Author, Screenwriter
Born: Sept. 24, 1896, in St. Paul, Minnesota
Died: Dec. 21, 1940, in Los Angeles
New Jersey Hall of Fame, Class of 2009: Arts & Letters

Considered among the great American writers of the 20th century, F. Scott Fitzgerald chronicled the exuberance and excesses of the Jazz Age, a term he coined in reference to the decade following World War I. Oddly, commercial success often eluded Fitzgerald during his lifetime. His most famous work, “The Great Gatsby”—often referred to as the Great American Novel–remained underappreciated until after the writer’s death.

Born into a middle-class family in Minnesota, Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was named for a distant cousin who, more than eight decades earlier, had penned “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Fitzgerald’s parents were of Irish and English ancestry. His father, Edward Fitzgerald, was a manufacturer of wicker furniture. When Edward’s business failed, he moved the family to western New York to take a job as a salesman. When Scott was 15, his parents sent him to the Newman School, a religious prep school in Hackensack, where one of the Catholic fathers first recognized his literary potential and encouraged him to become a writer.

In 1913, Fitzgerald enrolled at Princeton University, where he honed his literary skills, writing stories and poems for various university publications. Fitzgerald never graduated from Princeton. Instead, he enlisted in the Army in 1917, several months after the United States entered World War I. Fitzgerald trained with an infantry regiment and was commissioned a second lieutenant, but the war ended before he could be deployed.

Following the war, Fitzgerald moved to New York to launch his literary career. He took a job in advertising to sustain himself as he sought—unsuccessfully—to sell his short stories. Finally, in 1920, Scribner’s, a publisher of fine literature, issued his debut novel, “This Side of Paradise,” an autobiographical account of Fitzgerald’s Princeton years. The book was greeted with great acclaim and ignited the market for his short stories.

With his new-found fame, Fitzgerald plunged into New York’s literary and social circles and enjoyed a giddy lifestyle with his new wife, the former Zelda Sayre, a southern debutante he had courted when stationed with the Army in Alabama. Zelda became the model for many of Fitzgerald’s characters; their stormy relationship informed the plot of Fitzgerald’s second novel, “The Beautiful and Damned,” which explored the indulgences of New York’s idle rich. His short stories of the period—many compiled in his 1922 collection “Tales of the Jazz Age”–often depicted the champagne-fueled hedonism of Prohibition-era New York.

Seeking a change in scene, the Fitzgeralds lived for a period on Long Island, then travelled to various European capitals—all while Scott labored over what would become “The Great Gatsby.” In France, they befriended contemporary literary figures such as James Joyce, Ezra Pound, and Ernest Hemingway, some of whom epitomized what would be known as the Lost Generation, an unmoored cohort that came of age in the 1920s.

The Fitzgeralds were still living in Europe when Scribner’s published “Gatsby” in 1925. Despite critical praise, the novel, which exposes the extravagance and disillusionment of the wealthy partying set on Long Island, was considered a commercial failure compared to his earlier works. His fourth novel, “Tender is the Night,” published in 1934, was another disappointment. With Fitzgerald’s income drying up during the Great Depression, he and Zelda could no longer afford their opulent lifestyle. His heavy drinking and her longtime mental-health issues degenerated into a flammable mix.

Amid his financial struggles, Fitzgerald moved to Hollywood to start a largely lackluster career as a screenwriter. His health compromised by years of indulgence, Fitzgerald died in Hollywood of a heart attack at age 44. Within a year of his death, a friend from his Princeton years, the literary critic Edmund Wilson, completed Fitzgerald’s final novel, “The Last Tycoon.” The book fueled new interest in “Gatsby,” driving strong sales throughout the 1940s. Over the ensuing decades, “Gatsby” sold in the millions, cementing Fitzgerald’s place in the American literary pantheon. Over the years, the novel has been adapted for at least six film or television productions. Additionally, most of Fitzgerald’s other novels and many of his 164 published short stories have been adapted for film or TV, assuring his lasting impact on American culture.