At a young age, Scott showed a talent for writing: At thirteen he published his first story in his school journal. In 1911 he transferred to an elite Catholic prep school in New Jersey, where he published three stories in the school’s literary magazine and wrote several plays. Fitzgerald enrolled in Princeton University in 1913, where he contributed to campus magazines and wrote scripts and lyrics for campus musicals. His devotion to extracurricular activities forced him to leave Princeton because of poor grades, although the reason recorded in official records was poor health. After the United States entered World War I, he enlisted in the army; while stationed at a military camp in Kansas, he began writing The Romantic Egotist, his first novel.

After the war, Fitzgerald was discharged from the army, never having seen active service. He revised his novel and renamed it This Side of Paradise; Charles Scribner’s Sons published it in 1920. That same year Scott married the willful, unpredictable Zelda Sayre, whom he had met several years earlier while stationed at an army base in Alabama. Fitzgerald’s first novel—immensely popular with the war generation—brought him instant fame, although many critics of the day debated its literary merits. He quickly developed notoriety as a carouser and a playboy—impressions he did little to diminish—but his reputation for heavy drinking and continual partying belied his writerly discipline, as evidenced by meticulous revisions of his novels and the numerous short stories he wrote throughout his life. In 1922 he followed his successful debut as a novelist with The Beautiful and Damned, a tale about a couple whose lives end in dissipation while they sue for a large inheritance. In his early works Fitzgerald explored a theme he would return to repeatedly: the effects of wealth and power on the people who possess them.

After the birth of their daughter, Scottie, the Fitzgeralds lived a peripatetic life for many years, settling in Europe for periods and then residing in America. In Paris Fitzgerald met Ernest Hemingway and other American expatriate writers, whom Gertrude Stein was to dub the “lost generation.”

In 1925 Fitzgerald published his masterpiece, The Great Gatsby. Written while the author was living in the French Riviera, the story of the parvenu Jay Gatsby was more a critical success than a financial one, and Fitzgerald continued to support his extravagant lifestyle through frequent, and well-paid, magazine contributions. But his literary fortunes changed following publication of The Great Gatsby. Although he published a collection of short stories in 1926, he did not produce another book until 1934, when Tender Is the Night, on which he had labored for years, was published. Meanwhile, his domestic life deteriorated as he sank deeper into alcoholism and Zelda became increasingly unstable. Zelda’s emotional collapse in 1930 was precipitated by maniacally intense ballet studies; the remaining years of her life were spent in and out of hospitals.

Tender Is the Night was a commercial failure and received mixed reviews from the critics. Fitzgerald spent the years following its publication drunk and dissolute; he chronicled this period in the “Crack-Up” essays. As his literary fame diminished, he worked as a Hollywood scriptwriter and wrote short stories; in 1939 he began work on his final novel, The Last Tycoon, which detailed Hollywood life. By then he was living with Sheilah Graham, a Hollywood gossip columnist, with whom he would spend the rest of his life. On December 21, 1940, before The Last Tycoon was completed, F. Scott Fitzgerald died of a heart attack at the age of forty-four. The Last Tycoon was published in 1941; its writing style is considered as fine as the best of Fitzgerald’s other work.