The Fitzgerald Revival that began in the late 1940s has never really ended. Every year adds to the Diamond-as-Big-as-the-Ritz-sized mountain of Fitzgeraldiana. The bibliographical notes that follow highlight the primary sources, as well as the critical books and articles I found essential to researching and writing So We Read On.
F. Scott Fitzgerald was a scrupulous chronicler of his own life. His Letters not only provide an intimate glimpse into his mind and heart, but—as should be evident from the many quotations in my book—they contain some of his finest writing. I relied on several editions: F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Life in Letters, edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1994); The Letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald, edited by Andrew Turnbull (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1963); Correspondence of F. Scott Fitzgerald, edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli and Margaret M. Duggan (Random House, 1980); Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda, edited by Jackson R. Bryer and Cathy W. Barks (St. Martin’s Press, 2002); and As Ever, Scott Fitz—, edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli (J. B. Lippincott, 1972).
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Ledger (1919–1938) has been digitized and is available online thanks to the Irvin Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, University of South Carolina. Begun shortly after he moved to New York City in 1919, the ledger provides rich details—including earnings and publication history—about the erratic life of a professional writer, even one as successful as Fitzgerald. The Notebooks of F. Scott Fitzgerald, edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), date from 1932 to his death. They include reflections on the art of fiction and unvarnished commentary about his friends and his own state of mind. The Crack-Up, edited by Edmund Wilson (New Directions, 1945), features selections from Fitzgerald’s notebooks and classic personal essays such as “My Lost City,” “Echoes of the Jazz Age,” and “The Crack-Up.” The Romantic Egoists (University of South Carolina Press, 2003), edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli, Scottie Fitzgerald Smith, and Joan Kerr, is a poignant collection of family photos and clippings from the Fitzgeralds’ own scrapbooks.
If I were forced to choose one biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald out of the trio that vie for the honor of being the best life of Fitzgerald, I would reach for Matthew J. Bruccoli’s Some Sort of Epic Grandeur (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981) because of its exhaustive detail and unapologetic love for its subject (which some critics see as a flaw). Arthur Mizener’s The Far Side of Paradise (Houghton Mifflin, 1951) has the advantage of being the first biography of Fitzgerald, written when many of his friends were still alive, but because of that fact it strikes this contemporary reader as being overly discreet. When he was a young boy, Andrew Turnbull came to know the Fitzgeralds after they moved to a house (La Paix) outside Baltimore owned by his mother. His biography, Scott Fitzgerald (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1965) is gracefully written and informed.
Out of the many other Fitzgerald biographies, Scott Donaldson’s Fool for Love (St. Martin’s Press, 1985), is intriguing for its psychological readings of Fitzgerald and, particularly, his mother. Jeffrey Meyers’s Scott Fitzgerald (1994; Harper Perennial reprint, 2014) also embraces a psychological—and less sympathetic—approach to Scott and Zelda. Ruth Prigozy’s F. Scott Fitzgerald (Overlook Press, 2004) is a good short introduction to Fitzgerald’s life, enhanced by many photographs. The source to go to for biographical information about Fitzgerald’s early romance with Ginevra King is The Perfect Hour by James L. W. West III (Random House, 2006). Against the Current (Figueroa Press, 2005), Frances Kroll Ring’s account of her time working as Fitzgerald’s secretary in Hollywood (1939–40) is a small treasure of a memoir that brings its chief subject and the Golden Age of Hollywood to life. Crazy Sundays by Aaron Latham (Viking, 1970) chronicles Fitzgerald’s unhappy career as a screenwriter in Hollywood. Sheilah Graham wrote several memoirs of her relationship with Fitzgerald during that same Hollywood period. The best known are Beloved Infidel (Henry Holt, 1958) and College of One (1966; Neversink Library reprint, 2013) and they both hold up as illuminating (if somewhat selective) accounts of her life with Fitzgerald.
Despite more recent challengers, Zelda by Nancy Milford (Harper and Row, 1970) remains the best—and most balanced—biography of Zelda Fitzgerald. Scottie: The Daughter of… by Eleanor Lanahan (HarperCollins, 1995) is a sensitive and revealing portrait of one of literature’s most caring daughters, Scottie Fitzgerald, written by one of her own daughters. I was given a brief but vivid entry into Scottie Fitzgerald’s memories by listening to a recording of a conversation she had with Matthew J. Bruccoli in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1981. The CD of that conversation is contained with the exhibition booklet of Scottie Fitzgerald: The Stewardship of Literary Memory, put together by the Matthew J. and Arlyn Bruccoli Collection of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Thomas Cooper Library, University of South Carolina, 2007.
The edition of The Great Gatsby that I relied on while writing this book is the 1995 Scribner paperback edition with notes and a preface by Matthew J. Bruccoli. Anyone interested in Gatsby’s gestation should read Trimalchio, edited by James L. W. West III (Cambridge University Press, 2000). The “autograph manuscript” of The Great Gatsby resides in a vault within Princeton University’s Library, but is accessible online for everyone to view thanks to the Princeton University Digital Library at http://pudl.princeton.edu/results.php?f1=kw&v1=gatsby.
