What year was F. Scott Fitzgerald born?

F. Scott Fitzgerald was born in 1896.

Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was born on September 24, 1896, in St. Paul, Minnesota. He was named after his distant cousin, Francis Scott Key, the lyricist of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Fitzgerald later became one of the defining American writers of the Jazz Age, a period whose glamour, consumerism, and social change shaped much of his fiction.

Fitzgerald attended Princeton University, although he left without graduating, and his early literary ambitions were closely tied to campus writing and theatrical work. His breakthrough came with This Side of Paradise, published in 1920. The novel’s success made him famous and helped establish his public image as a voice of the young postwar generation.

He is best known for The Great Gatsby, published in 1925, though it was not an immediate commercial triumph. Fitzgerald died in 1940, aged 44, in Hollywood. The year 1896 is sometimes confused with 1900, the birth year of his wife, Zelda Fitzgerald, or with 1925, the publication year of The Great Gatsby.