F. Scott Fitzgerald was born into a Catholic family in St. Paul, Minnesota, on September 24, 1896. Educated in private prep schools and then at Princeton until 1917, when he enlisted in the army because he feared he wouldn't graduate , he was a middle-class, Midwestern boy who coveted the wonders of the East. When he married Zelda Sayre, a southern, upper-class daughter of a wealthy Alabama Supreme Court judge , Fitzgerald thought he had it all. The couple lived the high life, moving back and forth between Paris, the Riviera, and New York, but after a while Fitzgerald became...
characters that resembled Scott himself. The 1920's were full of wonderful highs, but also deathly lows in which the rising economy of the first eight years of the decade paralleled the early portion of Fitzgerald's life, but the crash of 1929 matched his downfall. "Like the Jazz Age, they [Zelda and Scott] were both beautiful and damned, and like it, they destroyed themselves." Fitzgerald's life was "an extraordinary portrait of an age, of a marriage, and of a man and a woman who cared too much, who lived too passionately, whose fatal flaw was their incredible capacity for life."