Bruccoli is THE guy to read if you want to know about F. Scott Fitzgerald. I had no idea of that when I took a college class he taught in the 90s. Bruccoli was a Fitzgerald scholar, and my university (University of South Carolina, where he was a professor) houses his entire collection of Fitzgerald "stuff," second only to Princeton, where Fitzgerald actually went.

An annual re-read, this book is my go-to for Fitz information.

Excellent, in-depth, and made me love the man even more.

The standard Fitzgerald biography, first published in 81 and twice updated since. Bruccoli is less interested in the Scott/Zelda psychodrama than in facts about the writing career, so you get a lot of itineraries, dates, and dollars---often right down to the decimal points. What the book lacks in a compelling portrait of FSF's mindset it more than compensates for in scrupulousness and precision.

Interesting, sometimes moving.

My review would be higher, but I have recently learned some very interesting, and unsavory, information about the author from his roommate at Yale.

Like some of the other reviewers, I am a Fitzgerald worshipper of sorts. I knew something of his life, but I was hoping that there would be some twinkle of light in his life. The stories of those whose gifts are not appreciated during their life are heartbreaking. This is magnified for someone like Fitzgerald who sought recognition so desperately. I am not entirely sure of why I give this only four stars. I suppose I had hoped to glean a sense of the workings of this great artist's mind, but that, of course, is asking a great deal. Perhaps, I would have awarded five stars if Fitzgerald had any sort of positive self appraisal of his contributions in his later years, but that was not how it unfolded. I agonize a little over the thought of how much more beauty there would be in American literature were the treatment of alcoholism more advanced in his time.

The worst of all the Fitzgerald biographies. Their best known stories reduced to sentences.

finished on treadmill. what an awful man. abusive, pathetic, weak, unwilling to admit own failure, a bad father and husband and friend. but i will always be the girl who used a line from sleeping and waking as her yearbook quote.

I thought that we had an original idea to do whatever we wanted in the sixties. It looks like the twenties did start the whole thing. In this book, you will learn about Fitzgerald's wife Zelda, and her mental health struggles, not to mention his. Fitzgerald had a lot to say to his daughter about her education; the title of the book comes from a letter to her from him. I learned about the preliminary writing he did in his notebooks for a novel. That method was never explained to me in a writing class. There is a good compendium of his letters here: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1...
Several others writers such as Hemingway figure in the story. This is worth reading, for a number of reasons.

Well-researched including this gem of a footnote: "The publication of A Moveable Feast resulted in public calibration of Fitzgerald's penis. Two witnesses--Arnold Gingrich, who once saw Fitzgerald with his bathrobe open, and Sheila Graham, who slept with him--attested that it was normal." -Page 275.

And Fitzgerald's postcard to himself written and posted while he was living in Hollywood made me smile and feel sad at the same time.

Actually on last third. Huge bio and Bruccoli doesn't cut Fitzgerald many breaks. Broke away to read "Winter Dreams" and amazed at how the bio clarified the story. "WD" is a must read for FSF fans-major work in the "Gatsby Cluster."

A thorough & riveting biography, if you're interested in Fitzgerald's life.