Francis Scott Fitzgerald was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1896. His first novel, This Side of Paradise (1920), made him famous at twenty-three, and he and his wife Zelda became the golden couple of the Jazz Age, a name he gave the decade himself.

The Great Gatsby (1925) was his masterpiece, though it sold disappointingly in his lifetime. He died in Hollywood in 1940, at forty-four, believing himself a failure. Today the novel is read in nearly every American school.