The Great Gatsby is the defining literary work of the 'Jazz Age', the decadent 1920s, and perhaps the ultimate novel about the American Dream. In spite of countless adaptions into movies and plays, it is through F. Scott Fitzgerald's masterful prose that the story of the unscrupulous and extravagant Jay Gatsby - as told by the honest Nick Carraway - continues to live on as a great American classic.F. SCOTT FITZGERALD [1896-1940] was an American author, born in St. Paul, Minnesota. It seems fitting that he coined the term Jazz Age. His marriage to Zelda Montgomery is legendary, and so are the couple's acquaintances with cultural figures like Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway, as well as their lifestyle in 1920s Paris. As Fitzgerald was a master of the short story genre, it is only logical that his most famous novel is also his shortest: The Great Gatsby [1925].