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F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Life in Letters by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Judith S. Baughman (Editor), Matthew Joseph Bruccoli (Editor)

From Booklist: There's a bit of a Fitzgerald resurgence going on what with Jeffrey Meyers' excellent new biography , and now this, the first collection of Fitzgerald's letters to be published in 30 years. Bruccoli is a productive and enthusiastic Fitzgerald maven, having edited collections of Fitzgerald's poems and stories as well as critical literature and a collection of Zelda Fitzgerald's writings before putting together this utterly fascinating volume. Fitzgerald was a profoundly literary man who wrote remarkably forceful and revealing letters. He's sly and charming, blunt and cocky, insecure and ambitious, and capable of a bone-chilling objectivity about everyone, even those closest to him. Naturally, the most compelling letters analyze his catastrophic marriage. Zelda's severe mental illness placed a tremendous emotional, financial, spiritual, and artistic burden on Fitzgerald, and his letters to various psychiatrists and friends disclose just how tangled up he and Zelda were and how much it impacted his writing. His stern yet concerned letters to his daughter, Scottie, are also of great interest. On the more professional front are Fitzgerald's detailed letters to Maxwell Perkins, Edmund Wilson, John O'Hara, and Ernest Hemingway. In all, this is a powerful form of autobiography. Donna Seaman

Scott Fitzgerald by Andrew Turnbull

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.

Against the Current: As I Remember F. Scott Fitzgerald by Frances Kroll Ring, Scottie Fitzgerald Smith (Afterword), A. Scott Berg (Preface)

San Francisco Chronicle: [A] model of compression and enlightenment...an all-encompassing image of F. Scott Fitzgerald in the winter of his life.

Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda: The Love Letters of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Zelda Fitzgerald, Eleanor Lanahan (Introduction), Jackson R. Bryer, Cathy W. Barks

From Publishers Weekly: "Once we were one person," F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote to his wife in the last years of their marriage, "and always it will be a little that way." While this carefully annotated collection (edited by two scholars at the University of Maryland) is dominated by Zelda's letters more of hers are extant it provides an intimate account of an enduring romantic union (as opposed to the dirty laundry of the Fitzgeralds' spectacular Jazz Age revels and rows or Scott's descent into alcoholism and Zelda's into mental illness). Their cross-Mason-Dixon Line courtship letters begin in 1918, with Zelda displaying her ardor and "mental wickedness" and Scott responding in brief but affectionate telegrams. The Great Depression coincided with Zelda's psychological malaise, and her letters from the '30s are penned from various sanitariums and, later, her family's home in Alabama, where she convalesced under her mother's care. Scott's letters are sufficiently represented only in his final year, when he was exiled to Hollywood as a scriptwriter and had a secretary to keep copies. Among the mutual assurances of love and the occasional long-distance tiffs, Scott and Zelda sometimes discuss art Zelda's search for self-expression in writing, dance and painting; Scott's desire to be "an instrument" for "dark, tragic destiny." Although Scott's letters, typically written in his high lyric style, are unfortunately outnumbered, this collection offers many previously unpublished epistles and photographs as well as an introduction by the Fitzgeralds' granddaughter, and is a moving portrait of a two-decades-long, complicated and deep love affair. (Apr.)Forecast: The Fitzgeralds remain a popular literary couple Nancy Milford's three-decades-old Zelda still sells well so there should be demand for this collection. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

The Great Gatsby: The Authorized Text by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Charles Scribner (Afterword), Matthew Joseph Bruccoli (Preface)

Amazon.com: In 1922, F. Scott Fitzgerald announced his decision to write "something new--something extraordinary and beautiful and simple + intricately patterned." That extraordinary, beautiful, intricately patterned, and above all, simple novel became The Great Gatsby, arguably Fitzgerald's finest work and certainly the book for which he is best known. A portrait of the Jazz Age in all of its decadence and excess, Gatsby captured the spirit of the author's generation and earned itself a permanent place in American mythology. Self-made, self-invented millionaire Jay Gatsby embodies some of Fitzgerald's--and his country's--most abiding obsessions: money, ambition, greed, and the promise of new beginnings. "Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter--tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther.... And one fine morning--" Gatsby's rise to glory and eventual fall from grace becomes a kind of cautionary tale about the American Dream.

