Hemingway Vs Fitzgerald - Hardcover

Donaldson, Scott

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0719554837 ISBN 13: 9780719554834

Publisher: Trafalgar Square, 2000

Synopsis

A marvelous look at the most famous literary friendship of our time, set against the glittering backdrops of Paris, Pamplona, Capri and the Riviera

Paris in the 20s: The era of literary expatriates Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald continues to burn in the imagination as a time of unparalleled glamour and romance. The legendary friendship--and rivalry--of these literary giants was compellingly chronicled by Hemingway in A Moveable Feast, but as Hemingway reminded the reader, that book is fiction. Here, in Fitzgerald and Hemingway, leading scholar Scott Donaldson goes beyond the mythologyzing to create a true, multi-faceted narrative of a great friendship fueled by admiration, jealousy, and liquor--a heady mixture of literary scholarship, history, and gossip.

With a dazzling cast of characters that includes legendary Scribner's editor Maxwell Perkins, the artist/socialites Gerald and Sara Murphy, Zelda Fitzgerald and Hadley Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, John Dos Passos, Archibald MacLeish, agent Harold Ober, publisher Horace Liveright, and Lady Duff Twysden, Scott Donaldson recounts the glory and pain of a writing life and the rise and fall of the great literary friendship of our time.

About this title

About the Author

Scott Donaldson is the preeminent biographer and scholar of Hemingway and Fitzgerald and the author of By Force of Will: The Life and Art of Ernest Hemingway and Fool for Love: F. Scott Fitzgerald. He is the editor of The Cambridge Companion to Hemingway.

From Kirkus Reviews

A tidy though somewhat tedious history of the literary rivalry and oft-fractured friendship between Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Donaldson, biographer of Fitzgerald (1983) and John Cheever (1988), begins with a laborious introduction to his subjects childhoods and early romances that limply attempts to draw striking parallels between the two men based upon such unexceptional experiences as problems with parents and love affairs ending disastrously. After this lamentable opening, however, Donaldson's pacing and analysis improve markedly as he delineates the origins of the men's friendship amidst the snappy decadence of the American expatriate community in 1920s Paris. With their world populated by the likes of Gertrude Stein, John Dos Passos, Archibald MacLeish, and the cream of the Parisian social scene, Hemingway and Fitzgerald moved, frolicked, and fought in the limelight both of their private social circles and a scrutinizing public eye. Tempers frequently flashed over their criticisms of each other's works: Hemingway's attack on Tender Is the Night and Fitzgerald's suggested revisions for A Farewell to Arms are but two examples of their aggressive posturing, which stretched into long literary skirmishes. The many fracases the two men found themselves in, including Hemingway's pummeling of critic Max Eastman and Fitzgerald's alcohol-induced misadventures, provided the men with ample opportunities either to realign themselves as friends in mutual support or to distance themselves from each other. Even more, though, than their respective writings and celebrated social blunders, the friendship floundered over the question of reputation; as Fitzgerald succinctly stated, ``I talk with the authority of failureErnest with the authority of success. We could never sit across the same table again.'' Freed from Donaldson's armchair psychoanalysis of his subjects, Hemingway Vs. Fitzgerald would emerge a cleaner and tighter history of the men, whose heady lives and harrowing words could well be left to tell their own story without such an intrusive authorial presence. (18 b&w photos) -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Edition details

• Publisher: Trafalgar Square
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0719554837
• ISBN 13: 9780719554834
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1