About the Author

Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald, widely regarded as one of the greatest American writers of the twentieth century, was born on September 24, 1896, in Saint Paul, Minnesota, to an upper middle class Irish Catholic family. A renowned American author of novels and short stories, Fitzgerald’s first piece of writing—a detective story published in the school newspaper—appeared in print in 1909, at the age of thirteen. His works form the epitome writings of the Jazz Age, a term he coined himself. He is considered a member of the ‘Lost Generation’ of the 1920s. He finished four novels, This Side of Paradise, The Beautiful and Damned, The Great Gatsby—his most famous— and Tender Is the Night, in his lifetime. A fifth, unfinished novel, The Love of the Last Tycoon, was published posthumously. Fitzgerald also wrote many short stories on themes of youth and promise along with despair and age.