Product Description
ENDURING LITERATURE ILLUMINATED BY PRACTICAL SCHOLARSHIP

Published when he was twenty-three years old, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s debut novel, This Side of Paradise, established him as the golden boy of the dawning Jazz Age. As a chronicle of youth, no other literary work remains as revealing—or as bitingly relevant.

THIS ENRICHED CLASSIC EDITION INCLUDES:

• A concise introduction that gives the reader important background information

• A chronology of the author’s life and work

• A timeline of significant events that provides the book’s historical context

• An outline of key themes and plot points to guide the reader’s own interpretations

• Detailed explanatory notes

• Critical analysis and modern perspectives on the work

• Discussion questions to promote lively classroom and book group interaction

• A list of recommended related books and films to broaden the reader’s experience

Simon & Schuster Enriched Classics offer readers affordable editions of great works of literature enhanced by helpful notes and insightful commentary. The scholarship provided in Enriched Classics enables readers to appreciate, understand, and enjoy the world’s finest books to their full potential.Amazon.com Review
Fitzgerald's first novel, reprinted in the handsome Everyman'sLibrary series of literary classic, uses numerous formal experimentsto tell the story of Amory Blaine, as he grows up during the crazyyears following the First World War. It also contains a newintroduction by Craig Raine that describes critical and popularreception of the book when it came out in 1920. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (114)

A story of crippled souls
Amory Blaine was born to an eccentric mother and a cold and distant father. This is the story of his life, but more than that it is the story of his search for love, and his search for meaning - both ultimately disappointingly unsuccessful.

I gather that this book, the first one that F. Scott Fitzgerald published, was wildly successful when it was first published, in 1920. It really spoke to the Lost Generation. Well, reading it now some 90 years later, it does not have the same impact - nor could it.

As a window on the Lost Generation, or at least on their tastes, it is quite interesting. As I read the book, I could not help but reflect on a thinker I knew many years ago who spoke of people who loved themselves best, but were forever on a fruitless search to find someone who would love them more. All of the characters in This Side of Paradise have that same problem - a deep and overwhelming love for themselves which makes them unable to give unconditionally of themselves.

I suppose that is why I did not find myself enjoying this book at any point - there is nothing uplifting here. The crippled souls of the characters only inspired pity in me, as I watched what I knew to be their fruitless search for love and meaning.

So, if you are interested in the Lost Generation and the 1920s, then you will probably enjoy this book. If you are looking for a work of literature that will feed your soul and send you forward, then you will probably not enjoy this book...as indeed, I did not.

Youth speaks.
When first published in 1920 This Side of Paradise rapidly became a bestseller and launched the career of its 24 year old author, F. Scott Fitzgerald. The novel's protagonist, Amory Blaine, is clearly a stand-in for Fitzgerald himself.
The book traces Amory's life from early childhood to young adulthood and describes in great detail his challenges and conflicts as he reaches maturity in the very turbulent second decade of the 20th century.Amory, like the author, becomes a Princeton man.Perhaps the most noteworthy aspect of This Side of Paradise is that Fitzgerald's unbridled nostalgia for his time spent at Princeton comes through loud and clear. (The fact that he never managed to graduate does not seem to have diminished his fond memories one iota.)
By his own admission, Amory is an egotistical elitist who has little or no empathy for the less fortunate lower classes.Much of the novel consists of Amory's introspection on the true nature of love, personal fulfillment, the relevance of religion and other equally obtuse subjects.This Side of Paradise is also a bit odd from a structural standpoint in that there is an overabundance of poetry interspersed with the prose and one of the more important chapters is written largely in the form of a play complete with lines of dialogue and stage direction.
Those inclined to criticize this book will see it as a hodgepodge of self-indulgence.But to the generation who came of age circa. 1920, it contained much that rang true.

Perfecting his craft?
Part of the problem with Fitzgerald's being affiliated with a prized novel, The Great Gatsby, is that the author's other novels must be compared to it. I use this as an opening because, while the instances of early talent in the writer are here in his debut novel, the story, even though richly autobiographical, fell a little flat. Maybe this is part due to the fact that for a good deal of the book the protagonist, Amory Blaine, is pretty much synonymous with the shallow, aimless generation that Fitzgerald and other Lost Generation authors tried to depict. With the exception of minor moments of insight late in the novel, Amory is as superficial as the world seems around him.

Some have a problem with the experimental format of This Side of Paradise. It is written as a narrative, poem, drama, letter and journal. I didn't feel that way, and thought it gave a unique aspect to the novel. Fitzgerald's technique seems to coincide with the modern novel of experimenting with narrative. However, the story's subject itself clearly comes across as an author working into his craft, rather than having perfected it.

Within the story, Amory Blaine searches for identity and meaning of life amid outside influences--his mother, the world, the war, his acquaintances at school, his friendships, and his loves. While there were some moments of insight, the story comes across as a bit flat and meandering. In the final estimation, the characters were a bit too artificial.

Fitzgerald's movement towards perfecting his skill is evidenced, however. There are some valid insightful moments for the protagonist in the book's concluding pages, and Fitzgerald's style is evidenced in these brief snapshots. Fitzgerald's style would be perfected later in The Great Gatsby.

This pretty much takes me back to my original argument. The Great Gatsby is vastly superior in terms of depth, narrative and likability of main protagonist than This Side of Paradise. Not to say that there isn't a glimpse of talent here, and future higher achievements, but I'd rather be reading The Great Gatsby.

Definitely not my cup of tea
I have to say that I found this book tobe quite boring.i've been laid up for a few weeks. I have a Kindle so have been able to read and enjoy many of the classics.This was a book i had to stop reading several times and always wondered why i returned to it. I will try something else by Fitzgerald from his later years. I won't give up on someone others consider a brilliant writer.

Paradise Lost
I love F. Scott Fitzgerald's Great Gatsby, his almost florid romanticism and his poetic prose.The first part of This Side of Paradise had me completely, youngglib man going to Princeton, full of himself, living a frivolous college life, falling in and out of love.I awaited the story's last part, wondering how his life might turn out.Instead, about mid-way through, and with virtually no coverage of Armory's WWI duty on the front lines, we are served a random, lazily assembled smorgasbord of poetry, memos, script form dialogue, long-winded essays on a very young person's attempt to come to terms with the world, etc. etc. etc.Most disappointing of all is the author's failure to explore the serial failure of his love affairs, a subject I wish he had addressed in far greater depth.

I kept on to the end, because of my interest in Fitzgerald's tragically short-lived career.Greatness I suppose was his with Gatsby, for it is work whose substance come through in a structural maturity, forming a contrast to the insubstantial characters and the shallow lives they live.A preface to the Paradise I read by defender Aaron John Loeb acknowledged the book's "technical errors."No, no,, we are talking strucutral errors.

And still, there is the soul of this author; but what a wasted opportunity that he should have been allowed by his editor (not Max Perkins, I hope) to stop working after the first 100 pages. Because of its second-half collapse, I can only give this book two stars.

David Lewis / Showbizdavid ... Read more

Product Description

Today, F. Scott Fitzgerald is known for his novels, but in his lifetime, his fame stemmed from his prolific achievement as one of America's most gifted (and best-paid) writers of stories and novellas. In The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Matthew J. Bruccoli, the country's premier Fitzgerald scholar and biographer, assembles a sparkling collection that encompasses the full scope of Fitzgerald's short fiction. The forty-three masterpieces range from early stories that capture the fashion of the times to later ones written after the author's fabled crack-up, which are sober reflections on his own youthful excesses. Included are classic novellas, such as "The Rich Boy," "May Day," and "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz," as well as a remarkable body of work he wrote for the Saturday Evening Post and its sister "slicks." These stories can be read as an autobiographical journal of a great writer's career, an experience deepened by the illuminating introductory headnotes that Matthew Bruccoli has written for each story, placing it in its literary and biographical context.

