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"You don't write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say."

Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald (September 24, 1896 — December 21, 1940) was an American author who is well known as the chronicler (and namer) of the Jazz Age. Throughout his career he wrote five novels and many short stories.

Fitzgerald was born in Minnesota. He liked to drink and party and wrote his novels in order to support that lifestyle for his wife. The materialistic and hedonistic tendencies of his peers are reflected in his works, as is plenty of angst about the appropriateness of all that partying after World War I. While courting his future wife, Zelda, he completed his first novel This Side of Paradise. The works that followed were a river of short stories, The Beautiful and Damned, Tender Is the Night, The Love of the Last Tycoon, and his most famous work, The Great Gatsby.

The critical and commercial popularity of Fitzgerald's work faded during his lifetime, and he finished his career as a script doctor in Hollywood. His critical reputation was revived following his death, with The Great Gatsby emerging as a strong contender for the Great American Novel.

He has been portrayed by:


Works by F. Scott Fitzgerald with their own trope pages include:


Other works by F. Scott Fitzgerald provide examples of:

  • Artistic License – Economics: Averted in "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz". The Washington family discovers a mountain made entirely of solid diamond, but cashing in would lower the value of diamonds to next to nothing and leave the family near-broke. (Today, the mountain would not necessarily be rendered worthless, as more diamonds are used for industrial purposes than as jewelry. However, Fitzgerald wrote before this was a common industrial practice.)
  • Celebrity Paradox: In The Beautiful and Damned, one character mentioned a new book called This Side of Paradise that's just been released.
  • Died During Production: The Love of the Last Tycoon wasn't finished by the time he kicked the bucket, but eventually got published after his friend Edmund Wilson finished it up using the manuscript.
  • Forgot I Couldn't Swim: The protagonist of "The Swimmers" forgot that he couldn't swim and tried to save a drowning girl. Later it played a major part in his Character Development.
    "This is the man who didn't know whether he could swim, because he'd never tried."
  • God Is Dead: "A new generation dedicated more than the last to the fear of poverty and the worship of success; grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken." —
  • Treasure Is Bigger in Fiction: The eponymous diamond in "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz" is as big as a mountain. Its owners live on it both metaphorically and literally.

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