lots of interesting information about a very interesting person.

This is an excellent read for anyone curious about the life of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Brucolli conveys Fitzgerald's life using only information that can be solidly backed by either Fitzgerald's own accounts, reliable family/collegue accounts, or by existing data. It is especially interesting that he uses Fitzgerald's accounting ledgers to gain insight into the author's life. Bottom line: Fitzgerald was a great writer with often disappointing personal beliefs who made tragic life choices. Not a gossip book, but a compelling read.

Was just going back through this pulling bookmarked quotes and realized I never actually reviewed on here - this is essentially the definitive FSF biography, and with good reason: the breadth and scope and collection of primary sources (so many letters and notes and photos I'd never seen - extremely exciting for me as a Fitzgerald obsessive who thought she'd seen just about everything) are unparalleled. I have nothing on Bruccoli, though - he was the world's foremost Fitzgerald scholar as well as a friend of his daughter Scottie. Basically Scott's #1 superfan. To that end, my singular complaint about this book is that Bruccoli's biases toward Scott and against Zelda are sometimes cringingly apparent - I'd recommend balancing that out with a read of Nancy Milford's "Zelda" to get the other side of the story.

Extremely thorough.

Author Matthew J. Bruccoli has assembled an impressive and exhaustive biography of Fitzgerald the writer and Fitzgerald the man. Initially, I began reading this to get a sense of Fitzgerald’s wife, Zelda, and found myself becoming intrigued by Fitzgerald!

By far, the best of the F. S. F. biographies, the Bruccoli account is comprehensive, neither patronizing nor critical, and reveals that the story of Fitzgerald's life truly is, in Scott's own words, "Some sort of epic grandeur". Caught up in the Jazz Age, or perhaps partly responsible for it, Scott Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda pursued the path of glamour, charm and celebration everywhere they went: in New York, Paris, the French Riviera and every sparkling place to be in the post WWI years, all the while writing to support that lifestyle. And he did that by revealing his own life in his fiction with all its glitz and glamour but also with complete honesty about the excesses of this life, and his own poor decisions and failures. Except for a few of the headiest years, Fitzgerald was running just ahead of the bill collectors, turning out short stories to finance his expensive lifestyle and the time he could spend on writing his novels. Lucky for us, The Fitzgerald's were helped by Scott's editors and agents with advances and personal loans which enabled the author to turn out 5 novels—one of which is considered by many, "The Great American Novel", The Great Gatsby, and more than 160 short stories, undoubtedly creating some of the finest American literature in the twentieth century.

Bruccoli doesn't spare us the warts of Fitzgerald's life but he doesn't wallow in them either. It is clear from the start that Fitzgerald's closely related life/art was a series of highs and lows, successes and failures and while it was not a "typical American life" it was truly an American life that was a product of its time and reflective of a climate and movement of the country.

This biography just doesn't stop for a moment. It thinks it does in within F. Scott's work, but it just hurtles ahead until the end. I like it but I don't. I want a better, more meditative biography of one of the most talented authors who honestly ever lived.

This brick-sized epic seems to be the most comprehensive of the plethora of biographies of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Where it differs to almost all the others is that it comprehensively and consistently ties Fitzgerald’s work to the many strands of his life. This is a very astute and intelligent approach by the author as most great novels have an autobiographical element, especially those of Fitzgerald. The book is easy to read and exceptionally engaging and the research presented by the author is outstanding. Amazingly, after almost a century of Fitzgerald appreciation, the book dispels many Fitzgerald myths and actually presents an accurate and honest insight of both a lauded great writer and an obnoxious declining alcoholic.

This is The Fitzgerald Biography!

Perhaps the most respected Fitzgerald scholar, Bruccoli spent a lifetime dedicated to studying Fitzgerald, and he is the biographer who most clearly captures Fitzgerald’s essence.

The book is highly addictive, readable, and it is a pleasure to pick up.

Bruccoli also adds in relevant pictures. While it is one thing to know that Zelda Fitzgerald was institutionalized, it is another experience completely to see in a picture the institution set in Switzerland, looking more like a five-star resort nestled beside one of the most beautiful lakes in the world.

The artist’s life is a hard one; Fitzgerald found rejection and ruin throughout his life. Scribner turned down his first novel multiple times—when Scribner finally agreed to publish, it was with the utmost reluctance. Maxwell Perkins, Fitzgerald’s editor, effectively threatened to resign if Scribner didn’t publish someone with the talent of Fitzgerald.

Out of the four novels published during Fitzgerald’s lifetime, The Great Gatsby earned him the least amount of money.

