American · 1896–1940
F. Scott Fitzgerald captured the Jazz Age so completely that he named it. His 1925 novel "The Great Gatsby"—initially a commercial disappointment—became the definitive American novel about wealth, aspiration, and disillusionment. Fitzgerald's prose glitters with the era's champagne excess while dissecting the corruption beneath the party. His own life paralleled his fiction: early success, marriage to the glamorous Zelda, expatriate years in France, then alcoholism and obscurity. He died at forty-four believing himself a failure, just before scholars began the revaluation that made Gatsby required reading.