Together, these forty-three stories compose a vivid picture of a lost era, but their brilliance is timeless. As Malcolm Cowley once wrote, "Fitzgerald remains an exemplar and archetype, but not of the 1920s alone; in the end he represents the human spirit in one of its permanent forms." This essential collection is ample testament to that statement, and a monument to the genius of one of the great voices in the history of American literature. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (13)

Masterful and Easily Understood
Loved the short stories from beginning to end. It's a book that you'll not want to stop reading. The verbiage is very easy and flows like the river as you read through his works. You'll finish this book in no time. The end result will be an experience with one of our country's greatest authors to ever grace a blank sheet of paper. Enjoy and read more FSF if this is your first taste of him!

Interesting
I bought this product to read "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" and compare it with the movie of the same name.

As I suspected, the story was much different than the movie.

But I still got the other Fitzgerald stories, so that was a bonus.

F Scott Fitzawesome
F Scott Fitzgerald is the greatest American author of the 20th Century.It's easy to see why with this collection of short stories.What I enjoy best about this book is seeing the experimentation of Fitzgerald's writing from one story to the next.It's fun to see the literary and thematic chances that he took as his career progressed.You should buy this book.

Deadline Looming....
It was, after all, the Great Cham, Samuel Johnson, who said that "Nobody but a blockhead ever wrote for anything but money"-I don't believe this is true. I don't even believe Johnson that "harmless drudge" as he describes himself in the dictionary he spent several unrewarded years compiling believed it either.But it does, anent Fitzgerald and his stories, as comprised in this book, come to mind. Simply put, Fitzgerald was a much better short story writer than a novelist.Indeed, one can argue that Fitzgerald was not a novelist at all and was, as he described himself, a writer who wanted to "preach at people."In any event, the Johnsonian dictum cited above seems to apply to Fitzgerald: He wrote much better when under some pecuniary deadline than otherwise.I am not so much concerned here as to whether "Fitzgerald" was a "great" writer or not.But he was certainly no Keats or Shelley, as one reviewer eulogizes.

There is a gossamer quality to Fitzgerald's prose that, it seems to me, is mistaken for lyricism.Pick up any page of Fitzgerald's contemporary, Thomas Wolfe, (specifically Look Homeward, Angel) and you'll see the difference. -What this lightness of touch amounts to in his novels and stories, for the most part, is that the characters come off as two-dimensional, and when Scott tries to delve deeper for what he called "psychological moments" or whatever, the reader is left with a gracefully penned alternative two-dimensional figure.It's quite frustrating. ----All this is to say, though I'm not a great fan of Fitzgerald's writing, some of these stories are worth any reader's while, and I shall list them:

"Bernice Bobs Her Hair" p.25

"Dice, Brassknuckles & Guitar" p.237

"Love In The Night" p.302

"A Short Trip Home" p.372

"The Swimmers" p.495

"A New Leaf" p.634

"Afternoon of An Author" p.734

"The Lost Decade" p.747

These stories stand out for one of two reasons, they lack the strain put on the reader by the gossamer sketching described above, or, for a few of them, Fitzgerald actually manages to pull it off - a powerful or haunting story touching the human condition.

Sorry, F. Scott acolytes, but only three stars for these pearls amidst the Period-Writing paste.

Beautiful writing
The use of language doesn't get much better than this.Each sentence is a work of art and a pleasure to read.I smile as I read.The stories themselves are so clearly placed in a post-WWI setting that they are a glimpse into life in the 1920's - as, I believe, Fitgerald wanted to show.Also, to me, any Fitgerald work edited or or explained by Matthew Bruccoli is informative & interesting.

The above, though, is to those who like Fitzgerald.To me, his is special beyond many other authors' writing.If you've never enjoyed his work before, this book won't change that.If you've never read anything by Fitzgerald, I would suggest starting with "The Great Gatsby." ... Read more

Product Description
F. Scott Fitzgerald's second collection of short stories contains some of his best-known tales of the glittering era he gave a name to. 

Published in 1922, Tales of the Jazz Age featured not only the flappers and lost young men Fitzgerald had made his name with, but a greater variety of characters and scenes. The critically admired novella "May Day" contrasts its drunken debutantes with a mob of war veterans battling socialists in the streets. Here, too, are several imaginative stories that Fitzgerald described as "fantasies," including "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," about a man who ages in reverse, and "A Diamond as Big as the Ritz," a surreal fable about the excesses of greed. Tales of the Jazz Age not only furthered Fitzgerald's reputation as a master storyteller but cemented his place as the spokesman of an age. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (10)

When they were good they were very very good, and when they were bad they were horrid
This 1922 short story collection is a trip back in time through the eyes of this celebrated author.There are 11 stories here, of varying quality and I enjoyed reading them all and letting myself visit the time and a place and the culture that is now just a small blip in the annals of history.Some stories are set in the world of the moneyed, others are set in the world of fantasy and there are other that are just figments of the author's imagination.I didn't like all of these stories.As the saying goes, "when they were good they were very very good, and when they were bad they were horrid", but I felt I got to know F. Scott Fitzgerald through these stories, see how his mind worked, and understand how he became so well known and was able to come to his full power in his novels.

His strongest stores were set in the real world, the young southern man who was smitten by a rich young woman, two recently released soldiers from the War in Europe who stumble upon some party-going socialites, a very funny story about a costume party where two men dress in a camel costume, and a sad story about a happy marriage which is spoiled by the husband's illness.

I don't like fantasy and found myself annoyed by these stories, even the one about the Curious Case of Benjamin Button which was recently made into a movie, or The Diamond as Big as the Ritz which was a fantasy of enormous wealth and cruelty.There were stories of unfulfilled dreams and real emotion which I liked.And others that were just stupid and silly and hard to follow.

Yes, I enjoyed this book, even the stories I didn't like.Having a critical attitude towards something I am reading is not a bad thing.However, I was really annoyed at the plethora of typographical errors throughout the book.There is no excuse for that.

MobileReference edition also has at least one error...
Tales of the Jazz Age: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,The Diamond As Big As The Ritz, My Last Flappers & more (mobi)

I'm sorry to report that there is at least one error in the MobileReference edition of Tales of The Jazz Age in the Jelly-Bean story, and that it mirrors the same error I found in the public domain editions.

In the paragraph that begins with, "In the twilight of one April evening when a soft gray had drifted down...," this sentence is truncated:"His mind was working persistently on a problem that had held his attention for an."

I bought this MobileReference edition based upon the publisher's post and claim of no errors in this thread.It's no big deal ("To err is human...."), but I'll be asking for a refund of my 99 cents.

Tales of the Jazz Age
This is a well-bound, well illustrated hardcover reprint of F. Scott Fitzgerald's second collection of short stories, including "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," "May Day," and "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz."

Comments from the publisher
This page mixes reviews for 3 books: one published by MobileReference and two others published by 'Public Domain Books' and 'Juniper Grove'. It is unclear which review corresponds to which book. We assure you that MobileReference book does not have any errors. The MobileReference book was carefully checked for accuracy and completeness by a team of experts. Please download the Free demo. To find Tales of the Jazz Age published by MobileReference, search: mobi Tales of the Jazz Age.

MobileReference

Affordable but filled with errors
Although the stories are complete, they are filled with errors. It is distracting when sentences don`t make sense and it takes away from the experience. It is understandable why it was so affordable. ... Read more

Product Description
A self-portrait of a great writer 'srise and fall, intensely personal and etchedwith Fitzgerald's signature blend of romanceand realism.The Crack-Up tells the story ofFitzgerald's sudden descent at the age ofthirty-nine from glamorous success to emptydespair, and his determined recovery. Compiledand edited by Edmund Wilson shortly after F.Scott Fitzgerald's death, this revealingcollection of his essays—as well as letters toand from Gertrude Stein, Edith Wharton, T.S.Eliot, John Dos Passos—tells of a man with charm and talent to burn, whose gaiety and genius madehim a living symbol of the Jazz Age, and whoserecklessness brought him grief and loss."Fitzgerald's physical and spiritual exhaustion is described brilliantly," noted The New York Review of Books: "the essays are amazing for the candor." ... Read more

Customer Reviews (9)

Then and Now
I first read this book almost forty years ago-it's as powerful now as it was then; there was no "jet set" in the twenties yet that's what Fitzgerald captured so well... a frenetic pace of life that led nowhere.

