Recent biographies of Fitzgerald include:

Bruccoli, Matthew Joseph. Some Sort of Epic Grandeur: The Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, c1981.

This is the definitive biography, and it’s available in a revised, paperback edition from the University of South Carolina Press, 2002.

As long as I’m citing books by Matt Bruccoli, our era’s greatest Fitzgerald expert, I’ll recommend this superb “companion” to the novel:

_____, (Ed). F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby: A Literary Reference. New York: Carroll & Graf, 2002.

Canterbery, E. Ray. F. Scott Fitzgerald: Under the Influence. St. Paul, MN: Paragon House, 2006. Places Fitzgerald in a broader cultural framework.

Hook, Andrew. F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Literary Life. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. A brief life of Fitzgerald, drawing heavily on Bruccoli’s work.

Mellow, James R. Invented lives: F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1984. Out of print now, but it’s an interesting look at the Fitzgeralds’ life together.

Prigozy, Ruth, (Ed). The Cambridge Companion to F. Scott Fitzgerald. New York: Cambridge, 2001. A collection of specially-commissioned articles on all aspects of Fitzgerald’s life and work.

Prigozy, Ruth. F. Scott Fitzgerald. Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press, c2001. A lively, brief, heavily illustrated book by a well known Fitzgerald scholar.

Rielly, Edward J. F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Biography. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2005. Another brief biography.

Fitzgerald’s wife Zelda and other women of the “Flapper Era” have attracted considerable attention on their own:

Milford, Nancy. Zelda: A Biography. New York: Harper & Row, 1970.

Zeitz, Joshua. Flapper: A Madcap Story of Sex, Style, Celebrity, and the Women who Made America Modern. New York: Crown Publishers, c2006.

Fitzgerald helped popularize the term “Jazz Age” for the 1920s with the title of a collection of his short stories published in 1922 and very much still in print. You might want to take a look at it as well as Gatsby. This is the most recent edition scholarly edition, but there are plenty of others:

Fitzgerald, F. Scott. Tales of the Jazz Age. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

It’s hard for anyone to discuss American literature in the Twenties without discussing Fitzgerald. Take a look at these studies:

Bryer, Jackson R. and J. Gerald Kennedy (Eds). French Connections: Hemingway and Fitzgerald Abroad. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999. A collection of essays on these expatriate American writers.

Berman, Ronald. Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and the Twenties. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, c2001.

Meade, Marion. Bobbed Hair and Bathtub Gin: Writers Running Wild in the Twenties. New York: Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 2004.

These are just a few of the lively broader studies of that lively decade:

Allen, Frederick Lewis. Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s. New York: Wiley, 1997.

Evensen, Bruce J. When Dempsey Fought Tunney: Heroes, Hokum, and Storytelling in the Jazz Age. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, c1996.

Goldberg, David Joseph. Discontented America: The United States in the 1920s. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999.

Miller, Nathan. New World Coming: The 1920s and the Making of Modern America. New York: Scribner, c2003.

Goldberg, Ronald Allen. America in the Twenties. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2003.

Smith, Page. Redeeming the Time: A People's History of the 1920s and the New Deal. New York: McGraw-Hill, c1987.

To bring yourself back to reality, get this book on rural life in the same period as the madcap urban Jazz Age:

Meyer, Carrie A. Days on the Family Farm: From the Golden Age through the Great Depression. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, c2007.

Internet Resources

The University of South Carolina’s F. Scott Fitzgerald Centenary Website is useful for scholars and provides authoritative bibliographical data – but it’s not designed for k-12 classroom teachers:

http://www.sc.edu/fitzgerald/

For classroom purposes, F. Scott Fitzgerald Society Website will be far more helpful:

http://www.fitzgeraldsociety.org/teaching/index.php

The University of Kansas (Pittsburg) Jazz Age Website is largely a “critical bibliography of Websites (meaning that they’re evaluated, not just listed),and we all know what a help that service can be:

http://faculty.pittstate.edu/~knichols/jazzage.html

Don’t miss their Fitzgerald entries on the Lost Generation Writers Webpage. These links will give you lesson plans among other things:

http://faculty.pittstate.edu/~knichols/jazzage3.html#lost