Incredibly thorough, sympathetic, and maybe a little too detailed at times (i.e. his yearly income tax, to the penny). If you love Fitzgerald, such an in depth history will add so much to his stories. If you don't love him, you're wrong and also probably won't enjoy reading this.

pretty good, I thought.

This is a well-researched, comprehensive look at Fitzgerald's life. At points my interest waned, but overall it was a great biography that gave me a good sense of what Fitzgerald's life was like and what sort of man he was.

This definitive biography by the great Fitzgerald scholar covers the meteoric rise and fall of one of the great prose writers of all time. The Great Gatsby has always been near and dear to my heart, and the short stories are full of such exquisite prose that I have always been a major Fitzgerald fan. I knew most of these details from various general readings, but it is still thrilling to read how the stories developed in his mind and it is absolutely heartbreaking to read of his helpless descent into abject alcoholism and the desperate insanity of his wife Zelda. While I never really felt like I "knew" Fitzgerald with this book, as all truly great biographers accomplish, nonetheless, I knew all of the details and I could read the intimate struggles in his letters. This book is accompanied by a generous and healthy amount of graphics, many from the author's personal collection. If you want to read about FSF while having many of the myths peeled away, this is the book. Just as with Jay Gastby and Dick Diver, at the end of the book, I felt myself thinking "Poor guy."

Lovely and sad.

Haven’t read this since college. Wanted to go back and soak up the Jazz Age one more time.

"It was always the becoming he dreamed of, never the being." Fitzgerald's own words (from THIS SIDE OF PARADISE) seem to resonate throughout his own life. His biographer paints a vivid, nuanced picture of a tortured artist. More afraid of success perhaps than he is of failure. Hands down, one of the best biographies I've ever read.

Wow. I'm sort of at a loss for words for how deeply I felt this reading experience. This was everything I knew about Fitzgerald from my personal study of Gatsby - his early life and career and courtship of Zelda - but I was fascinated to learn more about the latter years of Fitzgerald's life and his decline and downfall. Bruccoli's writing is reverential and informative without being stuffy, and there is so much depth in Scott and Zelda that they come to life on the page. I'm beyond grateful to have read this, and it only makes me love Fitzgerald that much more.

Bruccoli's biography is, in my opinion, the definitive biography of FSF. And because Zelda was such an integral part of his life, Bruccoli wove the events of her life into that of Scott. Relying upon the notebooks and scrap books of the Fitzgeralds, as well as interviews with noted writers, publishers, editors, critics and other notables, Bruccoli leaves a record that is unsurpassed.

We see how Fitzgerald at a young age would write character sketches of friends and acquaintances, with the intention of incorporating them into his writing. It is a practice he followed for most of his life. With each novel and many of his short stories we learn about the real people that were incorporated into Fitzgerald's composite characters. We learn that FSF was a compulsive list-maker. Annually he created a ledger accounting of his successes and failures for that year. We see what what he is reading, and what other authors are writing over a twenty year span, and how it influences him. Fitzgerald had close relationships with notable writers such as Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, John O'Hara, Thomas Wolfe, Bud Schulberg and Ring Lardner, and their communications are noted. Oddly enough, there doesn't seem to be any record of Fitzgerald ever meeting fellow Minnesotan Sinclair Lewis.

Each novel—This Side of Paradise, The Beautiful and Damned, The Great Gatsby, Tender is the Night, and The Last Tycoon—is analyzed for character sources, Fitzgerald's "blueprint" for the construction of the novel is revealed, and the events and struggles of Fitzgerald's life that influenced the writing effort are described. The nine years he spent on Tender is the Night was a particularly arduous task as we witness the drinking, drinking and more drinking, and Zelda's slide into mental illness.

Fitzgerald kept meticulous records of his earnings by year and by each written work. He peaks at $37,000 in 1931 and begins a long slide into the low teens by 1937. It isn't until he goes to Hollywood for the third time in 1937 that his income takes a significant leap. But he is so far in debt that it is still all he can do to stay above water.

FSF was never able to adapt the the collaborative team approach to screenplay writing. While in Hollywood, there is a surprising cast of players who enter Fitzgerald's life—Bennett Cerf, Garrison Morfit (Garry Moore), Joan Crawford, Sheila Graham, Irving Thalberg and Joseph Mankiewicz, to mention just a few.

After soaring to fame during the Roaring Twenties Scott and Zelda are brought to their knees during the Depression of the Thirties. Fitzgerald's death in 1940 was barely noted except for about thirty people at his funeral. By 1951 the rebirth of Fitzgerald was in full swing, and by 1960 it could be called a resurrection. Scribner's sold over 15M of his works in the 60 years following his death. The works of FSF have been translated into 35 languages, and every year over 300,000 copies of The Great Gatsby are sold. Every two years for the past twenty hundreds of international scholars of Fitzgerald meet to discuss new discoveries and interpretations of his work. The next such meeting is scheduled for the summer of 2017 in St. Paul, MN, the city of his birth in 1896.

This volume is the second, revised edition of this book. In the preface, the author states that the most important thing for a biography is to include the facts of the subject's life. Why then did he publish a second edition? Because, he says, he had learned more facts.

True to the author's word, this book is a factually detailed account of Fitzgerald's life. However a truly outstanding biography has to go beyond mere factual detail. It must analyze the facts and draw inferences to get inside the subject's mind and provide a fully rounded picture of him or her. That is where this book falls a little short. Despite all the material on what Fitzgerald did each year of his life, where he was, his income and expenses, and the lists he made (Fitzgerald appears to have been a compulsive list-maker), it doesn't go beyond that material to show what made him tick.

I give this book four stars for the detailed and useful factual material it includes, but cannot give it five because of the failure to convincingly unravel Fitzgerald's complicated and fascinating psyche.

Screw Hemingway.

This is regarded as n  then definitive biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald and therefore, when I saw it in my university's library, I knew that I had to read it immediately. Despite my fascination with all things Fitzgerald, I'd yet to have read a biography of him, and this seemed like a good place to start. It didn't disappoint me in the slightest.

Even though I already knew a lot of the details of Fitzgerald's life, it was so nice to finally sit down and read an official life story about him, one which addressed the myths and provided me with an even greater insight into this amazing man's life than I was prepared for. Parts of this reaffirmed my absolute adoration of Fitzgerald; parts of this made me question my love for him (because he said and did a lot of things during his lifetime that I was previously unaware of and am uncomfortable with). However, what Bruccoli truly succeeds in creating here is a portrait of a deeply flawed man who knew he was destined for greatness and ruined himself on the path to that. Many sections of this book left me deeply emotional, which I wasn't expecting. This is more than just a simple accumulation of facts; this is a tragically told story of a life that was marred by astronomical expectations. What a wonderful way to start my further reading into Fitzgerald.

The final word here has to go to Bruccoli, who concludes this book so simply and yet so beautifully:

n  "F. Scott Fitzgerald is now permanently placed with the greatest writers who ever lived, where he wanted to be all along. Where he belongs."n