Who was F. Scott Fitzgerald?

Francis Scott Fitzgerald was an American Modernist writer best known for his novel The Great Gatsby. His work captures the disillusion of the post-war generation and the excesses of the Jazz Age.

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F. Scott Fitzgerald

Francis Scott Fitzgerald was an American Modernist writer best known for his novel The Great Gatsby. His work captures the disillusion of the post-war generation and the excesses of the Jazz Age.

F. Scott Fitzgerald was born in 1896 to a middle class family in Minnesota. Although he tried to make a name for himself as a writer in college, he eventually dropped out and joined the army. World War I ended before he was deployed, but his time in the army was nevertheless life-altering since his Alabama placement brought him into contact with Zelda Sayre, a young Montgomery debutante. The love story between Fitzgerald and Zelda is as well-known as his literary accomplishments. Most of Fitzgerald’s novels contain semi-autobiographical details of his experiences with Zelda. The pair married a week after the publication of his first novel, This Side of Paradise, and lived an active social life, enjoying the nightlife and excesses of the Roaring Twenties. Ironically, much of Fitzgerald’s writing strongly criticized the very lifestyle he led.

Fitzgerald was a key figure in the Modernist movement that arose in the post-war West. Like other Modern writers, Fitzgerald rejected traditional values and institutions. His novels were often satires and scathing rejections of the accepted ideas about love, success, and happiness. Although he wrote a number of short stories (including “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”) and magazine pieces, he is best known for his five novels. His most enduring work, The Great Gatsby, explores the emptiness of material wealth and the death of the American Dream. Today, this novel stands out as a perfect depiction of the Jazz Age and the post-war cynicism of the 1920s. Sadly, Fitzgerald’s own life mirrored many of the themes of his literature. While he enjoyed the heights of love, success, and good living at a young age, he found his prospects reversed barely a decade after his first success. Struggling with alcoholism, writer's block, and a broken marriage, he died at just 44 years old.

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Famous Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald

• The Great Gatsby
• This Side of Paradise
• The Beautiful and the Damned
• Tender is the Night
• The Offshore Pirate
• “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”

F. Scott Fitzgerald Quotes