F. Scott Fitzgerald was an author during the Jazz Age, a term he popularized after WWI to convey the “era’s newfound prosperity, consumerism, and shifting sexual mores.” Although his most popular book was The Great Gatsby, he originally rose to fame in 1920 at 23 years old when he published This Side of Paradise. Fitzgerald often writes about ambition and loss, discipline vs. self-indulgence, love and romance, and money and class. Many of these themes are very clearly reflected in Gatsby.    

 

Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was born on September 24, 1896 to Edward Fitzgerald and Mollie McQuillan Fitzgerald and first began writing at the age of 13 for his school’s newspaper. Throughout his early childhood, his family was financially unstable as his father was a failed businessman, and they relied solely on his mother’s inheritance. Living amongst the monied elite of St. Paul, Minnesota, Fitzgerald was very aware of his family’s outsider status. He was not a particularly good student either, his poor grades in high school interfering with his extracurricular pursuits of popularity. Later, in 1917, he would flunk out of Princeton University. His aspirations for military heroism were less than successful as well, as he described himself to be the “army’s worst aide-de-camp” while working as a lieutenant during the Great War. 

 

His romantic disappointments along with his failed military career served as inspiration for his novels. During his late teens he began dating girls from wealthier families though they often remarked that “poor boys [like him] shouldn’t think of marrying rich girls.” Early in his writing career because his writing was more autobiographical, critics tended to dismiss him as a “facile” writer. Though his personal milestones as representative of peers’ collective experience in his writing is what made him extremely popular and successful throughout his career. Fitzgerald began his career by writing about youth but later expanded his writing to address broader cultural concerns like money and status.