Fitzgerald, F(rancis) Scott (Key) (1896–1940)

US novelist and short-story writer. His early autobiographical novel This Side of Paradise (1920) made him known in the post-war society of the East Coast, and The Great Gatsby (1925) epitomizes the Jazz Age.

Fitzgerald was born at St Paul, Minnesota, and educated at Newman School, New Jersey, and Princeton University. His first book, This Side of Paradise, reflected his experiences at Princeton. In 1920 he married Zelda Sayre (1900–1948). In 1924 the Fitzgeralds moved to the French Riviera, where they became members of a fashionable group of expatriates. In The Great Gatsby 1925 the narrator resembles his author, and Gatsby, the self-made millionaire, is lost in the soulless society he enters. Fitzgerald's wife, a schizophrenic, entered an asylum 1930, after which he declined into alcoholism. Her descent into mental illness forms the subject of Tender is the Night 1934. After his wife's confinement Fitzgerald went to Hollywood to write screenplays and earn enough to pay her medical bills. His other works include numerous short stories, and the novels The Beautiful and the Damned 1922 and The Last Tycoon, which was unfinished at his death, but was made into a film 1976. His notebooks and letters were published in The Crack-up 1945.