Tales of the Jazz Age

FRANCIS SCOTT FITZGERALD (1896-1940) was born in Minnesota and educated at Princeton. His first novel, "This Side of Paradise" (1920), made him instantly famous. Shortly after he married the glamorous Zelda Sayre, and together they embarked on a life of big spending and party going. He published stories in fashionable periodicals such as the "Saturday Evening", "Vanity Fair" and "The Smart Set", in which he chronicled the mood and manners of the times; these were collected as "Flappers and Philosophers" (1920) and "Tales of the Jazz Age" (1922). "The Beautiful and Damned"(1922), a novel about a wealthy, doomed and dissipated marriage, was followed by "The Great Gatsby" (1925), the story of shady, mysterious financer Jay Gatsby, whose romantic and destructive passion for Daisy Buchanan played against a backdrop of Long Island glamour and New York squalor; the story is narrated by the innocent outsider Nick Carraway. "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. He died in Hollywood, of a heart attack, after working as a screenwriter, leaving his last novel, "The Last Tycoon", unfinished.