F. Scott Fitzgerald's Biography

Born in 1896, Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald (known as F. Scott Fitzgerald) was an American writer best known for his novel The Great Gatsby, as well as three other novels and many short stories. Along with his wife, Zelda, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, and numerous other artists of the Jazz Age, Fitzgerald spent much of the 1920s as an expatriate in Paris.

Fitzgerald was known as a heavy drinker, and while we don’t want to romanticize his excesses (his drinking would eventually lead to his death by heart attack at the young age of 44), he was certainly exposed to a fascinating era of cocktails and other libations. As Prohibition dragged on in his home country, he and his friends lived it up—for better or for worse—along the Seine and the French Riviera.

While he likely drank just about anything in sight, like his friend Hemingway, Fitzgerald’s cocktail of choice was reportedly the Gin Rickey. He believed that gin was harder to detect on one’s breath than other liquors (a dubious claim at best, considering it’s an explicitly aromatic spirit), and was renowned for his exceptionally low tolerance. In those days, though, that might’ve been an asset.