The Author Francis Scott Fitzgerald Francis Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, U.S.A. and came from a middle-class family. He attended Princeton University, but he never took his degree, leaving university in 1917 to enlist in the army. He was sent to a training camp in Alabama, but the 1st World War ended while he was still there, so he never went to Europe to fight. While he was in Alabama, Fitzgerald met Zelda Sayre, a young and beautiful socialite1, daughter of an Alabama Supreme Court judge. They fell passionately in love, but she refused to marry him because he was poor. In order to earn money, Fitzgerald moved to New York, where he only found a badly paid job in advertising. In 1920, however, he completed his first novel, This Side of Paradise, a portrait of young people s lifestyle at the beginning of the 1920s The Roaring Twenties, as they were later called, or The Jazz Age, as Fitzgerald himself called the period. The book was an immediate success; it gave him money and also the girl he loved. In fact, one week after the novel was published, he and Zelda Sayre were married. Thanks to the royalties2 and to the very well-paid short stories that he contributed to magazines, the Fitzgeralds were able to live expensively and glamorously. For a while they settled on Long Island, New York, in a large house where they led a frenetic social life, drinking too much and throwing extravagant parties, like the ones described in The Great Gatsby. During the 1920s, they became a sort of living legend, the personification of that Jazz Age that Fitzgerald was describing in his writings. Although he was living a very disorderly life, in fact, he was writing constantly, to earn the money which was necessary for their 1. socialite: someone who is famous because they attend many upperclass social events. 2. royalty: the payment made to a writer for each copy of his work sold. 4