Joyce Carol Oates said of F Scott Fitzgerald: 'Rarely is a literary figure so seemingly exemplary in the most terrible, tragi-pathetic of ways.' This book gives a revealing insight into the life and world of one of America's greatest writers. Scott Fitzgerald's life reads like one of his own stories: a young man of great promise marries into wealth, but beneath the golden surface lie alcoholism, debt, insecurity, and in Fitzgerald's particular case, the mental instability of his beautiful, unconventional wife, Zelda. In the face of these sorrows, Fitzgerald wrote brilliant, diamond-sharp prose and in The Great Gatsby he captured for all time the dark side of the American Dream. Many of the photos in this volume have never before been published, including a photo of the location where Fitzgerald and Zelda became engaged, along with rare first edition book jackets, paintings by Zelda, and photos of friends and colleagues, among them Maxwell Perkins, Gerald and Sara Murphy, and Fitzgerald's great rival Ernest Hemingway.
Acclaimed Fitzgerald scholar Ruth Prigozy provides fresh insight into the life of the novelist who, in both his work and life, captured the rise and fall of the Jazz Age.