Fitzgerald's Masterpiece
Fitzgerald's "The Crack Up" deserves a place among our literary treasures. It's written with such honesty that Hemingway chided him for being too honest. True, this essay, along with "Pasting It Together" is mostly about despair, but then again, so is Ecclesiastes. Both belong in the same book shelf side by side. "The Crack Up" is not only about Fitzgerald, it's about the human condition; though we fail, we must persist.

This is a great work of art and a gift to our culture.

Slightly Obscure Fitzgerald
Lesser known work by FItzgerald is powerful and amazingly relevant in 2007.

The Crack-Up
"This is too real and there ain't no escape"-- Nick Lowe, "Cracking Up"


I carried F. Scott Fitzgerald's THE CRACK-UP around with me for almost ten years before I got around to reading it last month. It was one of those books that I felt I was literarily required to read, what with my affection for all things Fitzgerald -- especially Gatsby. Once I got into the book, I found parts of it fairly impenetrable, which must have been Fitzgerald's state of mind while writing some of the material, a posthumous hodgepodge of uncollected pieces, samplings of notebooks, and unpublished letters (both from and to the author).

An excellent companion piece to the book is the PBS American Masters documentary, F. SCOTT FITZGERALD: WINTER DREAMS, which draws heavily from THE CRACK-UP. The film, in its quest to simulate the elegance that its subject so desperately tried (and failed) to attain, unfortunately breezes over some key points in the writer's life; but the DVD is well worth checking out (literally, either from your local library or Netflix). (PBS's website makes up for some of these omissions with a nifty timeline that puts all of Fitzgerald's accomplishments into context with the tragic goings-on in his life. It also offers some additional footage that does not appear in the film, most notably interviews with E.L. Doctorow and Budd Schulberg, who wrote the screenplay for On the Waterfront and who, as a young screenwriter, was rewritten by Fitzgerald.)

Originally written as three essays for Esquire in 1936, "The Crack-Up" was Fitzgerald's bearing of his soul, his confession, his mea culpa to the world at large for letting them -- and himself -- down. It begins: "Of course all life is a process of breaking down, but the blows that do the dramatic side of the work -- the big sudden blows that come, or seem to come, from outside -- the ones you remember and blame things on and, in moments of weakness, tell your friends about, don't show their effect all at once. There is another sort of blow that comes from within -- that you don't feel until it's too late to do anything about it, until you realize with finality that in some regard you will never be as good a man again."

The literary world at large found such brash honesty unseemly, and Ernest Hemingway especially was disdainful of his friend's candor. But just as "The Crack-Up" essays unnecessarily confirmed that Hemingway was indeed a bastard, they also demonstrated that Fitzgerald could still write.

One of the most poignant and telling passages in THE CRACK-UP anthology appears in Fitzgerald's 1932 essay about New York, "My Lost City." Returning a couple of years after the stock market crash of 1929 ("I once thought that there were no second acts in American lives," he writes, "but there was certainly to be a second act to New York's boom days"), Fitzgerald found a new skyline awaiting him. The Empire State Building, all 103 floors and 1,454 feet, had risen out of the dust of the Big Crash. Fitzgerald "went to the roof of the last and most magnificent of towers. Then I understood -- everything was explained: I had discovered the crowning error of the city, its Pandora's box. Full of vaunting pride the New Yorker had climbed here and seen with dismay what he had never suspected, that the city was not the endless succession of canyons that he had supposed but that it had limits -- from the tallest structure he saw for the first time that it faded out into the country on all sides, into an expanse of green and blue that alone was limitless. And with the awful realization that New York was a city after all and not a universe, the whole shining edifice that he had reared in his imagination came crashing to the ground."

Perhaps at that moment Fitzgerald discovered he had his limits, too, and that they were already in his past. One wonders how many times in the eight tortured years he had left, dealing with the insanity of Zelda and Hollywood, book sales all but evaporating, he looked back on that moment atop the Empire State Building and wished he had jumped.

(c) 2006 - Visit chidder.livejournal.com

Thedark night of the soul
Fragments of Fitgerald here do not really shore up his ruin. The most romantic of American novelists tells the story of why in the lives of American writers there are no second acts. The title essay 'The Crack - Up' is a very moving one. The tale of ' the dark - night in the soul in which it is always three o'clock in the morning ' of his breakdown and loss of a real feeling for life. He struggled back, and he made his efforts, most admirably perhaps as a father in trying to educate a daughter with two very problematic parents. He was finished at forty- four and did not make it to some other better world in his work and his life. No second act for him. But these fragments show the very beauty of perception and fineness of literary line which enabled him to write his one, and one of America's great masterpieces, Gatsby. ... Read more

Product Description
The Four Books that Defined and Chronicled the Jazz Age! Here in one eBook is the quartet of books that catapulted F. Scott Fitzgerald to literary immortality. Meet the flappers, the indolent young men, the speakeasies, the gangsters, the illegal hooch, and the easy money that characterized the Roaring Twenties. From This Side of Paradise to Flappers and Philosophers, The Beautiful and the Damned, and Tales from the Jazz Age Fitzgerald will light the way on a very special insider's tour of the Jazz Age. The age that made Fitzgerald and killed him. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

The Polly Parker Stories
I am really shocked that this first rate Fitzgerald collection does not have the "Polly Parker" stories that originally were printed serially in THE SATURDAY EVENING POST in 1922. Apparently these uncollected stories remain unavailable anywhere in book form.

Polly Parker was a typical Fitzgerald heroine -- a blue-eyed flapper with a pert nose and golden hair bobbed very short. The reason her stories are omitted, I gather, is that they were slightly more sexual in tone and also addressed taboo subjects such as alcoholism, racial violence, incest, and insanity.

"GRANDPA'S GOLD" the first Polly story, deals with lasting echoes of the Civil War. Spoiled Polly goes to Vermont for the summer to stay with her aging grandfather -- the last remaining Union army veteran in Vermont. Ultimately she robs him of a small fortune in gold coins which he had originally intended to donate to a Negro orphanage. This story highlights Fitzgerald's ambivalence towards the young women of the day -- Polly is cruel and selfish, but also winningly spontaneous, free and independent. Fitzgerald's racism is in full flower here as well. The fact that she is "only" robbing colored people seems to make her crime an amusing prank rather than a vicious crime.

"ALLIGATOR QUEEN" is both darker and more sophisticated. Polly is a houseguest in Georgia, where she meets Eleanor Hiss, a jazz age siren who may or may not have negro blood. The two girls deliberately lead a young Harvard man out into quicksand, then go joy riding in his car while he slowly drowns. Fitzgerald later wrote that Eleanor seduced Polly in an early draft -- but in 1922 the SATURDAY EVENING POST would never have carried a story with an explicit lesbian seduction.

"HOLY MATRIMONY" is the ironic finale to the Polly Parker stories. Invited on a weekend yachting party, Polly is compromised by an Eastern Prince and forced to marry silent movie star Reginald Dashwood. Dashwood is a homosexual who needs "discreet companionship." Polly marries him, assuming he is a pushover, but instead he is cruel, domineering and controlling -- and aided by an iron-willed mother who treats Polly like a servant. Polly's "punishment" is ironic, since she now has unlimited wealth and a dazzling husband -- but no freedom and no hope of either sexual or spiritual release.

Taken together, these three stories represent Fitzgerald's darkest early work -- and they should be included in any "definitive" collection.

Short Stories
I bought this book for the short stories. They are like small diamonds on a necklace, sparkling in a row, each one a wonder. Fitzgerald's short stories are like that.

"The Off Shore Pirate" is hilarious. The "Ice Palace"is strange and beautiful."The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" is about a baby born very old who gets younger every year.

"The Diamond As Big As The Ritz" is classic Fitzgerald, about the rich.

The story that is missing is "The Rich Boy." This is the story that started the famous spat between Hemingway and Fitzgerald.

In this short story, Fitzgerald writes: "The rich are very different from you and me."Hemingway responds inhis short story, "The Snows Of Kilimanjaro:""Yes, they have more money."

But you will not find "The Rich Boy" in this book. Too bad.

