F. Scott Fitzgerald A Composite Biography

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 "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.