Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald (1896-1940) was the brilliant, self- mythologizing chronicler of the Jazz Age whose four completed novels and 150+ short stories mapped the promise and disillusion of modern American life. Born in St. Paul, Minnesota, he was named for his famous distant cousin Francis Scott Key, author of The Star-Spangled Banner. His parents were Edward Fitzgerald and Mary "Mollie" McQuillan; he grew up between the Midwestern respectability of his mother's prosperous Irish-American family and his father's faltering fortunes-an early split that fed the class consciousness in his fiction.Fitzgerald attended St. Paul Academy, then the Newman School in New Jersey, where Father Sigourney Fay encouraged his literary ambitions. He entered Princeton in 1913, threw himself into campus literary life- writing lyrics for the Triangle Club and contributing to the Princeton Tiger and Nassau Literary Magazine-but neglected classes and eventually left to join the Army in 1917. During these years he fell for Chicago heiress Ginevra King, a relationship many scholars see echoing through characters like Daisy Buchanan. Zelda, sudden fame, and the Jazz Age personaWhile stationed near Montgomery, Alabama, in 1918, Fitzgerald met Zelda Sayre. After a brief breakup over money, he rewrote his campus novel; Scribner's published This Side of Paradise in spring 1920, and he married Zelda in New York on April 3, 1920. Instant celebrity followed, and high-paying magazine short stories-especially for The Saturday Evening Post-financed a headline-grabbing lifestyle. Their only child, Frances "Scottie" Fitzgerald, was born in St. Paul on October 26, 1921. Fitzgerald's name became inseparable from the 1920s-he helped popularize the very phrase "Jazz Age," including by titling a 1922 collection Tales of the Jazz Age. After The Beautiful and Damned (1922), the Fitzgeralds decamped to France in 1924, mingling with the American expatriate set around Gerald and Sara Murphy. There he completed The Great Gatsby, published in New York on April 10, 1925-a work he considered his finest. The novel's initial sales disappointed, though its reputation would later make its mark in history.