Included with the short stories are two novels:: This Side Of Paradise and The Beautiful And Damned.They are very adolescent novels. High school students might enjoy them.

Maybe not.

The short stories do more to describe the Jazz Age than his novels.

If you are serious about this author, his greatest novel is The Great Gatsby.His next best novel is Tender Is The Night."The Rich Boy" is his best short story.

Good Collection of Pre-Gatsby Work
This is a very attractive packaged, comprehensive collection of Fitzgerald's early work, containing his first two novels (This Side of Paradise and The Beautiful & Damned) and his first two short story collections.Included are some classic short stories such as May Day and The Diamond As Big As The Ritz.Some of the other stories are less than classic, but all are enjoyable.As is the case with all Library of America volumes, the book is very easy to handle and read.There is a useful set of notes and chronology of Fitzergald's life in the back.All in all, this is well worth the price. ... Read more

Product Description
Through his alcoholism and her mental illness, his career highs (and lows) and her institutional confinement, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald's devotion to each other endured for more than twenty-two years. Now, for the first time, the story of the love of these two glamorous and hugely talented writers can be given in their own letters. Introduced by an extensive narrative of the Fitzgeralds' marriage, the 333 letters-three-quarters of them previously unpublished or out of print-have been edited by the noted Fitzgerald scholars, Jackson R. Bryer and Cathy W. Barks. They are illustrated throughout with a generous selection of familiar and unpublished photographs. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (5)

An intimate portrait of a fascinating couple
One of the better books I've read in the last couple of years, and no doubt my favorite non-fiction book of all time. The letters included are mostly Zelda's.Though it would be lovely to be able to read Scott's as well, don't let that dissuade you from reading the book - Zelda wrote the most lyrical and beautiful letters I have ever read. Especially interesting is her evolution from a flighty teen to a woman with serious literary and artistic aspirations, which makes the letters towards the end of the book, when her mental state is deteriorating from letter to letter, especially heartrending. Strongly recommended if you are interested in the Fitzgeralds, 1920s literature, or love

A Fantastic Collection of Literary Love Letters
Once I opened this book of F. Scott and Zelda's love letters, I was glued to it, and didn't put it down until I had read the entire book 6 hours later. This is an engrossing collection of passionate letters between two of America's most famous Jazz Age babies, full of innocence, spurned hope, desperate longing, and a never-ending belief that one day, somehow, they would end up together again. Even knowing the Fitzgeralds' history as well as I do, I was drawn in by their steamy letters, and half-believed that everything was going to turn out alright in the end for them. Maybe it did. This is a fantastic, epic collection of letters (more by Zelda than Scott), photos (I loved seeing the presents that Scott gave to Zelda), drawings, and copies of the original letters. F. Scott had such beautiful handwriting. Anyways, for anyone with even a slight interest in the Fitzgeralds, or in love letters, this is a book well worth its price, one that I thought about for days after I finished it off.

Mediocre
I'm fascinated by Fitzgerald and was truly looking forward to reading this book, what I thought would be an exchange between F. Scott and Zelda, as its title indicates.

But, the book is almost entirely Zelda's writing.Zelda didn't keep many of Scott's letters, so they aren't here, and apparently his letters to other people are found in other books - not that they "belong" here, necessarily, but I would have liked to hear from Scott himself.For example, Zelda in the hospital: letters from Zelda to Scott are here.Scott clearly is doing things during these periods - including writing letters to hospital staff *about* Zelda's treatment (these letters, I believe, are in Bruccoli's book, F. Scott Fitgerald's Life In Letters).

Much of Scott's thoughts, therefore, are left to the imagination.He's in California at times; he's drinking; he's with their child.Since this book is about their relationship as told through letters--i.e., their own words and thoughts--I wanted his too.

So, I found it rather one-sided and its title misleading.Had I known I wasn't going to read a relationship in letters I may have had a different response.It's absolutely interesting to read Zelda's thoughts and we certainly understand much of their situation through reading this book.So, for what it is, it's interesting.But, for what it purports to be, it's lacking.

Portrait of a Marriage
This is a vivid, moving portrait of a marriage told in the couple's own words to one another.While biographer and commentators on the Fitzgeralds and their period have provided their own interpretations of the most famous exemplars of the Jazz Age, Breyer and Barks have chosen to let the protagonists speak for themselves and to each other. The result is a look at two human beings struggling to find their identities, define their relationship, and establish their place in the world relative to one another.That they only partially succeeded but never stopped trying is what makes this collection of their letters compelling reading.
Highly recommended for anyone who wants to know what the world looked like to those living in, and often trapped in, its confines.

Just not interested
I really tried to get into the letters of Scott and Zelda.I thought it would broaden my knowledge of this artistic couple and help me to understand their work.I tried.I failed.I just could not get interested in Zelda's shallow world of parties and dances.I tried skipping to the meatier stuff later in her life; still could not quite muster up the empathy needed to relate to this woman.Her life was no doubt tragic and sad, but I was not moved.Perhaps it is heresy to say, but I still am not convinced F Scott is the great American novelist he is marketed to be; the letters in this book did not keep my attention long enough to desire to get to know them better. ... Read more

Product Description

F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in a friend's copy of Tender Is the Night, "If you liked The Great Gatsby, for God's sake read this. Gatsby was a tour de force but this is a confession of faith." Set in the South of France in the decade after World War I, Tender Is the Night is the story of a brilliant and magnetic psychiatrist named Dick Diver; the bewitching, wealthy, and dangerously unstable mental patient, Nicole, who becomes his wife; and the beautiful, harrowing ten-year pas de deux they act out along the border between sanity and madness.

In Tender Is the Night, Fitzgerald deliberately set out to write the most ambitious and far-reaching novel of his career, experimenting radically with narrative conventions of chronology and point of view and drawing on early breakthroughs in psychiatry to enrich his account of the makeup and breakdown of character and culture.

Tender Is the Night is also the most intensely, even painfully, autobiographical of Fitzgerald's novels; it smolders with a dark, bitter vitality because it is so utterly true. This account of a caring man who disintegrates under the twin strains of his wife's derangement and a lifestyle that gnaws away at his sense of moral values offers an authorial cri de coeur, while Dick Diver's downward spiral into alcoholic dissolution is an eerie portent of Fitzgerald's own fate.

F. Scott Fitzgerald literally put his soul into Tender Is the Night, and the novel's lack of commercial success upon its initial publication in 1934 shattered him. He would die six years later without having published another novel, and without knowing that Tender Is the Night would come to be seen as perhaps its author's most poignant masterpiece. In Mabel Dodge Luhan's words, it raised him to the heights of "a modern Orpheus."Amazon.com Review
In the wake of World War I, a community of expatriate American writersestablished itself in the salons and cafes of 1920s Paris. They congregatedat 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 eachother. F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife, Zelda, were part of this gang ofliterary Young Turks, and it was while living in France that Fitzgeraldbegan writing Tender Is the Night. Begun in 1925, the novel was notactually published until 1934. By then, Fitzgerald was back in the Statesand his marriage was on the rocks, destroyed by Zelda's mental illness andalcoholism. Despite the modernist mandate to keep authors and theircreations strictly segregated, it's difficult not to look forparallels 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, andspiritually--by his union with Nicole. Fitzgerald's fate was not quite sonovelistically neat: after Zelda was diagnosed as a schizophrenic andcommitted, Fitzgerald went to work as a Hollywood screenwriter in 1937 topay her hospital bills. He died three years later--not melodramatically,like poor Jay Gatsby in his swimming pool, but prosaically, while eating achocolate bar and reading a newspaper. Of all his novels, Tender Is theNight 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." ... Read more

Customer Reviews (150)

Highly Recommend
An entertaining and illustrative portrayal of a golden time.This is Fitzgerald at his best!

Masterpiece, but ...
What a difference the edition makes.The re-ordered sections change the entire pacing.The original version, published in 1934 echews the chronological narrative and packs a different punch.Revised in the early 50s (posthumously), the later version is easier to follow, but loses a bit in the build up.

A classic either way - perhaps strong than Gatsby.

