F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) was born in St. Paul, Minnesota. He attended Princeton University, joined the United States Army during World War I, and published his first novel, This Side of Paradise , in 1920. That same year he married Zelda Sayre, and for the next decade the couple lived in New York, Paris, and on the French Riviera. Fitzgerald's masterpieces include The Beautiful and Damned , The Great Gatsby , and Tender Is the Night . He died at the age of forty-four while working on The Last Tycoon . Fitzgerald's fiction has secured his reputation as one of the most important American writers of the twentieth century.