American writer Francis (F.) Scott Fitzgerald was BOTD in 1896. Born in Saint Paul, Minnesota to a middle-class family, he studied at Princeton University, dropping out to join the US Army during World War One. He became a literary celebrity with his 1920 debut novel This Side of Paradise, chronicling the dissolute youth of the post-War era. The book’s financial success allowed him to marry his long-term sweetheart Zelda Sayre, a socialite from a prominent Alabama family. They became the glamour couple of the Jazz Age, living lavishly on Fitzgerald’s earnings, a perilous existence described in his 1922 novel The Beautiful and Damned. In 1924, they moved to France, joining an expatriate literary community including Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, Ezra Pound and Ernest Hemingway. Fitzgerald’s friendship with Hemingway was so intense that Zelda accused them of being lovers; in response, Fitzgerald attempted to hire a female prostitute to prove his heterosexuality. His 1925 novel The Great Gatsby, the bittersweet tale of a self-made millionaire pursuing an unhappily married socialite, was critically praised (notably by T. S. Eliot, who called Fitzgerald the greatest American novelist since Henry James) but was initially a commercial failure. Perennially short of money, his marriage suffered due to Zelda’s mental illness and his own affair with a young actress, lightly fictionalised in his 1931 novel Tender is the Night. Zelda was eventually institutionalised, while Fitzgerald attempted to revive his career as a screenwriter in Hollywood, undertaking uncredited rewrites on the films Madame Curie and Gone With the Wind, experiences recounted in his unfinished manuscript The Last Tycoon. A rampant alcoholic, he died in 1940, aged 44. Largely out of fashion at the time of his death, his work underwent a critical reassessment after World War Two. His novels, notably Gatsby, remain bestsellers and are widely hailed as American classics, inspiring numerous stage and screen adaptations. Biographers continue to speculate about Fitzgerald’s sexuality and the current of homoerotic longing in much of his writing, notably Nick Carraway, the closeted gay narrator of Gatsby who wakes up in bed with the effete Mr McKee. He has been portrayed on stage and screen by Jason Robards, Gregory Peck, Richard Chamberlain, Timothy Hutton, Jeremy Irons, Tom Hiddleston and Guy Pearce.