24 September 1896

On September 24, 1986, Francis Scott Fitzgerald was born in Saint Paul, Minnesota. He belonged to a middle-class family and, after graduating high school, he enrolled in Princeton, where he immediately became part of the University literary environment. Since he was not outstanding in academic diligence, he preferred to drop out of school and join the Army in 1917, the year in which the U.S. entered the First World War. However, the conflict ended before Fitzgerald could be deployed to Europe, and he turned to writing his first novel, This side of Paradise. After the publication of the book, and after earning his first revenues, he married Zelda Sayre, who belonged to a rich family from the South. The couple then decided to move to France, joining the community of writers and artists that lived in the country during the twenties; there, Francis and Zelda lived far beyond their means, a fact that would cause a lot of problems during the following years. Meanwhile, he kept working on his novels and short stories. In 1925 The Great Gatsby, his most famous novel, was published and it received very good literary criticism. In 1930, Zelda was diagnosed with schizophrenia and the couple went back to the United States, hit by the Great Depression, where she was hospitalized. Fitzgerald then left his wife while she was receiving psychiatric treatment and moved alone to Hollywood, where he tried to earn a living by working as a scriptwriter, struggling against financial constraints, depression, alcoholism and the abandonment by the audience and the critics. In fact, the novel Tender is the Night, published in 1934, had been a fiasco and his latest short stories had been harshly criticized. While he was trying to finish his last novel, he suddenly died in 1940; his literary merits, as well as his ability to be an interpreter of his age and his generation, were fully recognized only after his death.