Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald (F.Scott Fitzgerald)

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Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald (September 24, 1896, St. Paul, Minn U.S - December 21, 1940 Hollywood, Calif) was a short story writer. Fitzgerald is regarded as one of the greatest American writers of the twentieth century, with his novels famous for its depiction of the Jazz Age (1920s). He finished four novels (including "The Great Gatsby", "The Beautiful and the Damned"), left the fifth unfinished and wrote a dozen more that features the theme of youth, despair and age.

Fitzgerald was the only son of an unsuccessful, upper-class father and an energetic, provincial mother. His prename, Francis Scott Key, was given to him to honour his distant and successful relative. Fitzgerald's father, Edward Fitzgerald, was from Maryland while his mother, Mary McQuillan, was the daughter of an Irish-Catholic immigrant.

Fitzgerald had an intensely romantic imagination and he charged into experience determined to succeed those promises. At both St. Paul Academy (1908-10) and Newman School (1911-13) he tried too hard and made himself unpopular, but at Princeton he came close to realizing his dream of a brilliant success.

He became a prominent figure in the literary life of the university and made lifelong friendships with Edmund Wilson and John Peale Bishop. He became a leading figure in the socially important Triangle Club, a dramatic society, and was elected to one of the leading clubs of the university; where he fell in love with Ginevra King, one of the beauties of her generation. Then he lost Ginevra and left Princeton empty handed.

He returned to Princeton the next fall, but he had now lost all the positions desirable, and in November 1917 he left to join the army. In July 1918, while he was stationed near Montgomery, Ala., he met Zelda Sayre, the daughter of an Alabama Supreme Court judge. They fell...