[36][37] While awaiting deployment to the Western front where he hoped to die in combat,[37] he was stationed in a training camp at Fort Leavenworth under the command of Captain Dwight Eisenhower, the future general of the Army and United States President.

[43] At a country club, Fitzgerald met Zelda Sayre, a 17-year-old Southern belle and the affluent granddaughter of a Confederate senator whose extended family owned the first White House of the Confederacy.

[71] While Prohibition-era New York City was experiencing the burgeoning Jazz Age, Fitzgerald felt defeated and rudderless: two women had rejected him in succession, he detested his advertising job, his stories failed to sell, he could not afford new clothes, and his future seemed bleak.

[72] Unable to earn a successful living, Fitzgerald publicly threatened to jump to his death from a window ledge of the Yale Club,[d][74] and he carried a revolver daily while contemplating suicide.

[75] Abstaining from alcohol and parties,[76] he worked day and night to revise The Romantic Egotist as This Side of Paradise—an autobiographical account of his Princeton years and his romances with Ginevra, Zelda, and others.

He met sports columnist Ring Lardner,[101] journalist Rebecca West,[102] cartoonist Rube Goldberg,[103] actress Laurette Taylor,[103] actor Lew Fields,[104] comedian Ed Wynn,[104] and many others.

[105] He became close friends with critics George Jean Nathan and H. L. Mencken, the influential co-editors of The Smart Set magazine who led an ongoing cultural war against puritanism in American arts.

[130] Purportedly born in America to a German immigrant family, Gerlach had been a major in the American Expeditionary Forces during World War I and became a gentleman bootlegger who lived like a millionaire in New York.

[152] Upon its release on April 10, 1925, Willa Cather, T. S. Eliot, and Edith Wharton praised Fitzgerald's work,[153] and the novel received generally favorable reviews from contemporary literary critics.

During this period, he became friends with writer Gertrude Stein, bookseller Sylvia Beach, novelist James Joyce, poet Ezra Pound and other members of the American expatriate community in Paris,[160] some of whom would later be identified with the Lost Generation.

[190] During an automobile trip to Paris along the mountainous roads of the Grande Corniche, Zelda seized the car's steering wheel and tried to kill herself along with Fitzgerald and their nine-year-old daughter by driving over a cliff.

"[261] The following day, as Fitzgerald annotated his newly arrived Princeton Alumni Weekly,[262] Graham saw him jump from his armchair, grab the mantelpiece, and collapse on the floor without uttering a sound.

[277] In retrospective reviews that followed after his death, literary critics such as Peter Quennell dismissed his magnum opus The Great Gatsby as merely a nostalgic period piece with "the sadness and the remote jauntiness of a Gershwin tune".

"[279] Within one year after his death, Edmund Wilson completed Fitzgerald's unfinished fifth novel The Last Tycoon using the author's extensive notes,[l][281] and he included The Great Gatsby within the edition, sparking new interest and discussion among critics.

[159] Amid World War II, The Great Gatsby gained further popularity when the Council on Books in Wartime distributed free Armed Services Edition copies to American soldiers serving overseas.

[285] In 1952, critic Cyril Connolly observed that "apart from his increasing stature as writer, Fitzgerald is now firmly established as a myth, an American version of the Dying God, an Adonis of letters" whose rise and fall inevitably prompts comparisons to the Jazz Age itself.

[286] Echoing these opinions, writer Adam Gopnik asserted that—contrary to Fitzgerald's claim that "there are no second acts in American lives"—Fitzgerald became "not a poignant footnote to an ill-named time but an enduring legend of the West".

[294] Believing that prose has a basis in lyric verse,[295] Fitzgerald initially crafted his sentences entirely by ear and, consequently, his earliest efforts contained numerous malapropisms and descriptive non sequiturs which irritated both editors and readers.

[313] Although critics deemed The Beautiful and Damned to be less ground-breaking than its predecessor,[314][315] many recognized that the vast improvement in literary form and construction between his first and second novels augured great prospects for Fitzgerald's future.

[332] Due to this change, although Fitzgerald showed a mastery of "verbal nuance, flexible rhythm, dramatic construction and essential tragi-comedy" in Tender Is the Night,[293] many reviewers dismissed the work for its disengagement with the political issues of the era.

"[334] In contrast to the discernible progression in literary quality and artistic maturity represented by his novels,[293] Fitzgerald's 164 short stories displayed the opposite tendency and attracted significant criticism.

"[336] Realizing that slick magazines such as the Saturday Evening Post and Esquire were more likely to publish stories that pandered to young love and featured saccharine dénouements, Fitzgerald became adept at tailoring his short fiction to the vicissitudes of commercial tastes.

[349] He riveted the nation's attention upon the activities of their sons and daughters cavorting in the rumble seat of Bearcat roadster on a lonely road and sparked a societal debate over their perceived immorality.

[293] Remarking upon the cultural association between Fitzgerald and the flaming youth of the Jazz Age, Gertrude Stein wrote in her memoir The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas that the author's fiction essentially created this new generation in the public's mind.

[327] Echoing this assertion, critics John V. A. Weaver and Edmund Wilson insisted that Fitzgerald imbued the Jazz Age generation with the gift of self-consciousness while simultaneously making the public aware of them as a distinct cohort.

[359] Mere weeks after Fitzgerald's death in 1940, Westbrook Pegler wrote in a column for The New York World-Telegram that the author's passing recalled "memories of a queer bunch of undisciplined and self-indulgent brats who were determined not to pull their weight in the boat and wanted the world to drop everything and sit down and bawl with them.

[369] Although fundamental conflict occurs between entrenched sources of socio-economic power and upstarts who threaten their interests,[371] Fitzgerald's fiction shows that a class permanence persists despite the country's capitalist economy that prizes innovation and adaptability.

[371][381] Since Americans living in the 1920s to the present must navigate a society with entrenched prejudices, Fitzgerald's depiction of resultant status anxieties and social conflict in his fiction has been highlighted by scholars as still enduringly relevant nearly a hundred years later.

[394][395] Fitzgerald partly justified the perceived lack of political and intellectual substance in his fiction by arguing that he was writing for a new, largely apolitical, generation "dedicated more than the last to the fear of poverty and the worship of success; grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken.

[404] When his friend Burton Rascoe asked Zelda to review the book for the New-York Tribune as a publicity stunt,[405] she wrote—partly in jest—that it "seems to me that on one page I recognized a portion of an old diary of mine which mysteriously disappeared shortly after my marriage, and also scraps of letters, which, though considerably edited, sound to me vaguely familiar.