F. Scott Fitzgerald is widely praised as the finest and most famous novelist of 20th century America. His reputation is infinitely more lustrous since his untimely death than it was for much of his twenty-year literary career and is largely based on his 1925 novel, The Great Gatsby, as well as on the colourful and tragic incidents of his personal life. His alcoholism; his fairy tale marriage to the beautiful Zelda Sayre and her gradual descent into schizophrenia. The incandescent blossoming and dissipation of his literary gifts have all added to his legend.