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A Life in Letters

f. scott fitzgerald matthew j. bruccoli

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A vibrant self-portrait of an artist whose work was his life.
In this new collection of F. Scott Fitzgerald's letters, edited by leading Fitzgerald scholar and biographer Matthew J. Bruccoli, we see through his own words the artistic and emotional maturation of one of America's most enduring and elegant authors. A Life in Letters is the most comprehensive volume of Fitzgerald's letters -- many of them appearing in print for the first time. The fullness of the selection and the chronological arrangement make this collection the closest thing to an autobiography that Fitzgerald ever wrote.
While many readers are familiar with Fitzgerald's legendary "jazz age" social life and his friendships with Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Edmund Wilson, and other famous authors, few are aware of his writings about his life and his views on writing. Letters to his editor Maxwell Perkins illustrate the development of Fitzgerald's literary sensibility; those to his friend and competitor Ernest Hemingway reveal their difficult relationship. The most poignant letters here were written to his wife, Zelda, from the time of their courtship in Montgomery, Alabama, during World War I, to her extended convalescence in a sanatorium near Asheville, North Carolina. Fitzgerald is by turns affectionate and proud in his letters to his daughter, Scottie, at college in the East while he was struggling in Hollywood.
For readers who think primarily of Fitzgerald as a hard-drinking playboy for whom writing was effortless, these letters show his serious, painstaking concerns with creating realistic and durable art.

528 pages, Paperback

First published March 1,1980

This edition

Format
528 pages, Paperback
Published
May 3, 1995 by Scribner
ISBN
9780684801537
ASIN
0684801531
Language
English
Characters More characters
  • F. Scott Fitzgerald

    F. Scott Fitzgerald

    Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald (1896 - 1940) was an American author of novels and short stories, whose works are the paradigmatic writings of the Jazz Age, a term he coined. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century. ...

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About the author

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f. scott fitzgerald

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Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald, widely known simply as Scott Fitzgerald, was an American novelist, essayist, and short story writer. He is best known for his novels depicting the flamboyance and excess of the Jazz Age, a term he popularized in his short story collection Tales of the Jazz Age. During his lifetime, he published four novels, four story collections, and 164 short stories. Although he achieved temporary popular success and fortune in the 1920s, Fitzgerald received critical acclaim only after his death and is now widely regarded as one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century.
Born into a middle-class family in Saint Paul, Minnesota, Fitzgerald was raised primarily in New York state. He attended Princeton University where he befriended future literary critic Edmund Wilson. Owing to a failed romantic relationship with Chicago socialite Ginevra King, he dropped out in 1917 to join the United States Army during World War I. While stationed in Alabama, he met Zelda Sayre, a Southern debutante who belonged to Montgomery's exclusive country-club set. Although she initially rejected Fitzgerald's marriage proposal due to his lack of financial prospects, Zelda agreed to marry him after he published the commercially successful This Side of Paradise (1920). The novel became a cultural sensation and cemented his reputation as one of the eminent writers of the decade.
His second novel, The Beautiful and Damned (1922), propelled him further into the cultural elite. To maintain his affluent lifestyle, he wrote numerous stories for popular magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post, Collier's Weekly, and Esquire. During this period, Fitzgerald frequented Europe, where he befriended modernist writers and artists of the "Lost Generation" expatriate community, including Ernest Hemingway. His third novel, The Great Gatsby (1925), received generally favorable reviews but was a commercial failure, selling fewer than 23,000 copies in its first year. Despite its lackluster debut, The Great Gatsby is now hailed by some literary critics as the "Great American Novel". Following the deterioration of his wife's mental health and her placement in a mental institute for schizophrenia, Fitzgerald completed his final novel, Tender Is the Night (1934).
Struggling financially because of the declining popularity of his works during the Great Depression, Fitzgerald moved to Hollywood, where he embarked upon an unsuccessful career as a screenwriter. While living in Hollywood, he cohabited with columnist Sheilah Graham, his final companion before his death. After a long struggle with alcoholism, he attained sobriety only to die of a heart attack in 1940, at 44. His friend Edmund Wilson edited and published an unfinished fifth novel, The Last Tycoon (1941), after Fitzgerald's death. In 1993, a new edition was published as The Love of the Last Tycoon, edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli.

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Community Reviews

Rating(4 / 5.0, 20 votes)
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20 reviews All reviews
Profile Image for Kimberly .
RandomGuyScott
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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I read this book for so long. First I started reading it as an e-book, but then the app I use for e-books deleted it from their library. So I bought the book. I decided to start over as I saw that the footnotes were very useful. I read this book 1,5 times...

Mostly this book consists of lending money and someone being sick. I'm interested in 20s writers but this was maybe too much for me. Should have read his wiki page instead.
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Sereshay
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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“America’s greatest promise is that something is going to happen, and after awhile you get tired of waiting because nothing happens to people expect that they grow old and nothing happens to American art because America is the story of the moon that never rose.”
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scotwilson
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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A collection of correspondences with Maxwell Perkins from Scribner's on his work, finances + loans, marketing strategy, endless requests + whining, letters to his Princeton colleague and literary critic Edmund Wilson, critiques and advices to his homie Hemingway, Scottie his daughter, John Beale Bishop, etc. No matter what it is, it's always written... gorgeously?

One can only wish to write like this. (an irrefutable asshole though)

“You and I have been happy; we haven’t been happy just once, we’ve been happy a thousand times. The chances that spring, that’s for everyone, like in the popular songs, may belong to us too – the chances are pretty bright at this time because as usual, I can carry most of contemporary literary opinion, liquidated, in the hollow of my hand – and when I do, I see the swan floating on it and – I find it to be you and you only.”
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Gekuul
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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I have a love of F. Scott Fitzgerald's work, starting with the Great Gatsby, but going far beyond that. I picked up this book eagerly because I have always wanted to read his own letters about his life, particularly his relationship with Zelda.

I'm somewhat disappointed by the book. I find the one sidedness of the letters, we only read Fitzgerald's letters with a few exceptions, to leave me wanting. I don't feel the full picture, and it feels as though part of the story is missing. I also would like to read the other side of Zelda's illness--Fitzgerald's side of it is obviously self-serving and he is in denial about his own problems with drinking.

I am going to put a book with both his letters and Zelda's next on my list.
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Otorez
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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An excellent compilation of primary source material from Fitzgerald's Princeton years to his final years in Hollywood.
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SovereignCZ
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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I truly have never taken longer to read a book.

This wasn't as interesting as I expected/hoped it would be. Mostly administrative discussions about money and work, very little on his actual life, which admittedly you can't expect so much of when these are letters and not diary entries. I probably should have managed my expectations.

Found Scott very easy to pity and incredibly easy to dislike the whole way through. Happy to see the back of this book, for sure.
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lunattia
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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Fascinating stuff. Inside the heart and soul of one of America's most epic writers. To read this book is to understand that Fitzgerald was a true romantic and -- as most writers are -- his own worst critic.
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nonooah
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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I don't think there is a better way of knowing who a person was than reading his hand written letters. There was much to know of Fitzgerald and what was going on in his life that contributed to such wonderful, dramatic and colorful stories that so many people love and continue to read. I will forever refer back to this book and many specific letters as they are inspirational and contain powerful words. I highly recommend this book to lovers of the early 1900's, poetry and/or Fitzgerald.
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