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Francis Scott Fitzgerald is born in St. Paul, Minnesota.
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At the age of 14, F. Scott Fitzgerald appears in print for the first time, with "The Mystery of the Raymond Mortgage" in the student publication St. Paul Academy Now and Then.
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Fitzgerald enters Princeton University with the Class of 1917.
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Fitzgerald takes a commission as an infantry second lieutenant in the U.S. Army and leaves school to report for duty at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. He never graduates from Princeton.
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F. Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda Sayre meet at a country club dance in Montgomery, Alabama.
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Fitzgerald is discharged from the Army in February. Hoping to marry Zelda, he takes an advertising job in New York. In June Zelda breaks the engagement due to Fitzgerald's lack of fame and wealth. Fitzgerald quits advertising, moves in with his parents in St. Paul and goes to work rewriting The Romantic Egoist.
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This Side of Paradise, Fitzgerald's first novel, is published. A week later, he and Zelda marry in St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York.
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The Fitzgeralds' first and only child is born, a daughter named Frances Scott "Scottie" Fitzgerald.
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F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway meet at a bar in Paris.
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Zelda suffers her first nervous breakdown and spends much of the next year hospitalized in various clinics in Switzerland. In November Fitzgerald publishes the short story "One Trip Abroad," about an American couple who fall apart in Europe.
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The first of Fitzgerald's three-part autobiographical essay "The Crack-Up," detailing his own mental breakdown, appears in Esquire magazine. The third and final part runs in April, the same month that Zelda is committed to Highland Hospital mental asylum in Asheville, North Carolina. She lives there, on and off, for the rest of her life.
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Fitzgerald moves to Hollywood after signing a six-month contract from Metro Goldwyn Mayer, hoping that he'll work his way out of debt with screenplays. Within days of his arrival he meets a movie columnist named Sheilah Graham. They begin an affair that lasts until his death.
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Begins work on his final novel The Last Tycoon in the summer, but is unable to sell the serial rights to a magazine.
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F. Scott Fitzgerald dies of a heart attack at Sheilah Graham's Hollywood, California apartment. He is buried in Rockville, Maryland, where his father was born.
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The Last Tycoon is published after Fitzgerald's death.
