Sept. 24, 1896 -- Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald is born at 481 Laurel Ave. in St. Paul. He's named after Francis Scott Key, the man who wrote the ``Star Spangled Banner and a distant cousin of Fitzgerald's mother, Mollie McQuillan.

1898 -- The business owned by Scott's father, Edward Fitzgerald, fails, and the family moves to Buffalo, N.Y.

1908 -- The family returns to St. Paul and moves in with Louisa McQuillan, Mollie's wealthy mother. Later, the family moves elsewhere in the Hill District, but never spends more than three years in the same place. Scott, meanwhile, is enrolled at the St. Paul Academy, which publishes his first story in the school newspaper in 1909.

1913 -- Fitzgerald enters Princeton University, where he continues to write stories and plays. But he's an indifferent student who receives poor grades.

1917 -- Scott leaves Princeton in October to join the U.S. Army and is later stationed at Camp Sheridan near Montgomery, Ala.

1918 -- In July, Scott meets Zelda Sayre at a country-club dance in Montgomery. Meanwhile, he completes his first novel, entitled ``The Romantic Egotist.'' But he is unable to sell the manuscript to a publisher.

1919 -- Scott is discharged from the Army in February, disappointed that World War I ended before he could be shipped overseas. Later in the year, he becomes engaged to Zelda. After selling his first magazine story, Fitzgerald returns to St. Paul in July to live with his parents at 599 Summit Ave., where he works feverishly to revise his novel, now called ``This Side of Paradise.''

Sept. 16, 1919 -- Charles Scribner's Sons, a New York publisher, accepts ``This Side of Paradise'' and Fitzgerald's life changes forever.

1920 -- ``This Side of Paradise'' appears in March, sells 3,000 copies in three days, and makes Fitzgerald famous overnight. On April 3, Scott and Zelda marry at St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York.

1921 -- After various travels, Scott and Zelda return to St. Paul, where Fitzgerald completes his second novel, ``The Beautiful and the Damned.'' In October, the couple's only child, Scottie, is born.

1922 -- ``The Beautiful and the Damned'' reaches the best-seller lists but does not bring in as much money as Fitzgerald had hoped. After a final stay at the Commodore Hotel, Scott and Zelda leave St. Paul for New York in September, never to return.

1924-25 -- The Fitzgeralds move to Europe, where Scott meets Ernest Hemingway in a Paris bar. The two become uneasy friends. During this time, Fitzgerald completes his masterpiece, ``The Great Gatsby,'' which is published in April 1925. But the novel posts disappointing sales (today, by contrast, it sells an average of 300,000 copies a year).

1926-33 -- These are years of wandering, drinking and the beginnings of Zelda's debilitating mental illness. Despite his numerous problems, Fitzgerald manages to complete his last full novel, ``Tender Is the Night'' in 1933. He also works for a time as a Hollywood screenwriter.

1934 -- ``Tender Is the Night,'' a thinly disguised account of Scott and Zelda's life, appears in the bookstores but sells few copies. Meanwhile, Zelda suffers her third nervous breakdown.

1936 -- Zelda enters a mental hospital in North Carolina, where she lives for much of the rest of her life. Scott writes ``The Crack-Up,'' a harrowing series of confessional essays.

1937 -- Fitzgerald moves to Hollywood to work again as a screen writer. There, he falls in love with Sheilah Graham, a popular gossip columnist.

1939 -- Drinking heavily, Fitzgerald begins work on ``The Last Tycoon,'' a brilliant but never completed novel based on the life of legendary Hollywood producer Irving Thalberg.

Dec. 21, 1940 -- Fitzgerald, an old man at 44, suffers a fatal heart attack at Graham's house in Hollywood. He is buried six days later at a family cemetery in Rockville, Md. In its obituary, The New York Times says Fitzgerald ``epitomized `all the sad young men' of the post-war generation.''