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

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.

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.