1896-1940
Writer

Tales of the Jazz Age.

Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald is the American writer most closely identified with the 1920s, which he named the Jazz Age. Early success, alcoholism, and an appetite for glamorous society rendered him the subject for enduring literary gossip. Although Fitzgerald's popular reputation has been distorted into that of a playboy who squandered his genius, he was a productive author whose best fiction occupies a permanent place among the classics of American literature.

Early Success.

The only son of a respectable merchant-class Roman Catholic family — on his father's side genteel and on his mother's prosperous — Fitzgerald left Saint Paul, Minnesota, for an academically precarious but socially and artistically profitable four years at Princeton University, leaving without a degree to serve stateside in World War I in 1917. In 1920 his first novel, This Side of Paradise, brought him celebrity and...