Even theAmerican Heritage Dictionary acknowledges that F. Scott Fitzgerald "epitomized the Jazz Age." And nowhere among his writings are the gin, pith, and morning-after squint of that era better illuminated than in these short essays. Selected in celebration of the 100th anniversary of Fitzgerald's birth, these candid personal memoirs--one written with his wife, Zelda--furnish nothing less than the autobiography of "the lost generation" of the 1920s. "He lacked armor," EL. Doctorow, author of The Waterworks, Ragtime, and Billy Bathgates, notes in his introduction. "He did not live in protective seclusion, as Faulkner. He was not carapaced in self-presentation, as Hemingway. He jumped right into the foolish heart of everything, as he had into the Plaza fountain." The Jazz Age is a celebration of one of the twentieth century's most vital writers.

F. Scott Fitzgerald was born on September 24, 1896, in St. Paul, Minnesota. He was educated at Princeton University and served in the United States Army during World War I. His first novel, This Side of Paradise (1920), was a national bestseller; Fitzgerald followed it with three more complete novels and hundreds of popular short stories. The Great Gatsby (1925), a timeless story of social class, race, and gender in America, remains his best-known work. Fitzgerald was living in Los Angeles, working on movie screenplays and a novel he called The Love of the Last Tycoon, when he died of a heart attack on December 21, 1941, at the age of 44.