F. Scott Fitzgerald

F. Scott Fitzgerald was an American author of novels and short stories often staged during the Jazz Age. He is widely regarded as one of the twentieth century's greatest writers. His four finished novels are This Side of Paradise, The Beautiful and Damned, Tender Is the Night, and the Great Gatsby. Fitzgerald had a fifth unfinished novel, The Love of the Last Tycoon, which was published posthumously. Fitzgerald married the glamorous Zelda Sayre. They lived a colorful life of parties and money-spending.

F. Scott Fitzgerald was born in St Paul, Minnesota of mixed Southern and Irish descent. He was given three names after the writer of The Star Spangled Banner, to whom he was distantly related. His father, Edward Fitzgerald, was a salesman, a Southern gentleman, whose furniture business had failed. Mary McQuillan, his mother, was the daughter of a successful wholesale grocer, and devoted to her only son. Fitzgerald started to write at St. Paul Academy. His first published story, 'The Mystery of the Raymond Mortgage' appeared in 1909 in Now and Then. Fitzgerald entered in 1913 Princeton University, where he failed to become a football hero. He left his studies in 1917 because of his poor academic records, and took up a commission in the US Army.

Fitzgerald met Zelda Sayre at a country club. The two were engaged in 1919 and Fitzgerald moved to an apartment in New York to lay the foundation for his life with Zelda. Working at an advertising firm and writing short stories, he was unable to convince Zelda that he would be able to support her, leading her to break off the engagement. Zelda and Scott resumed their engagement in the fall of 1919. Elda bore their only child, a boy, Frances Scott "Scottie" Fitzgerald, born on October 26, 1921. Scott and Zelda became estranged; she continued living in mental institutions on the East Coast, while he lived with his lover Sheilah Graham, a gossip columnist, in Hollywood.

Fitzgerald had been an alcoholic since his college days, and became notorious during the 1920s for his extraordinarily heavy drinking, leaving him in poor health by the late 1930s. Fitzgerald suffered two heart attacks in late 1940. On December 21, 1940, Fitzgerald died of a massive heart attack.