Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald (September 24, 1896 – December 21, 1940) was an American author of novels and short stories, whose works are the paradigmatic writings of the Jazz Age, a term he coined.

Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald (September 24, 1896 – December 21, 1940) was an American author of novels and short stories, whose works are the paradigmatic writings of the Jazz Age, a term he coined. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century. Fitzgerald is considered a member of the "Lost Generation" of the 1920s.

He was born into an upper-middle class family in St. Paul, Minnesota, the only son of Edward Fitzgerald (1853-1931) and Mary 'Mollie' McQuillan (1860-1936), but had one sister, Annabel, born in 1901. In 1898 the Fitzgeralds moved to Buffalo, New York where Edward obtained a job as salesman with Proctor and Gamble after his furniture-making company foundered. It was the first move of many that Francis would make during his lifetime. When Edward lost his job in 1908 they were back in St. Paul.

That same year, young Francis was enrolled in the St. Paul Academy. Early on he showed a love of the theatre and writing--his first work to appear in print was a detective story The Mystery of the Raymond Mortgage (1909) in the Academy's student paper Now and Then. He next attended The Newman School, a Catholic prep school in Hackensack, New Jersey. It was there that he met mentor, friend Father Cyril Webster Sigourney Fay (1875-1919). In 1913 he entered Princeton University and his love of theatre came to the fore--he wrote many scripts and even musicals for the Princeton Club. He also had stories printed in The Princeton Tiger and the Nassau Literary Magazine. Fitzgerald met many lifelong friends at Princeton including John Peale Bishop and Edmund Wilson. His amateur play titles include The Girl From Lazy J (1911), Coward (1913), and Assorted Spirits (1914).

In 1917 Fitzgerald left Princeton to join the army. While in Montgomery, Alabama in 1918 he met Zelda Sayre (1900-1948). A year later they were engaged, but Zelda broke it off a few months later. After his discharge from the army in 1919, Fitzgerald moved to New York City. While working in advertising, he also found time to develop his first novel The Romantic Egoist. It was rejected by the publishers but after three revisions they published it to great success as This Side Of Paradise (1920). Examining the morality of early twentieth century youth, Fitzgerald's voice spoke to many of his contemporaries. He gained much esteem from fellow authors including Ernest Hemingway, although years later Hemingway would viciously criticize him.

Fitzgerald and Zelda married on 3 April 1920 at St Patrick's Cathedral in New York City. Their daughter Frances Scott 'Scottie' was born in 1922. The Fitzgeralds honeymooned at the Biltmore Hotel but were asked to leave because of their notoriously known parties. They settled at a home in Westport, Connecticut and continued the lifestyle of the rich and famous, constantly entertaining. It was the beginning of a turbulent life together. While he continued to write short stories for magazines, his next major published work was a collection of short stories, Flappers and Philosophers (1920).

Tales of the Jazz Age (1922), Fitzgerald's second collection of shorts contains one of his most famous short stories "The Diamond As Big As the Ritz". His second novel, also adapted to the screen, was published the same year, The Beautiful and The Damned (1922);

The Great Gatsby is a 1925 novel written that follows a cast of characters living in the fictional town of West Egg on prosperous Long Island in the summer of 1922. The story primarily concerns the young and mysterious millionaire Jay Gatsby and his passion for the beautiful Daisy Buchanan. Considered to be Fitzgerald's magnum opus, The Great Gatsby explores themes of decadence, idealism, resistance to change, social upheaval, and excess, creating a portrait of the Jazz Age.

First published by Scribner's in April 1925, The Great Gatsby received mixed reviews and sold poorly; in its first year, the book sold only 20,000 copies. Fitzgerald died, believing himself to be a failure and his work forgotten. But his work experienced a revival during World War II, and the novel became a part of American high school curricula in the following decades. The book has remained popular since, leading to numerous stage and film adaptations. The Great Gatsby is widely considered to be a literary classic and a contender for the title "Great American Novel".

After the publishing of Great Gatsby, his short stories continued to appear in magazines, but it was not until 1934 that Fitzgerald published his next book Tender is the Night. Zelda was profoundly upset to discover that Nicole Diver was modeled after her. In 1927 the Fitzgeralds rented the 27 bedroom mansion Ellerslie, near Wilmington, Delaware and drunken parties ensued (happened). Fitzgerald was increasingly turning to alcohol, sometimes becoming abusive. Zelda often acted out impetuously (impulsively), embarrassing herself in front of friends and strangers. For the next three years the couple travelled back and forth between New York, Montgomery, and Baltimore. They also travelled to and stayed in Europe for months at a time, sometimes with fellow Americans in Paris, the Riviera, Cannes, Capri, Antibes, and Rome. In 1930 they were in North Africa, the same year Zelda had a nervous breakdown. For the next few years she was in and out of clinics in Switzerland.

