Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)Andrew Turnbull's well-written biography brings F. Scott Fitzgerald to life. While the book is well researched and organized, ultimately it is Turnbull's wonderful language that makes this book shine. He carefully and lyrically describes, not just people's physical characteristics, but also their personalities and personal energy. And Turnbull focuses his book's attention on his subjects' most lively and engaging interactions, quoting letters and discussions at length only when they are truly fascinating. Turnbull, who knew Fitzgerald personally and considered him a friend, obviously loved the subject of this book - and that love helped to bring its subject to life. It helps, of course, that Fitzgerald led a wild, legendary existence.
The best I can do, to give a sense of this book, I think, is to quote a few passages, half-randomly, directly from Turnbull's prose:
In describing Fitzgerald's school headmaster: "He was almost pure albino with thin flaxen hair, white eyebrows and lashes, and pink watery eyes that jiggled behind thick lenses. His soft bulk, his round face with a button nose surmounting several rolls of chin -anyone could see that Fay liked to eat" (Turnbull 1962, 39).
In describing Fitzgerald's final years: "Now was the time of hospitals, nurses, night sweats, sedatives, and despair. Fitzgerald seemed to be slipping back into the morass of 1935-6. Half-crazed with worry and isolation, he was also blocked in his work and 'a writer not writing,' he once remarked, 'is practically a maniac within himself'" (Turnbull 1962, 298).
In describing Zelda, Fitzgerald's wife: "Zelda, too, was acting strangely. With her angry sidelong glances and barbed remarks there was something crouching and inimical in her posture. She was a wily antagonist who lay in wait for you conversationally and gave compliments that turned out to be brickbats. 'Did you ever see a woman's face with so many fine, large teeth in it?' she might say of some one she didn't like - after which she would retreat into herself. But the Murphy's remained fond of her and she of them" (Turnbull 1962, 165-166) . . . "Her willfulness had modulated into a bizarre petishness. Out with a group of friends, she would suddenly want fresh strawberries or watercress sandwiches and make everyone thoroughly uncomfortable until she got them" (Turnbull 1962, 177).
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Revealing and unusual, Scott Fitzgerald follows the fascinating life of one of America's most enduring authors, from his early years in St. Paul and at Princeton to New York in the twenties, the French Riviera, Baltimore, and finally Hollywood. Andrew Turnbull tells the story behind F. Scott Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise, revised and finally published when he was twenty-four, making him instantly famous, and his tender love affair with Zelda Sayre, from their glittering early life to the years Zelda spent in and out of sanatoriums. A literary generation, too, comes alive, including Ernest Hemingway, Edmund Wilson, the Murphys, and Edith Wharton. Fitzgerald lived on Turnbull's family estate in Baltimore in the early 1930s and there befriended young Andrew, then age eleven. Turnbull's personal relationship with Fitzgerald and the hundreds of interviews with those who knew him elegantly capture the dramatic, tragic story of F. Scott and the glow and pathos of his flamboyant life.
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