About the author
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The writer who named the Jazz Age, and captured it better than anyone.
Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1896. He left Princeton for the army, and in 1920 published his first novel, This Side of Paradise, which made him famous at twenty-three. That same year he married Zelda Sayre, and together they became the brightest couple of the decade Fitzgerald himself named: the Jazz Age.
The Great Gatsby followed in 1925. Set among the mansions of Long Island and the speakeasies of Prohibition-era New York, it pressed the era’s wealth, ambition, and disappointment into a single short novel. Reviewers admired it, but it sold modestly while he lived.
Fitzgerald spent his final years in Hollywood, writing for the studios and struggling with his health. He died in 1940, convinced he had been forgotten. In the decades since, The Great Gatsby has become one of the most widely read American novels ever written, taught in classrooms and reread by millions.