The Green Light at the End of the Dock (How much I spent):
Hardcover Text – Free through Mel-Cat (Michigan Library System)

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"I am not a great man, but sometimes I think the impersonal and objective quality of my talent and the sacrifices of it, in pieces, to preserve its essential value has some sort of epic grandeur." A few weeks ago I read the book "West of Sunset" by Stewart O'Nan which portrays the last few years of F. Scott Fitzgeral's life. Whenever I read historical fiction I am always curious as to the accuracy of the "facts" around which the story is built. As I researched I found that Mr. O'Nan had done his homework, but I realized I had never done mine. I have lived in Minneapolis for almost 50 years. I have driven and walked by homes and haunts of Fitzgerald, but I had never read a biography of the man. I assumed there were many so I entered "preeminent biography of … " into the search engine. The answer was: "Since its first publication in 1981, Some Sort of Epic Grandeur has stood apart from other biographies of F. Scott Fitzgerald for its thoroughness and volume of information." Normally when I read history, I tend to select that latest publication. I am a huge reader of WWII history. Because of new release of classified documents and the opening of Russian and other Eastern European sources, more and more information is entering this area of historical research. When I thought about Fitzgerald, however, I realized that my "rule of thumb" did not apply. Mr. Bruccoli devoted decades of research, collected many documents / memorabilia, and published extensively.... If you want an "anecdotal" biography, this is not the book for you. The volume has 624 pages. Given the quality of publishing in the 1980's it weighs a ton and has not been edited by a computer. It is beautifully written with actual correct grammar. The book has Fitzgerald's infamous "lists", medical information concerning Scott and Zelda that today would be protected by patient confidentiality, yearly income from a personal ledger from 1919 to 1937, and letters to / from Scottie, Zelda, his literary agent, Harold Ober, and his editor at Scribner's, Maxwell Perkins. Bruccoli shows us Fitzgerald as a greatly flawed man. He was, of course, an alcoholic from very early on, an unfaithful husband, a man in constant debt ( largely to Perkins and Ober ) who always borrowed against future work, a harsh father who did not practice what he preached, and basically a not particularly "nice" man. He has characteristics of Gatsby - always aspiring to be part of the "smart / rich" set and chasing some self-created dream. He lived on short stories for almost all of his income. He published only four books from which royalties were miniscule - his royalties for "This Side of Paradise" in 1929 amounted to $4.80 - "The Great Gatsby" - $5.10. His income for the year was $32,448.18. $27,000 came from stories published in the Saturday Evening Post. He was generous to new "unknown" authors such as Ernest Hemingway until they became more famous / successful than he. I found myself wondering why this man with so few "books" to his name became one of the "greatest authors of the 20th century"? I don't have an answer, yet. I read "The Great Gatsby", but cannot review it properly ( in my mind ) because I could not read it with new eyes - I knew virtually every aspect of the story. ( Interestingly I chose a 1995 edition of the book and guess who wrote the commentary - yes, Mr. Bruccoli. ) I want to read at least one of the other books and an edition of his "best" short stories ( if that is possible ) because for me, the jury is still out. One must be careful when setting out on a quest..... Kristi & Abby Tabby

I don’t read many biographies but it’s clear that this is a masterpiece. It does for Fitzgerald what Richard Ellmann did for James Joyce. I learned so much about an author I have loved since the sixth form: how much he relied on the income from short stories to pay for his lifestyle; his alcoholism; his fraught relationship with Hemingway; his separation from Zelda; his loving, hectoring, lecturing letters to his daughter, Scottie; his visits to the French Riviera (I read many of these pages on the beaches of Juan-les-Pins in Antibes, inspired by how he wrote about the place in “Tender is the Night”); his stints in Hollywood; his “College of One” tutoring of girlfriend Sheilah Graham late in life; his 16-year correspondence with a fan; his Gatsby-like “Ledger”, meticulously recording his income from writing and major life events; how little he made from his novels during his lifetime; his poor academic record at Princeton; his debts and borrowing; how terrible his spelling was. Highly readable and scholarly. An impressive achievement.

Some sort of Epic Dissipation.

Bruccoli is not in doubt about FSF's greatest as a writer, but is unsparing in his presentation of the evidence of the causes of his decline. And it is painful to read his descent into a booze filled world of disappointment and recrimination against Zelda. Bruccoli gives us a lot of detail and sometimes the minutiae of FSF's life gets in the way of the larger themes. It reminds me of the criticism of his biography of John O'Hara's, that it was a 'data dump'. While he does not pass judgement, letting the facts speak for themselves. It ends quite abruptly after his death and at I would like to have seen a bit more analysis at certain key points.