He was named after Francis Scott Key, a distant relative who wrote ‘Star Spangled Banner’ (America’s national anthem).

Like most teens, Scott loved girls. After college temporary loves, he met Ginevra King on the last days before Christmas break in 1915. She came from a wealthy Chicago family. They became pen pals of love notes. By the end of the year, Scott dropped out of Princeton due to illness and poor grades. He wrote in his diary that the romance had stopped, that he rarely heard from Ginerva, and he felt crushed.

Scott wrote one of America’s greatest novels, The Great Gatsby.

Scott’s wife, Zelda, in an interview with the New York Tribune in 1922, said she more than once recognized in her husband work pieces of her old diaries and letters from friends.

Through his writing, he made the wealth he craved, but spent it just as fast in social life.
Scott drank consistently, died of a heart attack when he was only 44 years old.

Zelda became schizophrenic and was hospitalized in 1932. She died when a fire broken out in the Highland Mental Institution in Asheville, North Carolina, in 1948.

I visited the Fitzgerald home in Alabama—it’s in the worst condition of any literary figure’s home I’ve ever seen. Very sad, like Scott’s and Zelda’s own end.