1896–1940

One of the great American novelists, F. Scott Fitzgerald lived in a squalid one–room apartment at 200 Claremont Street (near Columbia University) and worked for an advertising agency before he became successful as a writer. He had a remarkable ability to describe the city in glowing terms: “New York had all the iridescence of the beginning of the world,” he explains in his essay The Crack–Up, “…this was the greatest nation and there was gala in the air.” His great novels, including This Side of Paradise (1920), The Beautiful and the Damned (1922), and The Great Gatsby (1925), articulated the passions of the Jazz Age and reflect Fitzgerald’s ambiguous relationship with his own success.