F. Scott Fitzgerald is best known today as the author of the classic novel The Great Gatsby. The novel tells the story of Jay Gatsby, a poor and obscure Midwesterner who makes his fortune as a bootlegger to win the heart of his childhood sweetheart. One character says of Gatsby that he made himself up, in other words, that through creating a false personal mythology, by wearing fancy clothes, and buying fancy houses, Gatsby unsuccessfully tried to create a new identity for himself. The same could have been said of his creator, although unlike Gatsby, Fitzgerald had a far more ironic view of the world as a writer. He ironically chronicled Ivy League and elite Long Island society observed with wonder by the narrator of Fitzgerald's greatest book.
             Fitzgerald was born in the American heartland, in St. Paul Minnesota on September 24, 1896. His father Edward Fitzgerald was a failed furniture salesman and his mother Mary was an Irish immigrant. (Willet, 2006) Both were Catholic and thanks to his mother's inheritance, solidly middle-class, although it is said his father drank more at the office than he worked. The young Fitzgerald excelled as a writer at the Catholic school where he studied, but always felt somewhat out of his social element because of his mother's Irish birth when he ventured into the realms of the real St. Paul elite, such as at his local dancing school. (Martine, 1981, p.3)
             Fitzgerald got into Princeton but he was not particularly studious. He struggled academically. He wrote for the Princeton Triangle Club musicals, the Princeton Tiger humor magazine and the Nassau Literary Magazine. He was placed on academic probation. As he was unlikely to graduate he eventually dropped out of school to join the army. (Bruccoli, 1994) When the army stationed him near Montgomery, Alabama in 1918, Scott met and fell in love Zelda, who was later to become his wife. When he later proposed, Zelda initially rebuffed Fi...