Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald (September 24, 1896 - December 21, 1940) was an Irish American Jazz Age novelist and short story writer. He is regarded as one of the greatest American writers of the twentieth century. Fitzgerald was the self-styled spokesman of the "Lost Generation", Americans born in the 1890s who came of age during World War I. He finished four novels, left a fifth unfinished, and wrote dozens of short stories that treat themes of youth, despair, and age. Many admire what they consider his remarkable emotional honesty. His heroes--handsome, confident, and doomed--blaze brilliantly before exploding, and his heroines are typically beautiful and alluring.