of her literary career was self-serving. These are fair charges that complicate but don't erase the achievement of the novels he did complete.