F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896 1940) was an American novelist and short-story writer whose luminous prose and tragic sensibility made him the defining chronicler of the Jazz Age a term he himself coined. Born in St. Paul, Minnesota, and educated at Princeton, he burst onto the literary scene at just twenty-three with This Side of Paradise, a debut that brought him instant fame, a glamorous marriage to Zelda Sayre, and entry into the gilded world of flappers, speakeasies, and expatriate Paris that he would immortalize on the page. Over the next two decades he produced four completed novels including The Beautiful and Damned, Tender Is the Night, and his undisputed masterpiece The Great Gatsby along with more than 160 short stories that captured the yearning, excess, and disillusionment of a generation chasing the American Dream. Plagued by alcoholism, financial troubles, and his wife's mental illness, Fitzgerald died at forty-four believing himself a failure, yet his work has since been recognized as among the finest in American literature, its shimmering surfaces forever rippling with loss, longing, and the green light of possibility.
