Born in 1896 in St. Paul, Minnesota, F. Scott Fitzgerald attended Princeton University but never completed his degree, dropping out in 1917 to join the army. He was stationed in Alabama, where he met the socialite Zelda Sayre, whom he married in 1920 after the success of This Side of Paradise. Fame, money, and excessive drinking took their toll on both Scott and Zelda. After's Zelda was institutionalized, Fitzgerald moved to Hollywood in 1937 to write scripts and attempt to revive a flagging career; his experiences there inspired the unfinished novel The Last Tycoon (1941). Fitzgerald died of a heart attack in Hollywood in 1940. His major works include This Side of Paradise (1920), The Beautiful and Damned (1922), Tales of the Jazz Age (1922), The Great Gatsby (1925), All the Sad Young Men (1926), and Tender is the Night (1934).

James L. W. West III, editor, is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English, Emeritus, at Pennsylvania State University. He is the author of William Styron: A Life (1998) and The Perfect Hour: The Romance of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ginevra King (2005), among other books. From 1994 to 2019, West was the General Editor of the Cambridge Edition of the Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald; his variorum edition of The Great Gatsby was the final volume in the series.