A Life in Letters: A New Collection Edited and Annotated by Matthew J. Bruccoli (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics) - Softcover

Fitzgerald, F. Scott

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0684801531 ISBN 13: 9780684801537

Publisher: Scribner, 1995

Synopsis

A vibrant self-portrait of an artist whose work was his life. In this new collection of F. Scott Fitzgerald's 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 that 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 relationship. 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.

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.

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.

About this edition

• Publisher: Scribner
• Publication date: 1995
• ISBN 10: 0684801531
• ISBN 13: 9780684801537
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 532