Fitzgerald continued to use his wife's mental breakdowns and their overall dysfunctional relationship in his writings including "The Last of the Belles" (1929), "Babylon Revisited" (1930), "Emotional Bankruptcy" (1931), "Crazy Sunday" (1932), and "Trouble" (1937). Back in America in 1931, Fitzgerald went to California to work on scripts for the Metro Goldwyn Meyer film company. "Red-Headed Woman", "A Yank at Oxford", "Marie Antoinette", and "Three Comrades" are among the scripts he worked on. He moved there in 1938, having fallen in love with writer and movie critic Sheilah Graham. While his contract with MGM was not renewed, a number of other film companies hired him to do freelance work.

Still struggling with her illness, Zelda moved back to America and went to live with her mother in Montgomery in 1940. The same year, Fitzgerald had a heart attack; a month later, on 21 December 1940 he died of a second heart attack at Sheilah Graham's apartment in Hollywood, California. He now rests in Rockville Union Cemetery in Rockville, Maryland, with Zelda by his side. She survived him by eight years, until she died in a fire at the Highland Hospital in Asheville, North Carolina. In 1975 they were re-interred in Scott's family plot at St. Mary's Catholic Church Cemetery, Rockville, Maryland, where their daughter Scottie was buried in 1986.

The Great Gatsby

Nick Carraway, a young man from Minnesota, moves to New York in the summer of 1922 to learn about the bond business. He rents a house in the West Egg district of Long Island, a wealthy but unfashionable area populated by the new rich, a group who have made their fortunes too recently to have established social connections and who are prone to garish (яркий, кричащий) displays of wealth. Nick’s next-door neighbor in West Egg is a mysterious man named Jay Gatsby, who lives in a gigantic mansion and throws extravagant parties every Saturday night.

Nick is unlike the other inhabitants of West Egg—he was educated at Yale and has social connections in East Egg, a fashionable area of Long Island home to the established upper class. Nick drives out to East Egg one evening for dinner with his cousin, Daisy Buchanan, and her husband, Tom, an classmate of Nick’s at Yale. Daisy and Tom introduce Nick to Jordan Baker, a beautiful, cynical young woman with whom Nick begins a romantic relationship. Nick also learns a bit about Daisy and Tom’s marriage: Jordan tells him that Tom has a lover, Myrtle Wilson, who lives in the valley of ashes, a gray industrial dumping ground between West Egg and New York City.

Nick eventually garners an invitation to one of Gatsby’s legendary parties. He encounters Jordan Baker at the party, and they meet Gatsby himself, a surprisingly young man who affects an English accent, has a remarkable smile, and calls everyone “old sport.” Gatsby tells that he knew Daisy in Louisville in 1917 and is deeply in love with her. He spends many nights staring at the green light at the end of her dock, across the bay from his mansion. Gatsby’s extravagant lifestyle and wild parties are simply an attempt to impress Daisy. Gatsby now wants Nick to arrange a reunion between himself and Daisy, but he is afraid that Daisy will refuse to see him if she knows that he still loves her. Nick invites Daisy to have tea at his house. After an initially awkward reunion, Gatsby and Daisy reestablish their connection. Tom grows increasingly suspicious of his wife’s relationship with Gatsby. Though Tom is himself involved in an extramarital affair, he is deeply outraged by the thought that his wife could be unfaithful to him. He forces the group to drive into New York City, where he confronts Gatsby in a suite at the Plaza Hotel. Tom announces to his wife that Gatsby is a criminal—his fortune comes from bootlegging alcohol and other illegal activities. Daisy realizes that her allegiance is to Tom, and Tom contemptuously sends her back to East Egg with Gatsby, attempting to prove that Gatsby cannot hurt him.

When Nick, Jordan, and Tom drive through the valley of ashes, however, they discover that Gatsby’s car has struck and killed Myrtle, Tom’s lover. They rush back to Long Island, where Nick learns from Gatsby that Daisy was driving the car when it struck Myrtle, but that Gatsby intends to take the blame. The next day, Tom tells Myrtle’s husband, George, that Gatsby was the driver of the car. George, who has leapt to the conclusion that the driver of the car that killed Myrtle must have been her lover, finds Gatsby in the pool at his mansion and shoots him dead. He then fatally shoots himself.

Nick stages a small funeral for Gatsby, ends his relationship with Jordan, and moves back to the Midwest to escape the disgust he feels for the people surrounding Gatsby’s life and for the emptiness and moral decay of life among the wealthy on the East Coast. Nick reflects that just as Gatsby’s dream of Daisy was corrupted by money and dishonesty, the American dream of happiness and individualism has disintegrated into the mere pursuit of wealth. Though Gatsby’s power to transform his dreams into reality is what makes him “great,” Nick reflects that the era of dreaming is over.

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