F. Scott Fitzgerald

He dropped out of Princeton to join the army, expecting to die in the trenches; the war ended before he shipped out, and he channeled the near-miss into This Side of Paradise, the 1920 novel that made him famous at twenty-three and won him Zelda Sayre, the Alabama belle who had refused to marry a nobody.

Their marriage became the emblem of the age they helped name: real gin, real recklessness, a decade of Paris and the Riviera among the expatriates he'd later fictionalize. Zelda's schizophrenia diagnosis in 1930 emptied their finances into sanitariums; Fitzgerald, drinking heavily and chasing magazine paychecks, moved to Hollywood to write screenplays he mostly hated.

He died there of a heart attack in 1940, at forty-four, leaving The Last Tycoon unfinished on his desk.