F. Scott Fitzgerald is an American novelist, short story writer, and essayist. He is most famous for his novel, The Great Gatsby, which is widely considered one of the greatest American novels. Born in St. Paul, Minnesota in 1896, Fitzgerald entered Princeton at the age of 16, but dropped out to enlist in the Army during World War I. He began his writing career in 1920 at the age of 24, with the publication of This Side of Paradise, an immediate success that established him as the voice of the Jazz Age generation. He followed it with The Beautiful and the Damned in 1922, which only brought him more success.

Fitzgerald worked on and published his third novel, The Great Gatsby (1925), while he, his wife Zelda, and their daughter lived in Europe. Although it was received well critically, sales were disappointing, and the decline in Fitzgerald’s popularity began. Tender is the Night, his fourth novel, was not financially successful, and its publication in 1934, during the height of the Depression, caused many to dismiss Fitzgerald as belonging to an era that had passed. Fitzgerald died before his fifth novel, The Last Tycoon, was finished, but it was completed and published posthumously in 1941 by writer Edmund Wilson.