American novelist and short-story writer whose four completed novels and best stories gave the 1920s its defining American literary voice — the chronicler of the Jazz Age who also, almost alone among its celebrants, saw clearly what it cost. Born in St. Paul, Minnesota, educated at Princeton (which he left without a degree), Fitzgerald published This Side of Paradise at twenty-three, married Zelda Sayre within a week of its success, and spent the rest of the decade in New York, Long Island, and Paris, living at the edge of — and often past — his means. He knew Hemingway in Paris in the mid-1920s (the relationship is the central male friendship in A Moveable Feast) and envied, was envied by, and was overshadowed by him.
The Great Gatsby (1925) is the book. Compact, formally taut, narrated at one remove by Nick Carraway, it turns the story of a self-invented bootlegger's doomed pursuit of a married rich girl into the most concentrated American novel ever written about class, money, longing, and the national self-deception that attaches grand meanings to the accumulation of wealth. Tender Is the Night (1934), his fourth and last completed novel, is longer, looser, and in places finer — the Riviera, psychiatry, the disintegration of a marriage that closely tracked his own with Zelda, whose mental illness had by then been diagnosed as schizophrenia. The Last Tycoon, unfinished at his death in Hollywood at 44, would likely have been his best.
Fitzgerald's stock has only risen. The prose is lyric without being ornate; the social eye is as sharp as any American novelist's; the moral seriousness — the sense that American wealth is built on a kind of beautiful lie — connects him to writers as different as Faulkner and Gatsby's many Black American readers, who have found in Nick's final pages one of the clearest statements of the national problem.