F. S. Fitzgerald

American writer (St. Paul, Minnesota, 24. IX. 1896 – Hollywood, 21. XII. 1940). From a wealthy family, studied at Princeton. From 1920, as a writer of stories for newspapers and magazines, he achieved great financial success, which enabled him to live an ostentatious lifestyle in the spirit of the "roaring twenties". Love and marriage to Zelda Sayre, travels in Europe and a bohemian life on the high side, where he met E. Hemingway, W. Faulkner and G. Stein, made him a legend of America's so-called lost generation. In short stories and novels, he recorded the conflict between the dazzling and self-forgetful post-war carnival and the so-called American dream of happiness and success, and the reality as a deception that betrays that dream. In the hectic drive of the eternal "sweet life", despite all the sentimentality and falsehood of the basic drama of himself and his characters, Fitzgerald retains a permanent grain of skepticism: both he and his characters are powerless to change their destined destiny; seeing the reality, they do not give up the "dream". Collections of short stories and novels This Side of Paradise (1920), Tales of the Jazz Age (1922), The Beautiful and Damned (1922), All the Sad Young Men (1926) and his novel masterpieces The Great Gatsby (1925) and Tender Is the Night (1934) they describe the defeated who wanted to "conquer life". After initial great successes, but also neglect after World War II. world war, criticism today sees in him an excellent writer who recorded the permanent components of the so-called social-psychological American character.