This biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald investigates the relationship between his novels and his magazine work, documents his finances, and discusses his disastrous marriage to Zelda and difficult relationship with Hemingway.

“Epic indeed, this is the definitive biography of Fitzgerald, plain and simple. There’s no reason to own another.” —Library Journal The Great Gatsby, The Beautiful and Damned, Tender Is the Night, “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.” These works and more elevated F. Scott Fitzgerald to his place as one of the most important American authors of the twentieth century. After struggling to become a screenwriter in Hollywood, Fitzgerald was working on The Last Tycoon when he died of a heart attack in 1940. He was only forty-four years old. Fitzgerald left behind his own mythology. He was a prince charming, a drunken author, a spoiled genius, the personification of the Jazz Age, and a sacrificial victim of the Depression. Here, Matthew J. Bruccoli strips away the façade of this flawed literary hero. He focuses on Fitzgerald as a writer by tracing the development of his major works and his professional career. Beginning with his Midwest upbringing and first published works as a teenager, this biography follows Fitzgerald’s life through the successful debut of This Side of Paradise, his turbulent marriage to Zelda Sayre, his time in Europe among The Lost Generation, the disappointing release of The Great Gatsby, and his ignominious fall. As former US poet laureate James Dickey said, “the spirit of the man is in the facts, and these, as gathered and marshalled by Bruccoli over thirty years, are all we will ever need. But more important, they are what we need.”

Looks at Fitzgerald's novels and his magazine work, documents his finances, and discusses his disastrous marriage to Zelda and difficult relationship with Hemingway

Revealing and unusual, Scott Fitzgerald follows the fascinating life of one of America's most enduring authors, from his early years in St. Paul and at Princeton to New York in the twenties, the French Riviera, Baltimore, and finally Hollywood. Andrew Turnbull tells the story behind F. Scott Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise, revised and finally published when he was twenty-four, making him instantly famous, and his tender love affair with Zelda Sayre, from their glittering early life to the years Zelda spent in and out of sanatoriums. A literary generation, too, comes alive, including Ernest Hemingway, Edmund Wilson, the Murphys, and Edith Wharton. Fitzgerald lived on Turnbull's family estate in Baltimore in the early 1930s and there befriended young Andrew, then age eleven. Turnbull's personal relationship with Fitzgerald and the hundreds of interviews with those who knew him elegantly capture the dramatic, tragic story of F. Scott and the glow and pathos of his flamboyant life.

Literary Criticism -- Biography Conversations with F. Scott Fitzgerald assembles over thirty interviews with one of America's greatest novelists, the author of The Great Gatsby and Tender Is the Night. Although most of these are not standard interviews in the modern sense, the quotes from Fitzgerald and the contemporary journalistic reaction to him reveal much about his writing techniques, artistic wisdom, and life. Editors Matthew J. Bruccoli, the foremost Fitzgerald scholar, and Judith S. Baughman have collected the most usable and articulate pieces on Fitzgerald, including a three-part 1922 interview conducted for the St. Paul Daily News. Fitzgerald (1896-1940) died before the authorial interview became a literary subgenre after World War II. Although Fitzgerald enjoyed his celebrity, as is clear in these pieces, he had a poor sense of public relations and provided interviewers with opportunities to trivialize him. As a result, Fitzgerald was often treated condescendingly in the press. Seven of his interviews-five printed before 1924-have flapper in their headlines. In the Jazz Age-a term Fitzgerald coined-he was regarded as a spokesman for rebellious youth, as a playboy, as an authority on sex and marriage, as an expert on Prohibition, and as an immensely popular writer for his work published in the Saturday Evening Post. Yet his literary ambitions were sizable and his impact on American fiction immeasurable. Matthew J. Bruccoli is Jefferies Professor of English at the University of South Carolina. He has written or edited thirty volumes on Fitzgerald, including the standard biography, Some Sort of Epic Grandeur: The Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Judith S. Baughman, who works in the department of English at the University of South Carolina, has written the F. Scott Fitzgerald volume in the Gale Study Guides series and has edited American Decades: 1920-1929.

When F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote to his daughter Scottie, describing his life as "epic grandeur," he did so with the authority that belongs only to people of great and often tragic destiny. He understood how the exuberance, doubts, fears and excesses of his life was perfectly matched within the literary picture he produced, which was as much autobiographical as possible. Tiziano Brignoli, in this literary essay now translated in English, outlines a literary profile of the American writer, symbol of the Jazz Age. Starting from the analysis of his first published novel, he illustrates a Fitzgeraldian portrait that shows the reader the most important aspects that composed his existence, the numerous contrasts of his character, and consequently what build his literature. What drove Fitzgerald to write "This Side of Paradise" and what social value did this book contain at the time? Why did he write "The Great Gatsby" and what makes it the American novel par excellence today? What did "Tender is the Night" means in terms of literary sacrifice by the American author, and what makes it one of his most autobiographical novels? What role did Zelda play as a partner in her husband's life? In the irony of life, the day Fitzgerald's epic grandeur was broken, it was inexorably tied to the American one. It's for this reason that the name of Francis Scott Fitzgerald will always be reproduced side by side with that of his generation, of which he was wonderfully able to tell the needs and torments. An edition with an in-depth afterword by the author, in conversation with Marjie Kirkland, cousin of the great American writer, talking about Fitzgerald's family, books and literature and Jazz Age.