Why is Fitzgerald so attracted to such loathsome characters?
Now, I have an admission to make.In my own fiction, I tend to get lost in my own little world, fall in love with my language and my parataxis, and subject my reader to little in-jokes that make me laugh.For example, in a recent work of mine, I included a little part about T. S. Eliot's Wasteland.I referenced, what I though to be heavy handedly, the "game of chess" section, and what I hoped to be more oblique, the "death by water" part. This was done because I was trying to get across the theme of decay.Ok, so it did not work.I can accept that fact.Maybe I have to be more aware of the audience, or something along those lines.The point here is that my own idiosyncrasies perhaps do not translate well.I have the same problem reading Fitzgerald that I suppose that people have when reading my own work.

Alcoholics living out their own malaise in high society do not interest me.I cannot find the characters that Fitzgerald writes about compelling.I find myself disgusted at their self-indulgent and harmful acts.The knowledge that these characters come from real life in the circles that Fitzgerald lived in pushes me over the edge.He obviously had interest in these sorts of people.It cannot be denied that he the prime chronicler of the Jazz Age.Dick, Nicole and their lot are loathsome characters.I first read this book, two years or so ago, and I have to say that I have no desire to revisit it.There are other more pressing things on the schedule, like washing my hair.

Fitzgerald got closer to a sympathetic character when he fleshed out Nick in The Great Gatsby.I think this is because he was portraying someone more like himself.Nick was more of an outsider looking in, or in his case, at the other end of the egg.Fitzgerald is able to create someone who you can sympathize with, because Nick somehow comes across as the most human of the characters that I can remember.Nick possesses a certain sense of longing to belong that seems to be indicative of Fitzgerald himself.He appears as an outsider in this expatriate community, or even the riche community of Gatsby.

The question I have is, "Why is Fitzgerald so attracted to such loathsome characters?"He to seems entranced by broken people in circumstances that would seem to be the embodiment of success on some levels.These characters all have a façade that seems smooth and glassy, only you can see the imperfections the closer you get.Dick, Nicole, Rosemary, Abe, Jay, and Nick all have their failings in the realm of fiction.Fitzgerald has his own, and so does Zelda.

I have no answers for my own question, and as a reader, I cannot get past this isolation that Fitzgerald uses by focusing on such unsympathetic characters.His writings have long been canonized, and are taught all over, but I have a distance with him that is greater than the one I feel when reading Hemingway.

As Mediocre As It Can Get
The first 40 pages is dull. So is the middle 100 pages. The ending is probably one of the most unsatisfying endings I've ever read as it ends not with not a bang but a sad whimper in diminuendo as if the author just didn't want to work on it anymore and dashed off a coda.

Fitzgerald's lyricism, in my opinion, is simply overrated. Granted, there are some breathtaking passages (which I took note of), but most of the writing was just dull, dull, dull. He would've benefited tremendously from studying storytelling as well since he makes the middle portion so deadly dull that it made me want to chuck it across the room, and butchers the last portion so badly that it came across as amateurish - choppy, rushed, and consequently ungraceful - which gives credence to his own remark about the book: "I would give anything if I hadn't had to write Part III of Tender Is the Night entirely on stimulant..."

He also makes tons of basic storytelling faux pas, such as redundant attributions (e.g. "I think so, too," he agreed), unnecessary and dull passages that add practically nothing to the story, a whole section (the middle section, more specifically from p.114 to 207) where we follow the main characters wander around without any specific objective except to kill time, and the last part that's haphazardly and painfully put together. The result is a very uneven book with deep pits of absolute boredom.

Didn't really like it

Taken aback.
I was excited to start this book at first.The story started off somewhat slow.Not till I started the middle of the book then it started to get exciting.The ending did not turn out how I expected.Overall, I felt depressed after reading this story. ... Read more

Product Description
Noted Fitzgerald biographer Matthew J. Bruccoli draws upon years of research to present the Fitzgerald's Jazz Age romance exactly as he intended according to the original manuscript, revisions, and corrections--with explanatory notes. Reprint.Amazon.com Review
In 1922, F. Scott Fitzgerald announced his decision to write"something new--something extraordinary and beautiful andsimple + intricately patterned." That extraordinary, beautiful,intricately patterned, and above all, simple novel became The GreatGatsby, arguably Fitzgerald's finest work and certainly the bookfor which he is best known. A portrait of the Jazz Age in all of itsdecadence and excess, Gatsby captured the spirit of theauthor's generation and earned itself a permanent place in Americanmythology. Self-made, self-invented millionaire Jay Gatsby embodiessome 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 thatyear by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's nomatter--tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our armsfarther.... And one fine morning--"Gatsby's rise to glory and eventual fall from grace becomes a kind ofcautionary tale about the American Dream.

It's also a love story, of sorts, the narrative of Gatsby's quixoticpassion for Daisy Buchanan. The pair meet five years before the novelbegins, when Daisy is a legendary young Louisville beauty and Gatsbyan impoverished officer. They fall in love, but while Gatsby servesoverseas, Daisy marries the brutal, bullying, but extremely rich TomBuchanan. After the war, Gatsby devotes himself blindly to the pursuitof wealth by whatever means--and to the pursuit of Daisy, whichamounts to the same thing. "Her voice is full of money,"Gatsby says admiringly, in one of the novel's more famousdescriptions. His millions made, Gatsby buys a mansion across LongIsland Sound from Daisy's patrician East Egg address, throws lavishparties, and waits for her to appear. When she does, events unfoldwith all the tragic inevitability of a Greek drama, with detached,cynical neighbor Nick Carraway acting as chorus throughout. Spare,elegantly plotted, and written in crystalline prose, The GreatGatsby is as perfectly satisfying as the best kind of poem. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1254)

Gatsby is great
I read this book last year in my American Lit. class. From the beginning I had a feeling that something is different about this book than any other book I have ever

read. So, it became the first book ever which I read first page to last page. I really liked that how the theme of American Dream is presented throughout the novel. I

really admired the main character Gatsby since he gives up everything for his love, but in return he has to lose his life. The reason why I loved this book so much

was that the dedication of Gatsby for the goal of his lifetime and the hard work he did for that. This book is really inspirational. It also talks about the American

Dream of people. Additionally, it also mentions the changes in the values in the 1920s. I would definitely, recommend this book for anyone who wants to read a really

good book to enjoy and also to learn.Sorry for ruining the story for you.

Classic book at a terrific price
I have over 200 books but I somehow managed to skip buying The Great Gatsby.I'm an idiot!What a terrific book!I breezed through it so quickly that I'm sure I skipped something important.I'm planning to re-read it as soon as I get some free time.Thank God for Amazon and it's incredible books at reasonable prices.Amazon makes reading the classics easy, accessible and affordable.What more could I ask for?

Don't waste your time
This is perhaps the most boring book I've ever been forced to read. Each of the characters is dull and predictable; you can guess in the beginning what the end will be. Save your time and money and buy a book that will actually keep you awake.

A Classic of All English Literature
This book is a beautiful masterpiece. Fitzgerald gleefully dances the line between prose and poetry in an intriguing and delightful manner. He creates a collage of the human condition: love, romance, hatred, kindness, evil, deceit, loneliness, emptiness. The book also has great humor, unforgettable characters and an interesting plot. It's real miracle though is Fitzgerald's unassailable command of the English language. If you buy it in kindle form don't buy the cheaper version. It's words are broken up and all over the page. It will drive you crazy trying to read it.

Epitomizing the Jazz Age
This is one of my favorite books. It is a short book, less than 200 pages, and the writing is fluid, so you can easily finish it in a couple of hours. On the surface it is about rich people's folly -- Gatsby's failed attempt to resurrect the past with money. But it is more than that; it cuts deep into the pitfalls of the Jazz Age: that easily gotten money is easily parted with, that money can buy everything. It is interesting to know that Fitzgerald wrote this book in the middle and at the height of the roaring 20s, portentous of the house of cards that was about to crumble in the next decade. The writing in this book has a liquid, even luminous quality to it, and it is quite remarkable that after more than 80 years it still has a degree of modernity and it does not feel antiquated at all. ... Read more

Product Description
Since its first publication in 1981, Some Sort of Epic Grandeur has stood apart from other biographies of F. Scott Fitzgerald for its thoroughness and volume of information about Fitzgerald's life and career. It is regarded today as the basic work on Fitzgerald and the preeminent source for the study of the novelist. In this second revised edition, Matthew J. Bruccoli provides new evidence discovered since its original edition. This new edition of Some Sort of Epic Grandeurimproves, augments, and updates the standard biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (8)

exhaustive bio
Bruccoli definitely knows his stuff. But his writing reminds me of a grad school teacher I had who was too close to his obsession to teach the material in a very interesting way at all. If you're looking for a bio that has all the minutia of FSF's life, this is it. If you're looking for a compelling and selective narrative, not so much. I found myself skipping through the 500+ pages to get to what I wanted/needed.

