F. Scott Fitzgerald
A Composite Biography
Niklas Salmose and David Rennie, Editors
F. Scott Fitzgerald was a man of many aspects, a writer whose complexity and multitudes this composite biography finally aptly portrays. Bringing together twenty-three leading writers and scholars on Fitzgerald, each focusing on two years of his life, this volume presents a new way of grouping together biographical material and perspectives, considering from various angles the author's best-known works as well as understudied writings, personal experiences, and literary relationships.
“There never was a good biography of a novelist,” F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in The Crack-Up. “There couldn’t be. He is too many people, if he’s any good.” Fitzgerald, a good novelist by any measure, has tested this challenge to the biographer’s art. A new star illuminating the literary scene; a chronicler of the Jazz Age in all its brilliance and tarnish; a romantic symbol of the American century; an acute observer of society’s best and worst, and of his own star-crossed career; a midlife burnout at forty-four, leaving an unfinished masterpiece in his wake—he was a man of many aspects, a writer whose complexity and multitudes this composite biography finally aptly portrays.
Bringing together twenty-three leading writers and scholars on Fitzgerald, each focusing on two years of his life, this volume takes its cue from Henry James’s remark, cited by preeminent Fitzgerald biographer Scott Donaldson: “The whole of anything is never told; you can only take what groups together.” F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Composite Biography presents a new way of “grouping together” biographical material and perspectives, considering from various angles the author's best-known works as well as understudied writings, including neglected stories and forays into autobiography such as “What I Think and Feel at 25” and “How to Live on $36,000 a Year.” The glamor and fame that made F. Scott and Zelda mythic figures of their time appear here alongside the personal experiences that he occasionally included in his writing: the beginnings as well as the poignant end; the literary relationships that informed and framed his work, set against solitary effort, fame, and failures. This remarkable study of F. Scott Fitzgerald, by twenty-three experts, reflects the multifaceted whole of a “life in many parts” in new and revelatory ways.
Contributors: Jade Broughton Adams; Ronald Berman; William Blazek, Liverpool Hope U; Elisabeth Bouzonviller, Jean Monnet U; Jackson Bryer, U of Maryland; Kirk Curnutt, Troy U; Catherine Delesalle-Nancey, U Jean Moulin Lyon 3; Scott Donaldson; Kayla Forrest; Marie-Agnès Gay, U Jean Moulin Lyon 3; Joel Kabot, U of Maryland, Baltimore; Sara Kosiba; Arne Lunde, U of California, Los Angeles; Bryant Mangum, Virginia Commonwealth U; Martina Mastandrea; Philip McGowan, Queen’s U Belfast; David Page; Walter Raubicheck, Pace U; Ross Tangedal, U of Wisconsin–Stevens Point; Helen Turner, Linnaeus U; James L. W. West III, Pennsylvania State U.
$29.95 cloth/jacket ISBN 978-1-5179-1585-8
448 pages, 78 b&w photos, 6 1/8 x 9 1/4, July 2024
Niklas Salmose is professor of English literature at Linnaeus University and an executive board member of the F. Scott Fitzgerald Society. He has translated Fitzgerald’s writing into Swedish and is editing a new edition of The Last Tycoon for Oxford Classics.
David Rennie, a teacher of English at St. Machar Academy, Aberdeen, Scotland, is author of American Writers and World War I and editor of Scottish Literature and World War I.
Contents
Introduction
F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Composite Biography
1896–1897
Helen Turner
1898–1899
Martina Mastandrea
1900–1901
Philip McGowan
1902–1903
Joel Kabot
1904–1905
Ross Tangedal
1906–1907
Kayla Forrest
1908–1909
David Page
1910–1911
Sara Kosiba
1912–1913
Ronald Berman
1914–1915
David Rennie
1916–1917
James L. W. West III
1918–1919
Niklas Salmose
1920–1921
Walter Raubicheck
1922–1923
Bryant Mangum
1924–1925
Marie-Agnès Gay
1926–1927
Jade Broughton Adams
1928–1929
Catherine Delesalle-Nancey
1930–1931
Kirk Curnutt
1932–1933
Scott Donaldson
1934–1935
William Blazek
1936–1937
Elisabeth Bouzonviller
1938–1939
Arne Lunde
1940
Jackson R. Bryer
Acknowledgments
Contributors
Illustration Credits
Index