A Life in Letters

F. Scott Fitzgerald; Matthew Bruccoli; Judith S. Baughman

ISBN 10: 0684195704 / ISBN 13: 9780684195704

Published by Charles Scribner's Sons (edition First Edition), 1994

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Synopsis:

"I doubt if, after all, I'll ever write anything again worth putting in print." F. Scott Fitzgerald was twenty-six when he wrote this lament to his editor, Maxwell Perkins, in 1923 - two years before Scribners published The Great Gatsby. Soon after Gatsby appeared, Fitzgerald wrote to H. L. Mencken, "I think the book is so far a commercial failure - at least it was two weeks after publication - hadn't reached 20,000 yet."
Gatsby turned out all right in the end. But while Fitzgerald's roller-coaster reputation fell precipitously in the years approaching his death in 1940, his stature in American literature has risen steadily in the five decades that followed - the strongest restoration in American literary history. Yet his life and work have remained obscured by myth and misconceptions. In this new collection of his 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 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 friendship. 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. A Life in Letters offers a full, vibrant self-portrait of an artist whose work was his life.

About the Author: F. Scott Fitzgerald was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1896, attended Princeton University, and published his first novel, This Side of Paradise, in 1920. That same year he married Zelda Sayre and the couple divided their time among New York, Paris, and the Riviera, becoming a part of the American expatriate circle that included Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, and John Dos Passos. Fitzgerald was a major new literary voice, and his masterpieces include The Beautiful and Damned, The Great Gatsby, and Tender Is the Night. He died of a heart attack in 1940 at the age of forty-four, while working on The Love of the Last Tycoon. For his sharp social insight and breathtaking lyricism, Fitzgerald is known as one of the most important American writers of the twentieth century.

Bibliographic Details

Title: A Life in Letters
Publisher: Charles Scribner's Sons (edition First Edition)
Publication Date: 1994
Binding: Hardcover
Condition: Good
Edition: First Edition.