Great biography.
An excellent, thorough, and well written biography.Detailed, but entertaining and easy to read.Broken up into short, easily digestible chapters.A must read for any Fitzgerald fan.

Some Kind of Wonderful
I am an absolute diehard fan of F. Scott Fitzgerald, both his life and his literature. So, I knew when I purchased this book I was bound to scrutinize its every nook and cranny. Well, my scrutiny proved to be a wasted effort. Without question, Matthew Bruccoli is the number one Fitzgerald scholar in the country, and after reading this biography, it is impossible to question why.
Bruccoli covers every aspect of Fitzgerald's life and includes several bits of correspondence to really give readers a look inside Fitzgerald's thinking. --Perhaps my favorite thing about the book is that it does not sentimentalize the author (which I myself have a habit of doing). Fitzgerald is spelled out here in all his glory, yet, we also get to see his unflattering side...paranoia, arrogance, unharnessed alcoholism, and downright neurosis.
F Scott Fitzgerald was a brilliant man whose life became legend. It is my humble opinion that Bruccoli has written the most thorough and best possible biography. Simply put, the read isfascinating. It might be 600 pages, but you will fly through it. It is "never dry" (like Fitzgerald :)) and always entertaining. For Fitzgerald fanatics like myself, this book is a must, but I am convinced that anyone who takes to "human interest" stories would find themselves engulfed in its pages.
Also recommended: "The Romantic Egoists"...a scrapbook collection put together concerning the lives of the Fitzgeralds. It is packed with pictures and is a wonderful companion to the biography. It was also published by Bruccoli.

Outstanding biography
This is an excellent biography, full of a great wealth of detail.In truth, Fitzgerald is a pretty easy biographical subject, because his fiction was so closely based on his own life and experiences and because he wrote so many letters and kept such detailed notebooks and ledgers accounting for his own life.He also had relationships with many people (Zelda, other writers, etc.) who left behind many accounts of him.Still, Bruccoli does an extremely thorough job and the book is very well-written.

I would give it five stars except for an extremely irritating tendency Bruccoli has to be dismissive of almost all of Fitzgerald's short stories.Bruccoli is way too arrogant about pronouncing dozens of the stories F. Scott wrote as being "minor," or "disappointing," or even "embarrassing," while reserving his praise for a select few, such as "May Day" and "The Rich Boy."Personally, having read every one of FSF's currently collected short stories (well over 100 in all), I don't rate "May Day" or "The Rich Boy" very highly, but I love lots and lots of the "commercial" ones Bruccoli dismisses.I think he should leave the assessment of which stories are good up to the reader.Bruccoli's literary analysis -- of Fitzgerald's novels -- is outstanding, but the short stories should not be so dismissed (even if Scott himself at times dismissed them and hated having to write them to earn money).

Amazing reading material for anyone
I am a writer, and first took out the book suffering from similar problems to Fitzgerald's at the beginning of his career, hoping to get some guidence.Reading it, I was struck by the profundity of the advice on writing he gave his daughter Scottie, which is copied in excerpts.I felt like I was getting the same benefits he gave her, and I also got the sense that he would want this.He meant what he had learned to be accessable to everyone;in a way, it was what his life was based around.Then, I got a good deal out of the analyses the biographer devotes to transcibing the process Fitzgerald went through in mapping out each of his extaordinary novels-I took notes I'll keep for ever.I only wish I could find a source like this on my other favorite writers.I'll have to appeal to Amazon's reccomendations for advice. ... Read more

Product Description

One of the most widely read writers in the high school curriculum, F. Scott Fitzgerald is the author of the great American novel, The Great Gatsby. While other biographies provide extensive information about Fitzgerald's life and achievements, this volume meets the need of high school students for a concise, accessible, and informative discussion of Fitzgerald and his works. Chapters survey the various periods in his career, and the volume closes with a timeline and bibliography.

Probably the best candidate for the author of the great American novel, F. Scott Fitzgerald is primarily known for his masterpiece, The Great Gatsby. He had fallen out of favor by the time of his death in 1940, while Ernest Hemingway attained worldwide fame. But there has been a tremendous renewal of interest in his works, and he is one of the most important writers in the high school English curriculum. While there are other biographies of Fitzgerald, this work meets the need of high school students for a concise, accessible, and informative survey of Fitzgerald's life and career.

Product Description
This is a collection of the earliest works of F. Scott Fitzgerald; each were written prior to his most known work, "The Great Gatsby." This edition includes an active table of contents to help you easily find the work you are looking for.

Included works:

Novels:
This Side of Paradise
The Beautiful and the Damned

Short Story Collections:
Flappers and Philosophers
Tales of the Jazz Age (which includes "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button") ... Read more

Product Description
Your purchase helps fund free educational resources at BompaCrazy.com!!!

"Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald (September 24, 1896 – December 21, 1940) was an American writer of novels and short stories, whose works are evocative of the Jazz Age, a term he coined himself. He is widely regarded as one of the twentieth century's greatest writers. Fitzgerald is considered a member of the "Lost Generation" of the Twenties. He finished four novels, including The Great Gatsby, with another published posthumously, and wrote dozens of short stories that treat themes of youth and promise along with despair and age.

The 1920s proved the most influential decade of Fitzgerald's development.The Great Gatsby, considered his masterpiece, was published in 1925. Fitzgerald made several excursions to Europe, notably Paris and the French Riviera, and became friends with many members of the American expatriate community in Paris, notably Ernest Hemingway.

Hemingway looked up to Fitzgerald as an experienced professional writer. Hemingway greatly admired The Great Gatsby and wrote in his A Moveable Feast "If he could write a book as fine as The Great Gatsby I was sure that he could write an even better one" (153). Hemingway expressed his deep admiration for Fitzgerald, and Fitzgerald's flawed, self-defeating character, when he prefaced his chapters concerning Fitzgerald in A Moveable Feast with:

His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly's wings. At one time he understood it no more than the butterfly did and he did not know when it was brushed or marred. Later he became conscious of his damaged wings and their construction and he learned to think and could not fly any more because the love of flight was gone and he could only remember when it had been effortless. (129)
Much of what Hemingway wrote in A Moveable Feast helped to establish the myth of Fitzgerald's dissipation and loss (of ability, social control, and life) and Zelda's hand in that demise. Though the bulk of Hemingway's text is factually correct, it is also colored by his disappointment in Fitzgerald, as well as Hemingway's own rivalrous response towards any competitor, living or dead. That disappointment was most evident in The Green Hills of Africa, where he specifically mentions Fitzgerald as an archetypal ruined American writer; Hemingway had been both shocked and unnerved by Fitzgerald's account of his own difficulties in his nonfiction essays and notebooks from the 1930s, published as The Crack-Up (with Edmund Wilson as editor) in 1945.

Fitzgerald’s friendship with Hemingway was quite vigorous and as many of Fitzgerald’s relationships would prove to be. (As, indeed, were many of the thrice-divorced Hemingway's.) Hemingway did not get on well with Zelda, either. He claimed that she “encouraged her husband to drink so as to distract Scott from his ‘real’ work on his novel," the other work being the short stories he sold to magazines. This “whoring”, as Fitzgerald, and subsequently Hemingway, called these sales, was a sore point in the authors’ friendship. Fitzgerald claimed that he would first write his stories in an authentic manner but then put in “twists that made them into saleable magazine stories.” " Wikipedia. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

What's in this collection?
One star for this listing - no insult intended to F. Scott Fitzgerald -

There is no information in this listing to tell you exactly what is included in this collection.A lame excerpt from Wikipedia is all the info you get.

