Life Letters - Hardcover

Fitzgerald

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0684195704 ISBN 13: 9780684195704

Publisher: Prentice Hall & IBD, 1994

Synopsis

"I doubt if, after all, I'll ever write anything again worth putting in print." F. Scott Fitzgerald was twenty-six when he wrote this lament to his editor, Maxwell Perkins, in 1923 - two years before Scribners published The Great Gatsby. Soon after Gatsby appeared, Fitzgerald wrote to H. L. Mencken, "I think the book is so far a commercial failure - at least it was two weeks after publication - hadn't reached 20,000 yet."
Gatsby turned out all right in the end. But while Fitzgerald's roller-coaster reputation fell precipitously in the years approaching his death in 1940, his stature in American literature has risen steadily in the five decades that followed - the strongest restoration in American literary history. Yet his life and work have remained obscured by myth and misconceptions. In this new collection of his letters, edited by leading Fitzgerald scholar and biographer Matthew J. Bruccoli, we see through his own words the artistic and emotional maturation of one of America's most enduring and elegant authors. A Life in Letters is the most comprehensive volume of Fitzgerald's letters - many of them appearing in print for the first time. The fullness of the selection and the chronological arrangement make this collection the closest thing to an autobiography Fitzgerald ever wrote.
While many readers are familiar with Fitzgerald's legendary "jazz age" social life and his friendships with Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Edmund Wilson, and other famous authors, few are aware of his writings about his life and his views on writing. Letters to his editor Maxwell Perkins illustrate the development of Fitzgerald's literary sensibility; those to his friend and competitor Ernest Hemingway reveal their difficult friendship. The most poignant letters here were written to his wife, Zelda, from the time of their courtship in Montgomery, Alabama, during World War I to her extended convalescence in a sanatorium near Asheville, North Carolina. Fitzgerald is by turns affectionate and proud in his letters to his daughter, Scottie, at college in the East while he was struggling in Hollywood.
For readers who think primarily of Fitzgerald as a hard-drinking playboy for whom writing was effortless, these letters show his serious, painstaking concerns with creating realistic, durable art. A Life in Letters offers a full, vibrant self-portrait of an artist whose work was his life.

About this title

Review

James Dickey

"A Life in Letters" is the closest thing to an F. Scott Fitzgerald autobiography, which is much to be cherished.

J.T. Barbarese "Philadelphia Inquirer" The letters reveal a powerful and unsparing literary intelligence...extraordinary.

James Dickey "A Life in Letters" is the closest thing to an F. Scott Fitzgerald autobiography, which is much to be cherished.

James Dickey A Life in Letters is the closest thing to an F. Scott Fitzgerald autobiography, which is much to be cherished.

J.T. Barbarese Philadelphia Inquirer The letters reveal a powerful and unsparing literary intelligence...extraordinary.

About the Author

F. Scott Fitzgeraid was born in 1896 in St. Paul, Minnesota. His first novel, This Side of Paradise (1920), earned him immediate critical and financial success. The Great Gatsby (1925) was published while he and his wife, Zelda, lived in France in the midst of the expatriates of the 1920s. Upon their return to America he completed Tender Is the Night (1934), and he was at work on The Love of the Last Tycoon when he died in Hollywood in 1940.

Edition details

• Publisher: Prentice Hall & IBD
• Publication date: 1994
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0684195704
• ISBN 13: 9780684195704
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 525