Good biographies of F. Scott Fitzgerald?

December 25, 2008 10:22 AM

A friend of mine would like to read more about F. Scott Fitzgerald's life. What can you recommend?

I'm interested particularly in any good biographies or other books, hopefully veering more towards "interesting reading" than "overly academic". Suggestions? Thanks.

posted by Quidam to media & arts (9 comments total)

Matthew Bruccoli is considered by many to be Fitzgerald's preeminent biographer and scholar. Bruccoli's work, Some Sort of Epic Grandeur, provides a detailed, fascinating exploration of Fitzgerald's life and writings.
posted by terranova at 10:39 AM on December 25, 2008 [1 favorite]

Bruccoli is your first stop. Then Fitz's venture into memoir: The Crack-Up.
posted by Joe Beese at 11:04 AM on December 25, 2008

McSweeney's #22 featured a delightful book called "The Unwritten Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald."

It seems the Fitzgerald had scrawled into a notebook of his a couple dozen story ideas. Things like "girl and giraffe" and ""The Tyrant Who Had To Let His Family Have Their Way For One Day". Some go into a bit more detail, but most don't really have that much to go off of, so they assigned them to a few previous contributors and let them just run wild. It's a great read, though, I'm aware, not at all a biography, except that you get to see a bit into the worlds that Fitz never got around to writing for us.
posted by disillusioned at 11:08 AM on December 25, 2008 [1 favorite]

You might want to check out Ernest Hemingway's "The Moveable Feast", which is a non-fiction (probably!) memoir of his time in Europe. He goes into a fair amount of detail about Fitzgerald.
posted by Waldo Jeffers at 12:21 PM on December 25, 2008

nthing bruccoli. he's the standard reference we turned to in my fitzgerald classes in college.
posted by mittenedsex at 1:16 PM on December 25, 2008

You might want to check out Ernest Hemingway's "The Moveable Feast", which is a non-fiction (probably!) memoir of his time in Europe. He goes into a fair amount of detail about Fitzgerald.

It's a terrific book. But its sharp - in both senses of the word - verbal portraits of the writers Hem knew in Paris are, as I understand it, notoriously self-serving and unreliable. I certainly wouldn't look to it for an understanding of Fitzgerald's character.
posted by Joe Beese at 1:39 PM on December 25, 2008

You might also want to read Zelda, the Mitford biography of Fitzgerald's wife. It's very easy reading.
posted by onlyconnect at 11:08 AM on December 26, 2008

Fitzgerald doesn't feature prominently, but he is discussed in Shakespeare and Company, Sylvia Beach's memoir about her time running the bookshop of the same name in Paris, where Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Joyce, and most of the other famous writers of the day hung out whenever they were in Paris. It might provide an interesting glimpse at Fitzgerald, and is a fascinating read in its own right for the look it provides at other famous authors, as well.
posted by Caduceus at 9:52 AM on December 27, 2008

Supplement the other books with A. Scott Berg's biography Maxwell Perkins: Editor of Genius. Perkins was Fitzgerald's editor at Scribner's. Plenty of Fitzgerald in the book, plus plenty about the Fitzgerald-Hemingway relationship, often as mediated by Perkins.
posted by jhiggy at 6:07 PM on December 31, 2008