King of the Jazz Age Literature

The author of The Great Gatsby, Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald, was born on September 29,1896 in St. Paul, Minnesota. He started writing in the school newspaper as a young thirteen year old boy when he entered St. Paul Academy. When he attended the Newman school, a Catholic Prep School in New Jersey, Father Sigourney Fay encourage Fitzgeral to follow his dreams and ambitions. Later on, he went to Princeton and strengthened his writing abilities.

In 1917, he joined the army to fight in WWI and was assigned to Camp Sheridan in Alabama. In Alabama, he fell in love with Zelda Sayre, but after she rejected his marriage proposal due to his lack of success, he went back to St. Paul to work on one of his novels, This Side of Paradise.

After his novel was published, he became wealthy and successful enough to marry Zelda in New York. He moved to an apartment in New York City and worked on his second novel, The Beautiful and the Damned.

In 1921, Zelda became pregnant and they went back to St. Paul. Later on, their daughter, Frances Scott Fitzgerald was born.

In 1924, Fitzgerald moved to France to work on another novel, The Great Gatsby. The next year, when it was published, the sales were disappointing but movie deals brought in more money.

In 1927, he moved back to the United States and noticed that Zelda had been behaving strangely. A few years later, she had a mental breakdown and entered a clinic for treatment. Fitzgerald had to postpone writing his novel to write short stories to pay for her bills.

He wrote and published Tender is the Night, hoping to earn enough for his family but he was disappointed again. By 1936, he was continually drinking and poor, so he went to Hollywood to become a screenplay writer. He fell in love with Sheilah Graham, a columnist. He returned to writing novels and worked on The Love of the Last Tycoon, but he died from a heartattack in Sheilah's apartment on December 21, 1940.