Excellent
This book contains the novels This Side of Paradise and The Beautiful and the Damned, and the short story collections Tales of the Jazz Age and Flappers and Philosophers. The table of contents is active, and when you use it to jump to the book of your choice, the chapters or stories in the book are also active. So, vital literature well presented for only a dollar gets 5 stars.
... Read more

Product Description

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. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

The Beautiful and Damned.
F. Scott Fitzgerald scholar Matthew J. Bruccoli offers a discerning sample of Fitzgerald's letters that serve as an informal biography.Fitzgerald suffered many demons.Alcoholism and poor health were the obvious problems.From reading his letters, we learn that protecting his artistic integrity also weighed heavily on him.Money problems forced him to spend time writing lightweight but commercially viable stories for magazines.This took precious time away from his major work of writing serious novels.His afflicted wife, Zelda, was another dilemma.In 1930, Zelda had her first breakdown, and never recovered.Providing for her care and treatment added to his money woes.Although Fitzgerald enjoyed early success in 1920 with "This Side of Paradise," it was short-lived.By 1924, he wrote to Edmund Wilson, "I really worked hard as hell last winter--but it was all trash and it nearly broke my heart."There was critical success in 1925 with "The Great Gatsby," but it was a financial disappointment.Fitzgerald spent the next nine years writing, revising, and agonizing over "Tender Is the Night."Contrary to hope, that book failed to restore his reputation.The letters display deep introspection, opinions on other writers, comments of manners and morals, and daily concerns of money.There are also amusing and chatty letters to his daughter, Scottie.Fitzgerald's letters to Scribner's Maxwell Perkins and his literary agent, Harold Ober, are the most interesting, and reveal much of his concerns and ideas.Letters written to Zelda in the sanitarium are generally tender and loving, but occasionally they are cross and complaining.The book stops with a letter written to Scottie shortly before Fitzgerald's death in December 1940.Recommended reading for F. Scott Fitzgerald fans.;-)

Intriguing form of biography
This is the sort of book that makes one long for the days prior to-email, when people actually wrote letters to one another and correspondence other than bills and junk mail filled one's mailbox. The book is a valuablesupplement to Fitzgerald's many biographies; his letters reveal aremarkable clarity and self-awareness. My heart ached after reading some ofthem. A must read for all Fitzgerald historians.

I do recommend readingone of Fitzgerald's many biographies prior to reading his letters, as it isa fascinating exercise comparing Fitzgerald'sinterpretation/rationalization of an event with a third party's.

Fitzgerald as only Fitzgerald knew him.
If you want to gain insight into the life of F. Scott Fitzgerald then seek no further. This amazing compilation of Fitzgerald's correspondences to family, friends, business associates and acquaintances portrays the man andthe writer in a way no biographer could imagine. In his letters can beclearly seen Fitzgerald the literary genius, Fitzgerald the loving husbandand father as well as Fitzgerald the sycophant and Fitzgerald the torturedand insecure neurotic.The genesis and the demise of one of the mostfascinating men of his time eloquently presented in his own words.

Fitzgerald as only Fitzgerald knew him.
If you want to gain insight into the life of F. Scott Fitzgerald then seek no further. This amazing compilation of Fitzgerald's correspondences to family, friends, business associates and acquaintances portrays the man andthe writer in a way no biographer could imagine. In his letters can beclearly seen Fitzgerald the literary genius, Fitzgerald the loving husbandand father as well as Fitzgerald the sycophant and Fitzgerald the torturedand insecure neurotic.The genesis and the demise of one of the mostfascinating men of his time eloquently presented in his own words. ... Read more

Product Description
This file includes: The Beautiful and Damned, Flappers and Philosophers, Tales of the Jazz Age, and This Side of Paradise.According to Wikipedia: "Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald (September 24, 1896 – December 21, 1940) was an American writer of novels and short stories, whose works are evocative of the Jazz Age, a term he coined himself. He is widely regarded as one of the twentieth century's greatest writers. Fitzgerald is considered a member of the "Lost Generation" of the Twenties. He finished four novels, including The Great Gatsby, with another published posthumously, and wrote dozens of short stories that treat themes of youth and promise along with despair and age... Fitzgerald's work and legend has inspired writers ever since he was first published. The publication of The Great Gatsby prompted T. S. Eliot to write, in a letter to Fitzgerald, "[I]t seems to me to be the first step that American fiction has taken since Henry James...".[5] Don Birnam, the protagonist of Charles Jackson's The Lost Weekend, says to himself, referring to Gatsby, "There's no such thing...as a flawless novel. But if there is, this is it."[6] In letters written in the 1940s, J. D. Salinger expressed admiration of Fitzgerald's work, and his biographer Ian Hamilton wrote that Salinger even saw himself for some time as "Fitzgerald's successor."[7] Richard Yates, a writer often compared to Fitzgerald, called The Great Gatsby "the most nourishing novel [he] read...a miracle of talent...a triumph of technique."[8] It was written in a New York Times editorial after his death that Fitzgerald "was better than he knew, for in fact and in the literary sense he invented a 'generation'. [... H]e might have interpreted them and even guided them, as in their middle years they saw a different and nobler freedom threatened with destruction." ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

flappers and philosophers
this book has an INCREDIBLE number of typos!

someone should be firedridiculous! ... Read more

Product Description
Specially-commissioned essays by major scholars present a clear and comprehensive assessment of F. Scott Fitzgerald. No aspect of his career is overlooked--from his first novel published in 1920, through his more than 170 short stories, to his last unfinished Hollywood novel. Contributions present the reader with an accessible picture of the background of American social and cultural change in the early decades of the twentieth century. The volume offers readers a complete account of Fitzgerald's work as well as suggestions for further reading. ... Read more

Product Description
This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers. You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (62)

How do you decide which reprint to buy? The choices, the choices.....
Fitzgerald's "The Beautiful and the Damned" is one of the great American novels and well worth reading. And if your personal copy's in the same shape as mine, you probably need a new one. But it's now out in the public domain and a plethora of reprints are available, mostly from Print on Demand Publishers. So, as a previous reviewer asked, how do you decide which one to buy?

Because, believe me, there's some truely awful reprints available. To start with, when looking to pick up a copy of this book, CHECK THE PUBLISHER CAREFULLY and make sure you order a version that's what you think it is. The reason for this is....

Amazon associates reviews of a book with many different versions of the same book from different publishers. Unfortunately for us customers, Amazon is seeing a growing plague of new Print-On-Demand Publishers (one of whom, CreateSpace, is owned by Amazon) who are specialising in reprinting copyright-expired books. Such as "The Beautiful and the Damned." Some of these publishers produce quite good quality books, some do not. What you do need to do is check the publisher carefully for all these older "copyright expired" books.

An outstanding example of "not good quality" is the imprint of "The Beautiful and the Damned" published by General Books LLC. The version published by General Books LLC is scanned in using OCR technology (and using pretty poor quality OCR scanning equipment and software from the look of their books), is overall of very poor print quality, uses automated reproduction with no index, no illustrations and an excessive number of typos.

To quote some specifics from the publisher's own web site:
"We created your book using OCR software that includes an automated spell check. Our OCR software is 99 percent accurate if the book is in good condition. However, with up to 3,500 characters per page, even one percent can be an annoying number of typos....

After we re-typeset and designed your book, the page numbers change so the old index and table of contents no longer work. Therefore, we usually remove them. Since many of our books only sell a couple of copies, manually creating a new index and table of contents could add more than a hundred dollars to the cover price....

Our OCR software can't distinguish between an illustration and a smudge or library stamp so it ignores everything except type. We would really like to manually scan and add the illustrations. But many of our books only sell a couple of copies....

We created your book using a robot who turned and photographed each page. Our robot is 99 percent accurate. But sometimes two pages stick together. And sometimes a page may even be missing from our copy of the book. We would really like to manually scan each page and buy multiple copies of each original. But many of our books only sell a couple of copies....."

