Readable, detailed recounting of life events and analysis if Fitzgerald's novels and short stories. Not finished with it yet. This is one of Jon Meechem's favorite books.

The perfect example of a well-researched biography that sticks close to the bare facts. Broccoli excels in bringing the famous American author Fitzgerald back to life with detailed recollections from as early as his Princeton years to his declining health, and self-imposed exile with Sheilah Graham. A very long literary treat that stimulates the furthest corner of curiousity, while never leaving the essential truths about an author so under appreciated today. A standard among biographies and highly recommended to all Fitzgerald fans and newcomers alike.

I’ve always loved the sad life story of Scott Fitzgerald…as well as his problematic friendship with Hemingway.

Matthew Bruccoli's gigantic biography of Fitzgerald, "Some Sort of Epic Grandeur," has for long been the most acclaimed, most proofed, and most essential biography of the legendary American writer.

It's a very large book though; the biography itself is a little over 500 pages, while there are 200 pages of notes and sources and quite a lot of other intimidatingly authoritative components.

I've been looking at this book for a while, weary of its size, and only recently tried it---

In two days I read it. The first day I was so blown away with both Fitzgerald's life and Bruccoli's excellent writing that I chowed 300+ pages, and the second day smoothly finished what was left.

If you somehow don't know, Fitzgerald lived a very exciting life and lived during very exciting times. He was an alcoholic and a spender; he was also a good man and worked very hard. He married a woman who was as devotedly in love with him as he her and were recognized as the quintessential romance for a time; she was also to develop schizophrenia and increasingly challenge Fitzgerald's failing grip on reality.

Everything about the Lost Generation is exciting, and Fitzgerald is a key figure. He partied, lived as an expatriate for a while, underwent significant, forceful changes in the depression era, and was surrounded always by other eclectic and just as exciting writers like Hemingway, Parker, Lardner, etc etc.

Fitzgerald also has a rather tragic story as well, and the long, downward dip of his final years paints an emotional, powerful story. While I was mostly thrilled with Fitzgerald's biography, I also felt, earnestly, the need to cool myself down along with Fitzgerald, and carefully, patiently read his declining years which Bruccoli masterfully captures in their every stress, struggle, and doubt.

I am still surprised at how accessible, exciting and downright enjoyable this tome of a biography was. I've already ordered my own copy, as there are so many parts within this biography that really paint vivid and brilliant pictures of the world and people that Fitzgerald held a place with.

Don't let the size frighten you off. Get it off the shelf, and jump in; you're in for a blast.

This is a re-read, which is not a common circumstance with me w/r/t non-fiction (though it is for fiction, as re-reading is the true reading), biography in particular, as I usually err toward Updike's notion that a biography is a posthumous form of secondhand dishonesty--but this is the finest, and maybe only truly fine, biography I have ever read, and one that redresses many misconceptions about the subject, as did the Carver bio, which was published a few years back. FSF was a terribly hopeful individual. I would like to have met him. I find that even in the stuff he wrote that objectively is lacking, and every writer has some, there is more life, verve, and "try" than any five contemporary writers combined, the deceased notwithstanding. Anyway, if you are reading this, and you have any interest in FSF or the time period in which he wrote, there are worse places you could start peeking into things... I'd like to meet Bruccoli, for that matter; this is an exercise in literary ventriloquism, not unlike Gatsby or the best of the short stories.

I like the book a lot. Much more insight into who F Scott Fitzgerald was. The book certainly brings out his gift as a writer, but also his demons. I did not realize he wrote so many short stories.

Solid biography, I did think that there was some lack of detail about his relationship with Zelda/Scottie (his fights with Zelda are sometimes passed over with less emphasis) but this book is very long anyway. THE Fitzgerald biography for a reason.

Bruccoli's book is comprehensive and very readable. He is a fan but shows Fitzgerald's foolishness as a young man and his many negative characteristics as he aged and sank deeper and deeper into alcoholism. I learned a lot from reading the book--especially how truly close FSF's work is to his life and the people he knew. I don't think he's a great critic of FSF's work, but he's a good biographer.

Fitzgerald kept a ledger for almost all his life as a professional writer, detailing how much he made, and what from. The figures lifted from it are the only things this biography has that Andrew Turnbull's superb biography does not. They're rarely interesting, and merely detail what you already knew. Fitzgerald's biggest rewards came for the least of his work. His early masterpiece 'May Day' brought in $200, while the trashy ephemera he wrote for The Saturday Evening Post brought in $4,000 a story. Near the end of Fitzgerald's life, the royalties on all his books combined came to less than sixty dollars.

A loving look at the licentious and languid life of a literary lush - indeed, perhaps the most eloquent and evocative and enduring of the literary lushes. (He might not have beat Truman Capote at drinking but he certainly did so at writing.)

A must read for any FSF fan. While comprehensive, it's not as daunting and academic as it may appear, it's really a quite entertaining read.

I would recommend Professor Bruccoli's book to anyone who wants an in depth understanding of Fitzgerald. Some might dismiss the book on the basis that Bruccoli is an unabashed fan. But I would say so what if he's a fan--he's got some great insight in Fitzgerald's psyche. And even though he's a fan, he doesn't (in my opinion) observe Fitzgerald with rose colored glasses.


Fitzgerald was so complex. He could be brutal in his personal relationships, he struggled with demons (mainly alcohol) for most of his life, and yet his writing displays such a high degree of sensitivity. Some passages of his prose have a quality of delicacy and fragility.

Here's one of my favorite descriptive passages from Gatsby:

And so it happened that on a warm windy evening I
drove over to East Egg to see two old friends whom I scarcely
knew at all. Their house was even more elaborate than I
expected, a cheerful red and white Georgian Colonial mansion
overlooking the bay. The lawn started at the beach and
ran toward the front door for a quarter of a mile, jumping
over sun-dials and brick walks and burning gardens—finally
when it reached the house drifting up the side in bright
vines as though from the momentum of its run.


What a dynamic description of mere lawn!