F. Scott Fitzgerald defined the Jazz Age, wrote The Great Gatsby, and died at forty-four in a Hollywood apartment believing his life’s work had been forgotten. Gatsby had sold poorly, his final novel was unfinished, and the literary world had moved on. He could not have known that within a decade of his death, the novel he considered a commercial failure would be recognized as the greatest American novel of the twentieth century.

This episode traces Fitzgerald from his Princeton ambitions through the early success of This Side of Paradise, his marriage to Zelda, the creation of Gatsby, the alcoholic decline, and the Hollywood years where he died mid-sentence, convinced he had failed.

• Fitzgerald’s Princeton years and the early fame of This Side of Paradise
• The marriage to Zelda Sayre and the glamorous, destructive life that fed his fiction
• The writing of The Great Gatsby and its devastating commercial failure on publication
• The Hollywood exile, Zelda’s breakdown, and Fitzgerald’s death believing his legacy was nothing