Fitzgerald, F. Scott

Fitzgerald, F. Scott ( Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald) (1896–1940), American novelist. His first novel, This Side of Paradise (1920), made him instantly famous; shortly after its publication he married Zelda Sayre, and together they embarked on a life of high living, big spending, and party-going. His short stories, first published in fashionable periodicals, were collected as Flappers and Philosophers (1920) and Tales of the Jazz Age (1922), the latter including his child's-eye fantasy of extravagance, ‘The Diamond as Big as the Ritz’. The Beautiful and Damned (1922), a novel about a doomed marriage, was followed by The Great Gatsby (1925), the story of shady, mysterious financier Jay Gatsby's romantic and destructive passion for Daisy Buchanan. More short stories followed (All the Sad Young Men, 1926; Taps at Reveille, 1935), but by this time Zelda was suffering from mental breakdown, Scott from the effects of their violent lives, and Tender is the Night (1934) records, through the story of American psychiatrist Dick Diver and his schizophrenic wife Nicole, his own sense of impending disaster. Fitzgerald's own ‘crack-up’ accelerated, as Zelda failed to recover: he died in Hollywood, of a heart attack, after working as a screenwriter, leaving his last novel, The Last Tycoon (1941), unfinished.