F. Scott Fitzgerald, real name Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald, was born in St. Paul, Minnesota on September 24, 1986. The son of Edward Fitzgerald and Mary “Mollie” Fitzgerald nee McQuillan, Francis was named after Francis Scott Key, the author of the National Anthem and his second cousin three times removed. Throughout his youth, Fitzgerald wrote school plays for St. Paul Academy and the Newman School, where he met Father Sigourney Fay, his mentor. He attended Princeton from 1913 to 1917 where he neglected his studies for literary apprenticeship but contributed to the Princeton Triangle club musicals as scriptwriter and lyricist, the Princeton Tiger, the college’s humor magazine, and the Nassau Literary Magazine. However, with his graduation prospects looking slim and him being academic probation, he joined the army, eventually transferring over to Camp Sheridan near Montgomery, Alabama where he would meet his wife, Zelda Fitzgerald nee Sayre. Their relationship was a tumultuous one, the two constantly breaking up, making up, and later on, getting into domestic fights. What balanced this out initially was Fitzgerald’s success and popularity as a fiction writer, the lavish lifestyle of the celebrity, and the birth of their only child, Frances Scott “Scottie” Fitzgerald. However, even that would not last long: between the writer’s worsening alcoholism, Zelda’s worsening mental health, and the excessive spending the two did resulting in massive debt, Fitzgerald became his own antithesis. Thinking himself a failure, F. Scott Fitzgerald died of a heart attack on December 21, 1940.

Aside from The Great Gatsby, his other notable works include Tender Is the Night, The Beautiful and The Damned, This Side of Paradise, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Winter Dreams, Babylon Revisited and his unfinished novel, The Love of the Last Tycoon. For a full list of Fitzgerald’s Bibliography, click here.