Fitzgerald, F(rancis) Scott (Key) 1896-1940
US novelist

Born in St Paul, Minnesota, he was educated at Newman School, New Jersey, and Princeton, where one of his contemporaries was Edmund Wilson. He enlisted in the US army in World War I but never left the USA. He married Zelda Fitzgerald (n�e Sayre, 1900-47), and in 1920 published his first novel, This Side of Paradise, based on his experience at Princeton. He captured the spirit of the 1920s ('The Jazz Age'), especially in The Great Gatsby (1925), his best-known book. Other novels include The Beautiful and Damned (1922) and Tender is the Night (1934). His short stories were equally notable, published in Flappers and Philosophers (1920), Tales of the Jazz Age (1922), All the Sad Young Men (1926) and Taps at Reveille (1936). In keeping with his fiction, which revealed both a fascination with the rich and a moral dismay at the aridity of their lives, he led the strenuous life of a playboy in Europe and the USA, exhausting both his financial and emotional resources and exacerbating his wife's mental illness. He described his own problems - and those of his generation - in an influential essay, 'The Crack Up' (1935). Driven by debts and alcoholism himself, he wrote short stories for popular journals, notably the Saturday Evening Post, and in the same spirit went to Hollywood in 1937 as a scriptwriter, where he wrote a final, unfinished novel, The Last Tycoon (1941). He was largely dismissed at his death as the darling of a fatuous decade, but the durable grace and purity of his best prose have since won him a place in the canon of major American writers.

Bibliography: M Bruccoli, Some Sort of Epic Grandeur: a biography of Fitzgerald (1981); A Mizener, The Far Side of Paradise (1951, rev edn 1965)