General Books LLC are flooding Amazon with these low quality publications (450,000+ listed under General Books LLC so far) and, unfortunately, many of them have the reviews associated with the original or with better quality imprints associated with them. For the buyer that's not aware of this publisher this can result in a rather unfortunate purchasing decision.

A good rule of thumb for these Print on Demand publishers is to take a look at the cover - if it's a good quality illustration that reflects the content, there's a table of contents, and when you do the Look Inside thing there's no disclaimer saying you're looking at another book, and they've stated that they used facsimile reproduction technology (rather than OCR), it's usually a pretty safe bet. Conversely, if any of these are missing, you're taking a chance on the quality. I've bought a few based on my selection criteria above and they've been good quality. General Books LLC however, is a publisher to steer clear of at all costs.

If you have been unfortunate enough to buy the General Books LLC version by mistake, you can return to Amazon for a full refund (but check Amazon's return policy and process first).

obviously a classic, but which edition is the best buy?
Fitzgerald's tale is obviously a classic, but which edition is the best buy? There are so (or is "too"...) many available. Personally, I likethis editon The Beautiful and Damned (yes, you need to click the link to see which one it is as Amazon combines many reviews together), especially because of the captivating cover shot. A great value IMHO.

Hidden Treasure in the Shadow of Gatsby. . .
The American reading public seems to reduce `classic authors' to one-hit wonders: The Stranger, Catcher in the Rye, Vanity Fair, Frankenstein, Catch-22, Oedipus the King, etc. One great work seems to exhaust us and we move on. The only real exceptions are situations in which the author has two great works of moral equivalency: Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-four, Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Iliad and The Odyssey.

A victim of the one-book limit on our memories is The Beautiful and Damned. No, it's not as good as The Great Gatsby. But then again -- to paraphrase Joseph Heller -- neither is any other American novel. If it weren't for Jay Gatsby, however, this other work by F. Scott Fitzgerald would likely get suggested more often as `the Great American Novel'.

I was blown away by it. The novel is divided into roughly three parts, following the third decade of life of a useless Harvard alum living in New York City named Anthony Comstock Patch. The first period is youthful exuberance. It reads like it was written by a kid who woke up one day being after being anointed the Chosen One by the gods of literature. It's got this `Wow, I can write beautiful prose about anything!' euphoria to it. The prose dazzles and sparkles as it careens from one pointless bit to another as it lampoons the East Coast elite. It shifts tenses for no reason, abruptly goes into the format of a play for couple of pages at a stretch and generally dances its way through the nonadventures of several extremely wealthy young men. The words on the page are relentless brilliant. Even getting up to leave is memorable: `Anthony arose and punched himself into his overcoat. . .'

This first section is hilarious. Typically, when I discover something from before WWII that was meant to be humorous, I cringe to myself because it's so not funny. The opening of this book, after a slightly dry description of Anthony Patch's familial background, satirizes the wealthy, their pretensions, their sense of entitlement, their superiority, with unerring accuracy. It's laugh-out-loud funny but never mean-spirited.

I hate spoilers. Suffice to say that the second and third sections get uglier as relationships get more serious. What we forgive in the young we find more disappointing in people as they age. (A Peter Pan with a puffy-eyed hangover at thirty is not a pretty sight.) The prose loses little momentum as the story flirts with disaster.

In addition to the writing itself, what really struck me was how Fitzgerald could create a sense of empathy for such appalling characters. If Anthony Patch was a real person, he'd be the poster boy for Marxism. Yet Fitzgerald can get us to care about him and his ilk, people who are in truth little more than lazy, absentmindedly racist, decidedly misogynistic alcoholic snobs. (Indeed, this novel could be read as the parable about the consequences of misogyny on men.) If someone told me that it would be possible to write a novel in which you feel for a character who jokes about kicking a kitten -- we're left hoping it was a joke -- I would have said it was impossible, but there you have it.

The novel also makes the time period covered, from shortly before WWI to the Roaring Twenties, come vividly alive. Anthony Patch becomes the embodiment of America, starting in innocence, becoming disillusioned with war and ending in the boozy disillusionment of Prohibition. (And no, that's not really a spoiler.) It's not simply Anthony: the novel is animated by consumer products of the period, suggests a critique of suburbia forty years head of its time and is filled with fascination with those new technologies, the car and the feature-length film.

In short, The Beautiful and Damned probably offers more per page than just about any other novel you might read. Except The Great Gatsby.

This review is based on an out of print hardback from the library, not this particular edition.

Great Book for any Fitzgerald Fan!
Great book for any Fitzgerald fan!This was my guide to living life in my twenties, lol!I've heard it called a hard book to read, and I can see that.But there is great satisfaction upon finishing the book.I guarantee it!

A must-read--before it's made into a movie
Nearly ninety years after its first publication, _The Beautiful and Damned_ is still a shockingly relevant account of the entitlement class, the children of the rich or privileged who don't know how to navigate through life without big money.And, it's a New York City novel--written as only a mid-westerner can.It seems to me that because New Yorkers are too much in the middle of it to see themselves clearly, an intelligent "outsider" like F. Scott Fitzgerald must come along.To write as well as he did, Fitzgerald let the city inhabit him.New York got into his blood, and he recorded it in narrative right down to the dirt under the carpet.Fitzgerald's details lead the reader into the depths of the beautiful and doomed couple, the Gloria-Anthony entanglement, as they are part and parcel of the extremes of poverty and wealth (in the World War I era or the roaring 20s).

I don't know how Fitzgerald knew what he knew about the human psyche, or specifically about how a young man might react when he is good-looking and swimming in money and New York, but Fitz's life at Princeton University among this set of people gave him the environment in which to observe; Fitzgerald supplied the story around which the narrative coheres.Of course, there are autobiographical elements to this novel--a lot of himself and Zelda--but what the literary art requires is critical distance.To put his main characters through some shameful scenes, Fitzgerald had to know what tough love is in the New York City context.He had to put his couple to the test, people who from birth had relied on the "religion" of charm and money.And the author had more than just critical distance: F. Scott had them down right!Every expression, every word.Gloria: "This is life!Who cares for the morrow."And you can see Anthony deciding to have one more drink, his speech becoming slurred, his manners maudlin.While Anthony and Gloria wait for his inheritance, we find out what they're made of.

Most pleasurable about Fitzgerald's craft is his carefully-controlled technique of letting Anthony and Gloria visit hell (the "damned" in the title) while softening the harsh surgery-like light with well-timed, well-handled, lyrical sentences.In a single beautiful line, the passage of the winter sun describes both Fitzgerald's craft and his beautiful couple's descent: Gloria "lay still for a moment in the great bed watching the February sun suffer one last attenuated refinement in its passage through the leaded panes into the room" (p.173).Fitzgerald knew how to show the attenuated and refined way downhill.

One more thing about the craft of writing: Only the omniscient narrator technique--which Fitzgerald employs--can show characters in shameful acts and show what they're thinking, and the circumstances in which they got there, and how they "need" money in order to "survive."I wonder if now, in nearly 2010, this novel is not more important than in 1922.More than ever, _The Beautiful and Damned_ is a national portrait.(I can see how "spending" money could be the "sex" in the novel.)

Advice: Read this novel while in New York, if possible.The first time I read _The Beautiful and Damned_, I was living near 123rd (me, a Westerner!).I looked up every address in the novel (except for the gray house near Cos Cob, Conn.) and got to know New York through this novel.In fact, I could almost pick out their final apartment in Harlem near 127th.
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Product Description
C&C Web brings you F. Scott Fitzgerald's, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button from Tales of the Jazz Age. Selection includes an active table of contents.

Excerpt:

"As long ago as 1860 it was the proper thing to be born at home. At present, so I am told, the high gods of medicine have decreed that the first cries of the young shall be uttered upon the anesthetic air of a hospital, preferably a fashionable one. So young Mr. and Mrs. Roger Button were fifty years ahead of style when they decided, one day in the summer of 1860, that their first baby should be born in a hospital. Whether this anachronism had any bearing upon the astonishing history I am about to set down will never be known...I shall tell you what occurred, and let you judge for yourself".
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