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F. Scott Fitzgerald (Magill Book Reviews)

At a glance:

  • Author: F. Scott Fitzgerald
  • First Published: 1994
  • Type of Work: Letters
  • Genres: Nonfiction, Letters

Bruccoli’s work is the most comprehensive collection of Fitzgerald letters to date (including hundreds not previously published), but it is also the most revealing. For Matthew Bruccoli has organized the letters to give readers a glimpse into Fitzgerald’s life, in epistolary descriptions of his relationships, his travels, and his philosophy about writing. The letters detail the Jazz Age life that was the basis of the Fitzgerald myth from the 1920’s on, but they also reveal the other side of that glamorous expatriate life: his growing concern with his wife’s health (Zelda Fitzgerald was institutionalized for much of the 1930’s), his frantic attempts to raise money through his writings, his failed Hollywood career, his alcoholism.

The collection is arranged in six unequal periods (for example, to 1919, to 1924) and each section of letters is prefaced by a brief chronology of the most important dates in that period in Fitzgerald’s life, so someone unfamiliar with Fitzgerald will have no trouble getting a sense of the chronology.

Increasingly, the letters are about money, false directions, and business plans (these include letters to his editor, Maxwell Perkins, and his agent, Harold Ober, on how best to market his books). Later sections contain letters to Zelda, her parents, and her doctors, justifying Fitzgerald’s part in her sickness. The best letters in the collection are to friends (such as Ernest Hemingway, Edmund Wilson) and to his beloved daughter, Scottie. Since Fitzgerald never completed an autobiography, these often painfully honest letters are the most intimate glimpse of the man and the writer readers will find.