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Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, on September 24, 1896.
https://sc.edu/about/offices_and_divisions/university_libraries/browse/irvin_dept_special_collections/collections/matthew_arlyn_bruccoli_collection_of_f_scott_fitzgerald/life_of_fitzgerald/index.php -
President William McKinley (1843-1901) dies on September 14, 1901 of complications from bullet wounds inflicted by Leon Czolgosz. Czolgosz, an anarchist, shot the President during one of his public appearances at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York.
https://guides.loc.gov/chronicling-america-william-mckinley-assassination -
Wright brothers make the first controlled, sustained flight in heavier-than-air aircraft at Kitty Hawk, N.C.
https://www.infoplease.com/history/us/us-history-progressive-era-and-world-wars-1900-1949 -
Seventeenth Amendment to the Constitution is ratified, providing for the direct election of U.S. senators by popular vote rather than by the state legislatures.
https://www.infoplease.com/history/us/us-history-progressive-era-and-world-wars-1900-1949 -
Jeannette Rankin of Montana is the first woman elected to the U.S. House of Representatives.
https://www.infoplease.com/history/us/us-history-progressive-era-and-world-wars-1900-1949 -
Convinced that he would die in the war, he rapidly wrote a novel, “The Romantic Egotist”; the letter of rejection from Charles Scribner’s Sons praised the novel’s originality and asked that it be resubmitted when revised.
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Many people know about the success of the infamous writer, F. Scott Fitzgerald. Some know that he attended Princeton University and even based his first novel, This Side of Paradise, on the Ivy League school.
https://universityarchives.princeton.edu/2019/09/f-scott-fitzgerald-a-great-writer-but-a-not-so-great-student/ -
On April 4, 1917, the U.S. Senate voted in support of the measure to declare war on Germany.
https://history.state.gov/milestones/1914-1920/wwi -
Worldwide influenza epidemic strikes; by 1920, nearly 20 million are dead. In U.S., 500,000 perish.
https://www.infoplease.com/history/us/us-history-progressive-era-and-world-wars-1900-1949 -
He went to New York City to seek his fortune in order to marry. Unwilling to wait while Fitzgerald succeeded in the advertisement business and unwilling to live on his small salary, Zelda Sayre broke their engagement.
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Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution is ratified, prohibiting the manufacture, sale, and transportation of liquor. It is later repealed by the Twenty-First Amendment in 1933.
https://www.infoplease.com/history/us/us-history-progressive-era-and-world-wars-1900-1949 -
Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution is ratified, granting women the right to vote.
https://www.infoplease.com/history/us/us-history-progressive-era-and-world-wars-1900-1949 -
The publication of This Side of Paradise on March 26, 1920 made the 24-year-old Fitzgerald famous almost overnight.
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A week later he married Zelda Sayre in New York. They embarked on an extravagant life as young celebrities.
https://sc.edu/about/offices_and_divisions/university_libraries/browse/irvin_dept_special_collections/collections/matthew_arlyn_bruccoli_collection_of_f_scott_fitzgerald/life_of_fitzgerald/index.php -
When Zelda Fitzgerald became pregnant they took their first trip to Europe in 1921 and then settled in St. Paul for the birth of their only child, Frances Scott (Scottie) Fitzgerald, who was born in October 1921.
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The Fitzgeralds spent the winter of 1924-1925 in Rome, where he revised The Great Gatsby; they were en route to Paris when the novel was published in April. The Great Gatsby marked a striking advance in Fitzgerald’s technique, utilizing a complex structure and a controlled narrative point of view.
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Charles Lindbergh makes the first solo nonstop transatlantic flight in his plane The Spirit of St. Louis.
https://www.infoplease.com/history/us/us-history-progressive-era-and-world-wars-1900-1949 -
Among the suggested causes of the Great Depression are: the stock market crash of 1929; the collapse of world trade due to the Smoot-Hawley Tariff; government policies; bank failures and panics; and the collapse of the money supply.
https://www.stlouisfed.org/the-great-depression/curriculum/economic-episodes-in-american-history-part-5 -
Twentieth Amendment to the Constitution, sometimes called the “Lame Duck Amendment,” is ratified, moving the president's inauguration date from March 4 to Jan. 20.
https://www.infoplease.com/history/us/us-history-progressive-era-and-world-wars-1900-1949 -
Twenty-First Amendment to the Constitution is ratified, repealing Prohibition.
https://www.infoplease.com/history/us/us-history-progressive-era-and-world-wars-1900-1949 -
The 1936-1937 period is known as “the crack-up” from the title of an essay Fitzgerald wrote in 1936. Ill, drunk, in debt, and unable to write commercial stories, he lived in hotels in the region near Asheville, North Carolina.
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He began his Hollywood novel, The Love of the Last Tycoon, in 1939 and had written more than half of a working draft when he died of a heart attack in Graham’s apartment on December 21, 1940.
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During World War II, the United States began to provide significant military supplies and other assistance to the Allies in September 1940, even though the United States did not enter the war until December 1941.
https://history.state.gov/milestones/1937-1945/lend-lease -
The United Nations came into existence on October 24, 1945, after 29 nations had ratified the Charter.
https://history.state.gov/milestones/1937-1945/un -
The Cold War was an ongoing political rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union and their respective allies that developed after World War II.
https://www.britannica.com/event/Cold-War