Born in 1896 to an Irish Catholic family with connections to the American aristocracy, Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald grew up in the elite schools of St. Paul, Minnesota. He was a favorite of his mother's and loyal to his father despite Edward Fitzgerald's series of business failures in upstate New York that brought the family back to St. Paul. In high school, Fitzgerald wrote his first short stories and developed an intense interest in drama, but his poor grades forced him to transfer to the Newman School in Hackensack, New Jersey. He continued to write fiction and participate in drama when he entered Princeton University in 1913, and his experience there was very important to his writing, although he never graduated because of poor grades and illness and because he joined the army when the United States entered World War I.

While he was stationed in Montgomery, Alabama...