Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was born in 1896 in St. Paul, Minnesota, and named for a distant relative who wrote “The Star-Spangled Banner.” He went to Princeton, where he wrote musical comedies and neglected his classes, and left without a degree to join the army in 1917. Stationed near Montgomery, Alabama, he met Zelda Sayre, a judge’s daughter, who agreed to marry him if he could support her.

His first novel, This Side of Paradise (1920), was an immediate success, and he married Zelda a week after it came out. They became celebrities, the golden couple of what Fitzgerald himself named the Jazz Age: dancing on tables, jumping into fountains, spending money faster than he could earn it from magazine stories.

The Great Gatsby (1925) is his masterpiece. Nick Carraway, a young bond salesman, rents a house on Long Island next to the mansion of the mysterious Jay Gatsby, who throws enormous parties in the hope that one day Daisy Buchanan, the woman he loved and lost, will walk in. It is short, perfectly made and full of sentences readers know by heart. It sold only about twenty thousand copies in its first year, and Fitzgerald was crushed.

The 1930s were hard. Zelda was hospitalized with mental illness. Fitzgerald drank heavily, and his next novel, Tender Is the Night (1934), sold badly. In a series of essays called “The Crack-Up,” he wrote with painful honesty about his own breakdown. In 1937 he went to Hollywood to write screenplays for money, and he began a novel about a film producer, The Last Tycoon.

He died of a heart attack on December 21, 1940, at forty-four, with the novel unfinished. In the last year of his life, Gatsby earned him almost nothing, and copies from its second printing were still sitting unsold in the publisher’s warehouse. During the Second World War, an American program printed paperback books for soldiers, and about 150,000 copies of Gatsby went overseas. Young men read it in barracks and on ships. When they came home, it was on its way to becoming the great American novel it is now considered.