What was the medical cause of F. Scott Fitzgerald's death?

F. Scott Fitzgerald died of a heart attack. He collapsed in the apartment of his companion, Sheilah Graham, in Hollywood on December 21, 1940, at the age of 44. The underlying condition was occlusive coronary arteriosclerosis, a severe narrowing of the heart’s arteries.

Fitzgerald had experienced serious health and personal difficulties during his final decade. He struggled with alcoholism for much of his adult life, although he had achieved sobriety more than a year before his death. His declining health came during a period when his literary reputation and finances were also under pressure.

A common mix-up is to confuse Fitzgerald’s death with the illnesses that affected other writers of his era, or with the mental illness experienced by his wife, Zelda Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald’s death was cardiac, not caused by tuberculosis, pneumonia, or a stroke. His unfinished novel, The Last Tycoon, was published posthumously in 1941 after his friend Edmund Wilson edited the surviving manuscript.