F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) was born in St. Paul, Minnesota. Widely regarded as the literary voice of the Jazz Age, Fitzgerald chronicled the hopes, illusions, and disillusionments of early twentieth-century America. His early success came with This Side of Paradise (1920), a novel that captured the restless spirit of post-World War I youth. He went on to write The Beautiful and Damned (1922), The Great Gatsby (1925), and Tender Is the Night (1934), works that examined themes of ambition, love, class, and the decline of the American Dream with poetic precision.
Fitzgerald’s tumultuous marriage to Zelda Sayre and his struggle with financial instability mirrored the tensions in his fiction. His later years were spent in Hollywood as a screenwriter, a period marked by personal hardship and declining health. Though underappreciated in his lifetime, Fitzgerald’s literary reputation grew significantly after his death, and today he is celebrated as one of the most important American writers of the twentieth century. The Great Gatsby remains his most iconic and widely studied work