Tender Is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Charles Scribner (Introduction)

Amazon.com: In the wake of World War I, a community of expatriate American writers established itself in the salons and cafes of 1920s Paris. They congregated at Gertrude Stein's select soirees, drank too much, married none too wisely, and wrote volumes--about the war, about the Jazz Age, and often about each other. F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife, Zelda, were part of this gang of literary Young Turks, and it was while living in France that Fitzgerald began writing Tender Is the Night. Begun in 1925, the novel was not actually published until 1934. By then, Fitzgerald was back in the States and his marriage was on the rocks, destroyed by Zelda's mental illness and alcoholism. Despite the modernist mandate to keep authors and their creations strictly segregated, it's difficult not to look for parallels between Fitzgerald's private life and the lives of his characters, psychiatrist Dick Diver and his former patient turned wife, Nicole. Certainly the hospital in Switzerland where Zelda was committed in 1929 provided the inspiration for the clinic where Diver meets, treats, and then marries the wealthy Nicole Warren. And Fitzgerald drew both the European locale and many of the characters from places and people he knew from abroad.
In the novel, Dick is eventually ruined--professionally, emotionally, and spiritually--by his union with Nicole. Fitzgerald's fate was not quite so novelistically neat: after Zelda was diagnosed as a schizophrenic and committed, Fitzgerald went to work as a Hollywood screenwriter in 1937 to pay her hospital bills. He died three years later--not melodramatically, like poor Jay Gatsby in his swimming pool, but prosaically, while eating a chocolate bar and reading a newspaper. Of all his novels, Tender Is the Night is arguably the one closest to his heart. As he himself wrote, "Gatsby was a tour de force, but this is a confession of faith."

The Jazz Age by F. Scott Fitzgerald, E. L. Doctorow (Introduction)

From Library Journal: With September 24 marking what would have been Fitzgerald's 100th birthday, it is fitting that a book bearing his name and entitled The Jazz Age should emerge, for the two are inseparable in the minds of the reading public. This book of five confessional essays from the 1930s follows Scott and Zelda from the height of their celebrity as the darlings of the 1920s to years of rapid decline leading to the self-proclaimed "Crack Up" in 1936. The poetics of Fitzgerald's style are not lost in nonfiction, and these pieces display some of his finest writing. This volume contains an introduction by E.L. Doctorow.
Copyright 1996 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald: A New Collection by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Matthew J. Bruccoli (Editor), Penny Kaganoff (Editor)

Today F. Scott Fitzgerald is better known for his novels, but in his own time, his fame rested squarely on his prolific achievement as one of America's most gifted writers of stories and novellas. Now, a half-century after the author's death, the premier Fitzgerald scholar and biographer, Matthew J. Bruccoli, has assembled in one volume the full scope of Fitzgerald's best short fiction: forty-three sparkling masterpieces, ranging from such classic novellas as "The Rich Boy," "May Day," and "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz" to his commercial work for the Saturday Evening Post and its sister "slicks." For the reader, these stories will underscore the depth and extraordinary range of Fitzgerald's literary talents. Furthermore, Professor Bruccoli's illuminating preface and introductory headnotes establish the literary and biographical settings in which these stories now shine anew with brighter luster than ever.

The Love of the Last Tycoon: A Western by F. Scott Fitzgerald (Author), Matthew J. Bruccoli (Editor)

Cecilia Brady, the daughter of a great motion-picture producer, reminisces about events that began five years earlier when she was an undergraduate at Bennington College, starting with a flight home to Hollywood on a plane whose other passengers included Wylie White, a script writer down on his luck, Manny Schwartz, once an influential producer, and Monroe Stahr, another producer and partner of Cecilia's father, Pat Brady. Cecilia is attracted to Stahr, and he turns to her at the very time that he has a falling out with her father. Each of the partners conceives the idea of murdering the other. On the way to New York to establish an alibi, Stahr repents and decides to revoke his orders that will result in Brady's death, but his plane crashes before he can carry out his new plan and Cecilia loses both her father and the man she loves. Even in its incomplete form, The Love of The Last Tycoon: A Western has achieved a reputation as the best Hollywood novel. When F. Scott Fitzgerald died in 1940 he had written seventeen of thirty projected episodes. In 1941 the "unfinished novel" was published in a text for general readers by Edmund Wilson under the title The Last Tycoon. For more than fifty years this edition has been the only one available. This critical edition of The Love of the Last Tycoon utilizes Fitzgerald's manuscript drafts, revised typescripts, and working notes to establish the first authoritative text of the work. This volume includes a detailed history of the gestation, composition, and publication of the novel; full textual apparatus with editorial notes; facsimiles of the drafts; and explanatory notes on topical allusions and historical references for contemporary readers. The reconstruction of Fitzgerald's plan for the thirteen unwritten episodes is particularly useful. F. Scott Fitzgerald's incomplete masterpiece is restored to its 1940 state, and thus made fully accessible for the first time.