SCOTT FITZGERALD: A Biography, by Jeffrey Meyers, HarperCollins, 400 pages, $27.50.

Literary lodestar of the Jazz Age, novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald, was the darling of the unfettered postwar generation of World War I. He made the leap to fame at age 24 with his first novel, “This Side of Paradise.” Comments biographer Jeffrey Meyers, “The novel’s defiant tone had the same powerful impact on rebellious postwar youth as Salinger’s “The Catcher in the Rye” did in 1951, and it became a bible and guidebook as the Twenties began to roar.” A dicey practitioner of his own gospel, the handsome, hedonistic author lived beyond his means, drank to excess, and concealed a soul-wrenching inferiority complex behind a barricade of embarrassing and frequently destructive pranks that brought about his eviction from many hotels and restaurants. Incurably alcoholic, he abstained only when he wrote.

Despite his profligate lifestyle, he produced one of his finest novels, “The Great Gatsby,” while still in his 20s; and with touching nobility remained steadfast in his care of his wife, Zelda, who at the age of 30 began her long, slow descent into madness. Born in St. Paul, Minn., to middle-class Irish Catholic parents, he was named for his great-great-grandfather’s brother, Francis Scott Key, a Maryland lawyer who wrote “The Star-Spangled Banner” during the British naval bombardment of Baltimore in 1814. “I am half black Irish and half old American stock with the usual exaggerated ancestral pretensions,” he told writer John O’Hara.

An indifferent student, Fitzgerald distained study and “wrote all through every class” at St. Paul Academy, Princeton, and officers training camp where from November 1917 to February 1918 he drilled under young Capt. Dwight Eisenhower. Belatedly regretful of his folly, he became an avid reader but failed to compensate for the inadequacies that took the form of “hundreds of ludicrous, orthographical, grammatical and factual errors.”

Brilliantly, Fitzgerald put to page the Roaring Twenties’ flapper (a term borrowed from the common name for a wild duck). She wore bobbed hair, short skirts, had junked the corset for the teasing teddy, imbibed alcohol freely, and was a votary of free sex. “I married the heroine of my stories,” affirmed Fitzgerald, who freely admitted the roman a clef nature of his characters. His bride, Zelda Sayre, was a 20-year-old Lorelei with alabaster complexion, honey-gold hair and alluring eyes. Her father, an Alabama judge, was an eccentric who once chased Zelda around the dining room table brandishing a knife. Although Scott was unaware of it, the tempestuous Zelda’s family history was striated with a terrifying number of mental breakdowns and suicides. When Zelda’s schizophrenia robbed her of her sanity, Fitzgerald gallantly defrayed the exorbitant costs of the private sanitariums by turning out high-paying potboilers, in between writing his serious novels. He also managed to keep their daughter, Scottie, an only child, in exclusive boarding schools. Although the turbulent author was unabashedly promiscuous, he was faithful in his fashion to Zelda.

Catapulted into the elite ruling circle of D.H. Lawrence, Edith Wharton, Joseph Conrad, John Galsworthy, Ring Lardner and others, Fitzgerald found himself most attracted to Ernest Hemingway (whose work he brought to the attention of his own editor at Scribner’s). It was a complicated, painful friendship because Hemingway’s attitude was often that of “a tough little boy sneering at a delicate little boy.” Sadly, Fitzgerald’s popularity plunged in the last years of his life (but made a dramatic comeback in the posthumous “The Last Tycoon”), and he died of a sudden heart attack in Hollywood at the age of 44. Eight years later his wife perished in a sanitarium fire.

A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, Professor Jeffrey Meyers is the author of seven previous biographies. Now, once again, his cunning pen works its magic in this autopsy of the genius of Francis Scott Fitzgerald, from whose welter of insecurity, conceit, ambition, lust, love of excitement, and surging self-indulgence tumbled the novels and stories that evoke the wild and unrestrained Jazz Era. “Scott Fitzgerald” brings it all back in a rush.

Bea Goodrich’s reviews are a monthly feature in the Books & Music section.