F. Scott Fitzgerald was born on September 24, 1896, in St. Paul, Minnesota, to Edward and Mary McQuillan Fitzgerald. From his father, a businessman, he inherited his predisposition for alcoholism and his romantic imagination; from his mother, an heiress, he developed an attraction to wealth, all of which would become major themes in his work. At a young age, Fitzgerald expressed an interest and a talent in writing as he began to write stories that echoed ones from popular magazines. The school magazines at St. Paul Academy and Newman School, where he attended school, published several of his short stories. Every summer from 1911 to 1914 he wrote plays that neighborhood children performed for charity groups.

He entered Princeton in 1913, where he wrote short stories, poetry, plays, and book reviews for the Nassau Literary Magazine and the Princeton Tiger, and wrote plays for the school's shows. His concentration on writing...