André Le Vot F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Translated from the French by William Byron.
Doubleday, 373 pages, $19.95

At the outset of writing The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald complained (and boasted) to Maxwell Perkins, his editor at Scribner’s: “I don’t know anyone who has used up so much personal experience as I have at 27.” It was an apt observation. Despite his reputation as the inventor of the legendary Jazz Age—that overworked cliche about a decade of mindless affluence and irresponsibility that has become the property of television, the movies, and the musical comedy stage—Fitzgerald was, in his odd way, one of the most circumstantial of American authors. A specious glamour does, indeed, hang heavily over the early tales and the first three novels, This Side of Paradise, The Beautiful and Damned, and The Great Gatsby; but the more one learns about the details of Fitzgerald’s routine life, as opposed to his sophomoric pranks and scandalous behavior, the more one realizes that his fiction lived close—too close, perhaps—to his personal experiences. The blue lawns of Long Island, the boozy nonstop parties wasting the hours in Great Neck mansions, were neither pure invention nor some alcoholic blur vaguely remembered on mornings after; they had existed in reality, however much Fitzgerald may have heightened the effects in the retelling. Fitzgerald had bought the American Dream so early in his career and was so determined to cultivate and sustain it that the principal problem for the biographer