Matthew J. Bruccoli - Some Sort of Epic Grandeur: The Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald

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.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

To Scottie

For 9 October 1964

I am the last of the novelists for a long time now.

There never was a good biography of a good novelist. There couldnt be. He is too many people if hes any good.

Biography is the falsest of the arts. That is because there were no Keatzians before Keats, no Lincolnians before Lincoln.

I left my capacity for hoping on the little roads that led to Zeldas sanitarium.

The voices fainter and fainterHow is Zelda, how is Zeldatell ushow is Zelda.

Genius is the ability to put into effect what is in your mind. Theres no other definition of it.

I look out at itand I think it is the most beautiful history in the world. It is the history of me and of my people. And if I came here yesterday like Sheilah I should still think so. It is the history of all aspirationnot just the American dream but the human dream and if I came at the end of it that too is a place in the line of pioneers.

Then I was drunk for many years, and then I died.

From the Notebooks

Photographs identified as from the Bruccoli Collection are in the Matthew J. and Arlyn Bruccoli Collection of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Thomas Cooper Library, University of South Carolina.

Scottie Fitzgerald Smith, ca. 1981

Mollie McQuillan Fitzgerald with her son

Fitzgeralds birthplace

Fitzgerald, ca. 1899

Edward Fitzgerald with his son

Fitzgerald at age fifteen

Monsignor Cyril Sigourney Webster Fay

Front cover for Fie! Fie! Fi-Fi!

John Peale Bishop

Edmund Wilson

Ginevra King

Fitzgerald as Show Girl, Princeton

Fitzgerald at Princeton

1917 Tiger board, Princeton

Zelda Sayre in dancing costume

Maxwell E. Perkins

Harold Ober 103

Fitzgeralds first appearance on a Post cover

Dust jacket for This Side of Paradise

Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald at the time of her marriage

H. L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan

Portrait of Zelda Fitzgerald by Gordon Bryant

Portrait of F. Scott Fitzgerald by Gordon Bryant

John Held, Jr.s dust jacket for Tales of the Jazz Age

Ring Lardner

Undated clipping inscribed by Max Gerlach

Zelda and Scottie Fitzgerald, 1923

Villa Marie

The Fitzgeralds on the Riviera, 1924

Edouard Jozan

Fitzgerald at the time he was writing The Great Gatsby

Opening page of the manuscript of The Great Gatsby .

Final page of The Great Gatsby

Fitzgeralds rewritten galley 20 from Chapter IV of The Great Gatsby

Cugats preliminary sketch for the Great Gatsby dust jacket

Fitzgerald and Scottie on the Riviera

Accounting page from Fitzgeralds Ledger

The Fitzgeralds, Christmas 1925

The Fitzgeralds, 19251926

Gerald and Sara Murphy

Lois Moran with Ronald Colman in Stella Dallas

Ellerslie

Fitzgerald allegedly judging a beauty contest

Revised typescript for The Swimmers

Ernest Hemingway

Autobiographical page from Fitzgeralds Ledger

Les Rives de Prangins

Zelda at the time of her discharge from Prangins clinic

La Paix

A Fitzgerald chart for Tender Is the Night

The Lobster Quadrille by Zelda Fitzgerald

Untitled painting of dancers by Zelda Fitzgerald

Dust jacket for the first edition of Tender Is the Night

Letter from Zelda to Scott, 1934

Fitzgerald and Scottie in Baltimore

Fitzgeralds plan for his collected works

Fitzgerald, 4 June 1937

Poster for Three Comrades

Sheilah Graham

Fitzgeralds chart for 19311938

Reading list from the College of One

Fitzgerald and Sheilah Graham in Tijuana

Budd Schulberg and Ann Sheridan on the set of Winter Carnival

Latest outline for The Love of the Last Tycoon

Fitzgerald and John OHara

The last page of the working draft for The Love of the Last Tycoon

Presentation of the Fitzgerald Papers

When this biography was first published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich in 1981, my claim that its publication was justified by more facts did not pass unnoticed. One practicing biographer protested that biography should not be limited by facts. A one-book biographer declared that too much evidence interferes with the free play of the biographers insights. It is free because it has not been paid for by research; it may indeed become a form of play.

Facts are the only things a biographer can trustand only after they have been verified. Insights are as good as the evidence that supports them. This revised edition of Some Sort of Epic Grandeur provides still more facts, as well as corrections of the first edition.

Scottie Fitzgerald died 18 June 1986. She was the best thing I got from F. Scott Fitzgerald. This is the truth: I could not and would not have done my Daddy books without Scottie. She provided material and contacts. She made it all fun. The party is over.

M.J.B.

21 August 2001

Many of us share Samuel Johnsons declaration that the biographical part of literature is what I love most. But the popularization of the F. Scott Fitzgerald biography into mythology has diminished his stature and cheapened his work. He is regarded by a certain kind of Twenties buff as having scribbled his masterpieces during the course of a lifelong bender. Given the kind of writer he was, it is proper to identify Fitzgerald with his material; but it is a distortion of the record to portray him as an uncritical reveler. There was always a judging process operating in himcombined, in his finest work, with a quality of aspiration. Zelda Fitzgerald observed after her husbands death: I do not know that a personality can be divorced from the times which evoke it I feel that Scotts greatest contribution was the dramatization of a heart-broken + despairing era, giving it a new raison-detre in the sense of tragic courage with which he endowed it.

Fitzgerald generated his own legends. His life overshadows his work as he has become an archetypal figureor a covey of archetypes: prince charming, the drunken writer, the ruined novelist, the spoiled genius, the personification of the Jazz Age, the sacrificial victim of the Depression. These images were largely his own fault because he dramatized his success and failure. Relishing attention, he embraced his symbolic roles. The glamour, the triumph, the euphoria, the heartbreak, and the tragedy of his life were genuine; but the most important thing is what he wrote. Everything else matters only to the extent that it explicates his work or clarifies his career. It is impossible to dissociate a great writer from his work, and Fitzgerald was an intensely personal author. My intention in writing this biography was to focus on Fitzgerald as writer by tracing the ontogeny of his major work while providing a detailed account of his career as a professional author.