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ISBN: 978-1-904048-40-4
extent: 160pp
binding: paperback
price £4.99
pub. date April 2005

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press release

featuring:

The Great Gatsby
The Pat Hobby Stories
This Side of Paradise
The Crack Up
Emotional Bankruptcy
Hemingway
Hollywood
Alcohol
Zelda
The Diamond As Big As The Ritz
Dick Diver
The Jazz Age
The Last Tycoon
Tender Is The Night
The Beautiful And The Damned
and more...

F Scott Fitzgerald is widely praised as the finest and most celebrated novelist of twentieth century America. His reputation is infinitely more lustrous since his untimely death than it was for much of his twenty-year literary career and is largely based on his 1925 novel, The Great Gatsby, as well as on the colourful and tragic incidents of his personal life. His alcoholism; his fairy tale marriage to the beautiful Zelda Sayre, and her gradual descent into schizophrenia; the incandescent blossoming and dissipation of his literary gifts have all added to his legend.

Fitzgerald was an individual who seemed to be composed of opposites and who, fittingly, could have been one of his own characters. He was charming, witty and in love with the magic and splendour of life, but also felt compelled to embrace the darkness. As a writer, his perception of the world around him was so finely tuned and acute that his life and career were a mirror of the 1920s and 30s, so that just as the Jazz Age gave way to the Depression, Fitzgerald’s dazzling and youthful success yielded to drunkenness, despair and what he termed ‘emotional bankruptcy’.

This Pocket Essentials examines both Fitzgerald’s life and writing and probes the infinitely complex and symbiotic relationship between the two, revealing the man behind the myth and behind some of the finest prose of all time.

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