F. Scott Fitzgerald was born in 1896 in St Paul, Minnesota, and went to Princeton University which he left in 1917 to join the army. Fitzgerald was said to have epitomized the Jazz Age, an age inhabited by a generation he defined as "grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken." In 1920 he married Zelda Sayre, and their destructive relationship and her subsequent mental breakdowns became a major influence on his writing. Fitzgerald died suddenly in 1940. After his death the New York Times said of him, "He was better than he knew, for in fact and in the literary sense he invented a 'generation.'"
