Published by Charles Scribner's Sons in 1953, New York. Condition: Good. Includes introductions by Malcolm Cowley and Admund Wilson.
F Scott Fitzgerald was born in 1896 in Minnesota to an upper middle class family that sent him to be educated at Princeton. He dropped out after gaining a reputation as a difficult student, but not before he established himself as a well connected socialite with a taste for money, rich women and travel. He was a notoriously terrible speller and was often criticized by his peers for what we would now recognise as dyslexia. After joining the army he fell in love with rich socialite Zelda Sayre, the inspiration for his most famous work, The Great Gatsby where he critiques both the vulgarity and dazzling promise of American excess. She initially refused to marry Fitzerald on account of his finances but reconsidered his proposal on the success of his novel This Side of Paradise. As a couple they travelled extensively, chasing the ‘Lost Generation’ of authors, artists and wealthy bohemians that indulged in the famous extravagance of the Jazz Age, a term that Fitzgerald himself coined. He shared a publisher with Ernest Hemingway and Thomas Woolfe, both of whom he had turbulent relationships with as he struggled to retain his literary success. Referring to himself as an intensely romantic person with ‘a heightened sensitivity to the promises of life’ the gilded tragedy of his novels ended up preluding the sad second half of his own life. A long-time alcoholic, he struggled with addiction whilst his wife suffered multiple mental breakdowns, spending the rest of her life between sanatoriums. He died at the age of forty four of a heart attack never knowing the extent of fame he would find posthumously with The Great Gatsby, to this day the biggest selling title his publishers, Schribners, ever sold.