F. Scott Fitzgerald

A Composite Biography

2023

Niklas Salmose and David Rennie, Editors

A comprehensive study of the life of F. Scott Fitzgerald, related in two-year chapters by twenty-three leading writers on the Jazz Age author

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.

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