Hemingway vs. Fitzgerald: The Rise and Fall of a Literary Friendship - Hardcover

Donaldson, Scott

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0879517115 ISBN 13: 9780879517113

Publisher: Overlook Books, 1999

Synopsis

A chronicle of a fascinating literary friendship and rivalry traces the respect, the envy, and artistic competition that drove Hemingway and Fitzgerald and portrays the Paris of the Lost Generation of expatriates, including Gertrude Stein. 17,500 first printing.

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.

Reviews

Perhaps a respite from the flood of work on these two writers is in order. Not that there's anything particularly wrong or especially bad about this effort; it merely demonstrates that for the moment there's little to add on the subject. For here are all the old familiar places (Paris, the French Riviera, Key West, Hollywood, peopled with all the old familiar faces) Gerald and Sara Murphy, Maxwell Perkins, John Dos Passos, Archibald MacLeish, Brett Ashley, Zelda, Hadley, Pauline, all coming and going in what have become virtually set pieces in the long-running drama of the lost generation. The oft-told anecdotes include, for instance, Fitzgerald's blunder in allowing a Hemingway boxing match to run too long, Fitzgerald's anxieties about the size of his penis, Fitzgerald's editing of The Sun Also Rises. And then there's Hemingway's bullying, his resentment of Zelda, the drinking, the letters of praise and recriminations, the jealousies, the insecurities. Only the most passionate devotee of Fitzgerald, the greatest fan of Hemingway, the true aficionado of the expatriates can possibly be interested in reading it all over again. As for the interested but uninitiated, many other sources (the Hemingway/Fitzgerald letters, their own memoirs and autobiographical ruminations, the countless critical studies and biographies)Aincluding Donaldson's own far superior work on Hemingway (By Force of Will) and Fitzgerald (Fool for Love)Awould provide a better starting place. (Nov.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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.

This anemic and unnecessary volume chronicles the often tempestuous relationship between the two writers. Donaldson, who has written well on both subjects in the past, unfortunately offers no new insight here; the book is a catalog of well-known facts about the duo's lives and work presented in a style as flat as last week's beer. Fitzgerald, one of American letters' most gifted sons, emerges as little more than a groveling toady who tirelessly promotes Hemingway's work while casually allowing his own career to founder. All this has appeared before in numerous top-shelf biographies, especially Matthew J. Bruccoli's superior Fitzgerald and Hemingway: A Dangerous Friendship (LJ 9/1/94). Though Donaldson chronicles Hemingway's many slights to Fitzgerald in his stories, he fails to include the most recent slam, which appears in Hemingway's True at First Light (LJ 5/1/99), even though he notes the book's release. The lack of an index further detracts from this volume's usefulness. Not recommended.AMichael Rogers, "Library Journal"
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Overlook Books
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0879517115
• ISBN 13: 9780879517113
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 320