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Born on September 24, 1896, in St. Paul, Minnesota; he died of a heart attack on December 21, 1940, in Hollywood, California, at age 44.
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Fitzgerald attends the Newman School, a Catholic preparatory school in Hackensack, New Jersey. He meets Father Sigourney Fay, who recognizes Fitzgerald’s literary talent and encourages him to pursue writing.
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Fitzgerald enters Princeton University and writes for The Princeton Tiger, the school’s humor magazine. At Princeton he becomes a leading figure in literary life and writes scripts for the Triangle Club, a drama club at the university. He eventually flunks out, however. Although he returns to Princeton, he leaves again in November 1917 to join the army.
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His first book, This Side of Paradise, is published. The novel brings him fame and money. He marries Zelda in April. They become a celebrated couple. Writer Ring Lardner describes them as the prince and princess of their generation.
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This Side of Paradise (1920): Fitzgerald's debut novel, which was a commercial success and established his reputation as a voice of the post-war generation. -
He had a tumultuous marriage with Zelda Sayre, a celebrated Southern debutante who struggled with mental health issues, including schizophrenia. Their extravagant, party-filled lifestyle was almost as famous as his novels and provided much material for his fiction. -
The Fitzgeralds, along with their daughter, Francis (called “Scottie”), who had been born in 1921, leave for France. After spending some time in Paris, the family moves to the Riviera.
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The Beautiful and Damned (1922): A story chronicling the decadent lifestyle and the deterioration of a wealthy young couple. -
The Great Gatsby (1925): Widely considered his masterpiece and a contender for the "Great American Novel," it explores the themes of the American Dream, wealth, and moral decay during the Roaring Twenties. -
He was a leading figure of the Modernist movement and part of the "Lost Generation" of expatriate writers in Paris, which included Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein. -
After The Great Gatsby is published, Fitzgerald’s drinking becomes excessive, and Zelda suffers a mental breakdown in 1930. She spends the next year in European clinics. After she is released in 1931, they move back to the United States. She has a second breakdown in 1932 from which she never fully recovers. She publishes her first and only novel, Save Me the Waltz, which is based on the Fitzgeralds’ troubled marriage.
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Tender Is the Night (1934): His final completed novel, a complex and autobiographical story about a talented young psychiatrist and his wealthy, mentally ill wife on the French Riviera. -
Despite achieving early success, Fitzgerald died believing himself a failure, as his later works were not commercially successful during the Great Depression. It was only after his death that his work gained widespread critical acclaim, with The Great Gatsby becoming a standard text in American literature.
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The Last Tycoon (1941): An unfinished novel published posthumously, based on the life of Hollywood executive Irving Thalberg.