F. Scott Fitzgerald
F. Scott Fitzgerald was born in 1896 in St Paul, Minnesota, one of the states in the Midwest of the USA. Echoes of his personal experiences can be found in the characters of both Nick and Gatsby.
Although his father was poor, having failed in business, his mother's family financed Fitzgerald's education at Princeton in New Jersey, one of the so-called 'Ivy League' of elite universities.
In 1915, he fell in love with Ginevra King, a girl from a very wealthy Chicago family. However, her father, who was a successful businessman, disapproved because of Fitzgerald's poverty. She ended the relationship and instead married one of the richest men in Chicago. This left Fitzgerald with a sense of social inferiority and an ambivalent attitude to the rich. On the one hand he resented their exclusivity, selfishness and arrogance, but on the other, he secretly coveted their glamorous life style.
Like his characters Nick and Gatsby, Fitzgerald served in the American army from 1917 until his discharge in 1919, and it was at this time he met Zelda Sayre. They formed an engagement which she broke off, partly due to disapproval from her family, but when Fitzgerald started making money as a writer the relationship was resumed and they married. The character of Daisy, therefore, contains aspects of both Ginevra and Zelda.
Zelda's family disapproved of Fitzgerald as much because of his heavy drinking as because of his lack of money, and he eventually became an alcoholic. The Fitzgeralds went to live in Europe, and became notorious for their free-spending, self-indulgent, heavy-drinking lifestyle. This seems ironic, when such hedonistic behaviour is presented very negatively in The Great Gatsby.