Scott Fitzgerald: A Biography

F. Scott Fitzgerald fares rather badly in this biography by Jeffrey Meyers. He comes across as self-absorbed, ego-driven and immature; author of not only a body of respected literary works but of his own downfall and misfortunes. I'm not familiar enough with Fitzgerald's life to comment on the credibility of this presentation but it rings true enough, even though it does little to enhance the man's reputation. That he could write and was one of the better ones in the America of the twentieth century is beyond dispute. But his works often smack of that same immaturity and self-centeredness that drove him to fritter away his health, his talents and the money he earned from these. His stories are often marred by crass commercialization as he strove, through them, to maintain a lifestyle that was unrealistic and beyond his capacity to maintain. Zelda, his wife and fellow traveler in the life of dissipation they had jointly adopted, went mad and Fitzgerald himself fell into alcoholism as his literary skills faltered. In the end he was insulting and bumbling his way through Hollywood, struggling to make a comeback as a screenwriter, a milieu for which he seems to have been quite unsuited, and falling more and more deeply into alcoholism. Even after having made something of a financial (if not an artistic) comeback in pre-World War II Hollywood he seemed unable to live within the means this afforded him and continued to fritter away his resources, failing to cut critical expenses (expensive private schools, parties and limousines) and put money aside for the less prosperous periods that might follow. Meyers' writing, as he describes all this, is a bit dry and I found his frequent repetitions of the same events and quotes throughout the book somewhat tiresome. But on balance he does a decent job of documenting and describing the literary fall from grace of a writer who never seemed to have it in him to grow up in a world that demanded he do just that. One doesn't get much of a sense of the grandeur and accomplishment of Fitzgerald's work here but at least we see the man, however unpalatable that is, in the end. SWM

Meyers has an excellent biography of Fitzgerald, based heavily on letters, journals, and other writings. Meyers also gets pretty into an analysis of each of Fitzgerald's books and some of his better short stories. I will say that the first couple of chapters are slow going, but it gets better when Fitzgerald meets Zelda. And Meyers gives a pretty good portrait of her as well. This is really a first rate biography.

I've spent the last six months working my way through Scott Fitzgerald's novels and short stories. It became fairly obvious early on that a lot of what he was writing about in his fiction was autobiographical. I became interested in purchasing a biography so that I could get a feel for how much of his life he actually put into his work. I usually shy away from buying them because I find they are usually sensational or bland and almost never in between, but this book certainly runs against the norm. The many anecdotes (not all of them flattering) Meyer's includes in this biography give great insight into Fitzgerald's world and all of the inner demons that he struggled with within himself, not to mention those of his wife. Where other authors may have focused on his alcoholism, etc., Meyers never loses site of Fitzgerald, the extraordinary writer.