“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. …” It was an odd way for a rich and world-famous young writer to end his third novel— The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Yet looking back now, now that he is even more famous than he was in his short lifetime, with Gatsby made into a multimillion-dollar movie amidst enormous fanfare, we can see how touchingly appropriate that ending was. For Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda Sayre, his beautiful, doomed bride, their past was already a romantic lost world while both of them were still in their twenties.

They grew up in middle-class American families, he in the Midwest, she in the south; but both telt rrom the start that they were destined for great and fabulous things. “Marked for glory”—that was the way Scott put it later. Born in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1896, he went to private schools and was outstanding—not so much for academic work as for charm, almost excessive good looks, and easy success in extracurricular pursuits. He was small but played football with eager intensity; he wrote stories, poems, plays—one of his plays, when he was only sixteen, was produced locally with Scott himself as one character. Off to Princeton in 1913, he was soon writing for the college literary magazines as well as the famous Triangle Show; he was also learning to drink, to be a highly accomplished conversationalist and dancer at balls, and to dream of fortune and fame with a kind of astounding assurance. “I’m only interested in the best,” he told his friends.

When the World War came, volunteering was de rigueur for a young man like Fitzgerald. He expected to be killed in some heroic engagement in France; instead he was alternately thrilled and lacerated in a stormy love affair with the most beautiful belle in Montgomery, Alabama, where his infantry regiment went for training. Zelda Sayre, born in 1900, was the spoiled youngest daughter of an Alabama supreme court justice. In the big house on Pleasant Avenue she grew up doing just as she pleased; in school she did the same. She was goldenhaired, irrepressible, mischievous; everyone forgave her except possibly her girl friends, for by the time she was fourteen the boys were crowding round her like—well, moths around a flame. Nobody did things with quite the flair that Zelda did, nor quite as well: she danced better, swam better, acted better, and (it was rumored) kissed better than any girl in town. And she was daring: she smoked and drank a bit; one of her frequent observations was “What the hell!” She read a lot, but seldom her school books—fairy tales, she said, were her favorites.

Scott and Zelda met at a country-club dance in the summer of 1918. She had just graduated from Sidney Lanier High as the “most attractive” girl in her class; he was resplendent in his officer’s uniform.