Fool for Love is Scott Donaldson’s masterful biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald—written from a fresh and highly intimate perspective. Fool for Love follows Fitzgerald from his birthplace in St. Paul, Minnesota, to Princeton and upward into the highest reaches of literary and public success—and ultimately to Fitzgerald’s untimely death in Hollywood at the age of forty-four, broke and nearly forgotten.

This engrossing, definitive study explores two classic Fitzgerald themes—love and class—and the result is a striking portrayal of one of the twentieth century’s greatest writers, whose legacy and influence only continue to grow.

$19.95 paper ISBN 978-0-8166-7820-4
296 pages, 17 b&w photos, 6 x 9, September 2012

UMP blog - Q&A on motivation, love, and the Roaring Twenties: Some reflections on F. Scott Fitzgerald

You mentioned in an interview this year that Fool for Love is the best writing you've ever done. Why?
A couple of reasons. One is that I felt a greater kinship with Fitzgerald than with any other subject. I grew up in Minneapolis, across the river from Fitzgerald’s St. Paul. I went to Blake school, the Twin Cities rival to his St. Paul Academy. My mother, a contemporary of Fitzgerald’s, was raised in St. Paul, and attended St. Paul Central high, as did many of Scott’s boyhood friends. I like to think that she – the pretty, red-haired Ruth Evelyn Chase – may have danced with the handsome young Fitzgerald. But that’s merely speculation, for she died while I was in my early teens, before I knew anything of Fitzgerald, and so we never talked about that possibility.

Read the full Q&A.