F. Scott Fitzgerald the Night". A fifth, unfinished novel, "The Last Tycoon", was published posthumously. Four collections of his short stories were published, as well as 164 short stories in magazines during his lifetime. Born in 1896 in Saint Paul, Minnesota, to an upper-middle-class family, Fitzgerald was named after his famous second cousin, three times removed on his father's side, Francis Scott Key, but was always known as Scott Fitzgerald. He was also named after his deceased sister, Louise Scott Fitzgerald, one of two sisters who died shortly before his birth. "Well, three months before I was born," he wrote as an adult,
F. Scott Fitzgerald T. S. Eliot to write, in a letter to Fitzgerald, "It seems to me to be the first step that American fiction has taken since Henry James ..." Don Birnam, the protagonist of Charles Jackson's "The Lost Weekend", says to himself, referring to "The Great Gatsby", "There's no such thing ... as a flawless novel. But if there is, this is it." In letters written in the 1940s, J. D. Salinger expressed admiration of Fitzgerald's work, and his biographer Ian Hamilton wrote that Salinger even saw himself for some time as "Fitzgerald's successor". Richard Yates, a writer often compared to