I’ve said that Fitzgerald brings out the best critical writing in his admirers, and I think that continues to be the case. F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Man and His Work (Collier Books, 1962), the landmark 1951 essay collection edited by Alfred Kazin that I talk about in chapter five, is a must-read for anyone interested in what mid-twentieth-century public intellectuals like Edmund Wilson, H. L. Mencken, Lionel Trilling, and Kazin himself had to say about Fitzgerald. These essays are models of erudition and stylistic ease. Other essay collections about Fitzgerald and The Great Gatsby that I found well worth reading, particularly for their discussions of race and gender in Gatsby, are: Critical Insights: The Great Gatsby, edited by Morris Dickstein (Salem Press, 2010); The Cambridge Companion to F. Scott Fitzgerald, edited by Ruth Prigozy (Cambridge University Press, 2002); and F. Scott Fitzgerald in the Twenty-first Century, edited by Jackson R. Bryer, Ruth Prigozy, and Milton Stern (University of Alabama Press, 2003).
Among the many other books devoted to Fitzgerald’s writing and Gatsby in particular, I found the following to be among the most useful. Dictionary of Literary Biography: F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli (Gale, 2000) is a sweeping critical and pictorial history of Gatsby’s origins and reception. Jackson R. Bryer’s F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Critical Reception (Burt Franklin, 1978) comprehensively gathers together the reviews of The Great Gatsby, as well as Fitzgerald’s other novels, short stories, and ill-fated play, The Vegetable. The Foreign Reputation of F. Scott Fitzgerald by Linda C. Stanley (Praeger, 2004) does much the same for reviews, translations, criticism, and film treatments of Fitzgerald’s work outside of the United States. The Winding Road to West Egg by Robert Roulston and Helen H. Roulston (Bucknell University Press, 1995) is a solid account of Fitzgerald’s artistic development and the early hints of Gatsby that appeared in his short stories, as well as the Trimalchio draft. Ronald Berman’s The Great Gatsby and Fitzgerald’s World of Ideas (University of Alabama, 1997) offers some excellent close readings of Gatsby, as well as discussions of some of the ideas about race and religion that animate its pages. The Achieving of The Great Gatsby by Robert Long (Associated University Presses, 1979) is a revelatory close reading of Gatsby’s universe of symbols. American Icon by Robert Beuka (Camden House, 2011) surveys Gatsby’s initial reception and ongoing afterlife.
For an understanding of the New York City Fitzgerald knew during the 1920s, I relied on Ann Douglas’s superb cultural history, Terrible Honesty (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995). Capital of the World by David Wallace (Lyons Press, 2011) provided additional information on the nightclubs, dances, and newspaper columnists of Jazz Age New York. The Great Gatsby and Modern Times by Ronald Berman (University of Illinois Press, 1994) is an extraordinarily comprehensive survey of how the world of the 1920s—its prejudices, entertainments, and language—influenced The Great Gatsby. I also gleaned information about the specific debt The Great Gatsby owes to New York City from Lauraleigh O’Meara’s Lost City (Routledge, 2002). Frederick Lewis Allen’s Only Yesterday (1931; Harper Perennial Modern Classics reprint, 2010) is a marvelous nonfiction work of literary time travel back into the 1920s. Sarah Churchwell’s Careless People (Penguin, 2013) offers a lively look at New York City in the 1920s and makes a provocative argument for the importance of the Hall-Mills murder case to Fitzgerald’s novel.
The Lardners by Ring Lardner Jr. (Harper and Row, 1976) serves up tantalizing glimpses of the Fitzgeralds and their friends during the heady years they spent in Gatsby’s territory of Great Neck, Long Island. Max Perkins by A. Scott Berg (Penguin, 1978) still provides the most sweeping view of the New York City literary and publishing world of the 1920s and 1930s, as well as an affecting portrait of one of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s greatest and most steadfast champions. Lewis M. Dabney’s biography Edmund Wilson (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007) offers a discerning look at the long friendship between Wilson and Fitzgerald; Dabney also examines Wilson’s important influence on Fitzgerald’s development as a writer and his crucial role in the Fitzgerald revival. Everybody Was So Young by Amanda Vaill (Houghton Mifflin, 1998) evokes the fleeting glamour of Paris and the Riviera as the Fitzgeralds and their circle of friends experienced it. I took Morley Callaghan’s 1963 memoir, That Summer in Paris, with the proverbial grain of salt but appreciated its vignettes of Fitzgerald and Hemingway in that city in the period following the publication of The Great Gatsby. Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast (Scribner, 1964) is a classic memoir of the score-settling type, but it’s also a luminous and indispensable personal record of Paris in the 1920s; I’ve reread it many times with admiration.
To learn more about the Armed Services Editions, which were crucial to The Great Gatsby’s revival during and after World War II, I recommend Books in Action, edited by John Y. Cole (Library of Congress, 1984) and Books Go to War by Daniel J. Miller (Book Arts Press, 1996).