F. Scott Fitzgerald

F. Scott Fitzgerald named the Jazz Age and then watched it destroy him. His first novel, This Side of Paradise, published in 1920 when he was 23, made him famous overnight and gave him and his wife Zelda the money and the license to become the most celebrated — and most reckless — literary couple in America. He spent the next decade producing some of the finest prose in the English language while spending faster than he could earn, drinking more than he could sustain, and watching Zelda slide into the mental illness that would eventually institutionalize her for most of her adult life. He lived the decade he wrote about with a thoroughness that was both his gift and his catastrophe.

The Great Gatsby, published in 1925, sold modestly in his lifetime and is now understood as one of the two or three greatest American novels ever written. Its subject — the destruction of a man who mistakes wealth for meaning and romantic obsession for love, against the backdrop of a society that has confused prosperity with virtue — captured something so precise about the American character that the book has never gone out of print and has never stopped feeling current. Fitzgerald wrote it in five months on the French Riviera, revised it meticulously on the advice of his editor Maxwell Perkins, and watched it fail to make him rich.

The 1930s broke him. Zelda's breakdown, his alcoholism, and the Depression's indifference to his particular kind of glamour reduced him to writing Hollywood screenplays he found humiliating. He died of a heart attack in Hollywood in December 1940, at 44, widely considered a burnt-out relic of a vanished era. His unfinished final novel, The Last Tycoon, was published posthumously. Within a decade of his death Edmund Wilson and others had resurrected his reputation, and The Great Gatsby had become required reading in American high schools — a fate Fitzgerald, who wanted desperately to be taken seriously, would have found grimly satisfying.