pleted his formal education at Princeton University û although at college he mostly ignored formal study, instead receiving his education from writers and critics such as Edmund Wilson, who remained his lifelong friend.
In 1917 he quit Princeton to take an army commission, and in training camps he revised the first draft of his 1920 novel This Side of Paradise. While at a camp in Alabama, he fell in love with 18-year-old Zelda Sayre, who, as the archetypal flapper, would become integral part of Fitzgerald's fiction as well as his life (Brennan, 1999, p. 41)
This Side of Paradise, published in the spring of 1920, made Fitzgerald rich, or rich enough at least to marry the high-living Zelda. In this autobiographical novel, the young, disillusioned postwar generation found mirrored their shattered dreams and empty, irresolute lives. This is one of the poorest expressions of FitzgeraldÆs perspectives on life. His next novel, The Beautiful and the Damned (1922), a mood piece chronicling the anxieties and dissipations of a rich couple, proved somewhat less popular but his short stories, however, were in great demand. They paid for his and Zelda's partying and hotel-society life-style û as well as reflecting and celebrating just such a life. Of his more than 150 stories, he chose 46 to appear in four books: Flappers and Philosophers (1920), Tales of the Jazz Age (1922), All the Sad Young Men (1926), and Taps at Reveille (1935). Among his finest short stories is ôBernice Bobs Her Hairö, which is a delightful piece of writing about a disobedient young woman who dec
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