The Fitzgerald Legend

Some Sort of Epic Grandeur: The Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald By Matthew Bruccoli Harcourt Brace, 624 pp., $25 Scott Fitzgerald was a great writer, but not by the usual measure. He produced one masterpiece in Gatsby, a Mona Lisa of a novel in Tender Is the Night, a book you are tempted to think is a great novel except when you are rereading it, and a limited number of first-rate short-stories. That does not amount to a major career. But Fitzgerald could do startling things within a sentence. He could achieve unexpected effects, crazy things beyond the prose imagination: “Her voice was full of money.” The concentration of the unexpected, in the quantitatively small Fitzgerald major canon, is what makes him a major writer. There is no one like him.

Matthew Bruccoli is the pre-eminent

About the Author

Jeffrey Hart

Jeffrey Hart is a contributor to National Review.

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Some Sort of Epic Grandeur: The Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald By Matthew Bruccoli Harcourt Brace, 624 pp., $25 Scott Fitzgerald was a great writer, but not by the usual measure. He produced one masterpiece in Gatsby, a Mona Lisa of a novel in Tender Is the Night, a book you are tempted to think is a great novel except when you are rereading it, and a limited number of first-rate short-stories. That does not amount to a major career. But Fitzgerald could do startling things within a sentence. He could achieve unexpected effects, crazy things beyond the prose imagination: “Her voice was full of money.” The concentration of the unexpected, in the quantitatively small Fitzgerald major canon, is what makes him a major writer. There is no one like him.

Matthew Bruccoli is the pre-eminent