F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) was an American novelist and short story writer. He is best known for his 1925 novel The Great Gatsby, the quintessential tale of the decadence and overindulgence of the Jazz Age. Born into an upper middle-class family in St. Paul, Minnesota, Fitzgerald was raised in New York. After dropping out of Princeton University in 1917 to join the Army, he was stationed in Alabama, where he met wealthy socialite Zelda Sayre. It was only after he achieved moderate success with his debut novel This Side of Paradise that Zelda agreed to marry him. His second novel, The Beautiful and the Damned, propelled him to literary stardom, the volatile nature of which inspired his best-known work The Great Gatsby. Though it met with mixed reviews in Fitzgerald’s lifetime, The Great Gatsby is now considered by some literary scholars to be the "Great American Novel." Haunted by alcoholism, declining popularity, and financial difficulties well into the 1930s, Fitzgerald died in 1940. An unfinished novel, The Last Tycoon, was published posthumously in 1941.
