F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Composite Biography

Twenty-two literary scholars each recount a different two-year span in the life of F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) in this hit-or-miss attempt to capture a “plurality of perspectives” on the novelist. By devoting roughly equal space to each year of Fitzgerald’s life, Salmose, an English professor at Linnaeus University, and Rennie (American Writers and World War I), a high school English teacher, highlight how fleeting fame and happiness were for Fitzgerald and his wife, Zelda. Walter Raubicheck’s account of how the couple became Jazz Age celebrities by partying with money earned from Fitzgerald’s first novel, This Side of Paradise, stands in stark contrast to the financial straits the couple found themselves in only a few years later, suffering under the strain of Fitzgerald’s alcoholism and Zelda’s declining mental health. Fitzgerald’s relatively uneventful early life is covered in as much depth as his adulthood, making for a slow first half that’s riddled with tenuous claims about the significance of incidents from the author’s youth. For instance, Philip McGowan overreaches in insinuating that President William McKinley’s 1901 assassination at Buffalo’s Pan-American Exposition, which a four-year-old Fitzgerald had visited earlier that year, echoes in the murder of Jay Gatsby. This experiment doesn’t quite pay off. Photos. (July)