F. Scott Fitzgerald

Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, on September 24, 1896. He failed as a manufacturer of wicker furniture in St. Paul and became a salesman for Procter & Gamble in upstate New York. He was dismissed, still at the young age of 12, and began his life in education. Fitzgerald joined the army in 1917 and was commissioned a second lieutenant in the infantry. He'd been convinced that he would die in the war, so he rapidly wrote his novel, "The Romantic Egotist". The war ended just before he was to be sent overseas, and he was discharged in 1919.

He quit his job in the July of 1919 and returned to St. Paul to rewrite his novel as 'This Side of Paradise' - However, it wasn't until the fall-winter of 1919 when he commenced his career as a writer of stories for the mass-circulation magazines. The publication of This Side of Paradise on March 26, 1920, made the twenty-four-year-old Fitzgerald famous almost overnight, and a week later he married Zelda Sayre in New York. They embarked on an extravagant life as young celebrities.

Fitzgerald wrote The Great Gatsby in France, where he and his wife and daughter were to spend most of the last half of the 1920s. The novel bears almost no resemblance in form to those that had come before. In Jay Gatsby, nee James Gatz, Fitzgerald created far more than just another Amory Blaine seeking his fortune in the world, for in his misguided romantic way Gatsby stands for a deeper malaise in the culture - a sickness that drives young men to think that riches can obliterate the past and capture the hearts of the girls of their dreams.



Information found at ( http://people.brandeis.edu/~teuber/fitzgeraldbio.html#_thegreatgatsby ) and ( http://www.sc.edu/fitzgerald/biography.html )