Fitzgerald, F. Scott

1896–1940

American Novelist and Short-Story Writer

F. Scott Fitzgerald (Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald in full) is America's best-known chronicler of the Jazz Age, a reputation that sometimes overshadows the great merit of his work, especially This Side of Paradise (1920) and The Great Gatsby (1925). In his writings from the 1920s, Fitzgerald explored the tensions besetting the ideal of self-made American manhood. This was an era that seemed to offer incredible possibility, especially for the young, but that also made manifest the growing difficulty of achieving self-made success in modern society.

For Fitzgerald, manhood meant financial success and carefree heterosexual romance. Like some of his characters, the writer found, and then lost, both. Married to Zelda Sayre, whom he met while stationed in Alabama during World War I, ...