On December 21, 1940, F. Scott Fitzgerald died of a heart attack in the apartment of his young lover, the British Hollywood columnist Sheilah Graham. Beethoven’s “Eroica” was playing from the phonograph. Graham was reading a book of music history. And Fitzgerald, an intermittently recovering alcoholic, was eating chocolate and studying football statistics in The Princeton Alumni Weekly. Then, his heart stopped beating. He fell to the ground in pain and was, shortly thereafter, pronounced dead. Twenty years after the publication of This Side of Paradise, which launched his short career as a literary celebrity, Fitzgerald died in obscurity as an unemployed Hollywood writer, “a prematurely old little man haunting bookstores unrecognized” (as his friend, John O’Hara, lamented. Another friend, the great Hollywood screenwriter Nathanael West, died the next day, in a car crash, possibly because of the distressing news of Fitzgerald’s death).

By the time Fitzgerald reached Hollywood in 1937, his reputation as the glamorous chronicler of the Jazz Age was exploded. He was no longer the disciplined writer who outlined, edited, rewrote, and restructured his works, the way he did with his masterpiece, The Great Gatsby. He was tangled in debt. His wife Zelda, once his muse and love, was confined to an insane asylum, and their relationship—once heralded as the love of the century—was now broken with bitterness and resentment. Wallowing in self-pity for “mortgaging myself physically and spiritually up to the hilt,” Fitzgerald turned to writing to document his failures, anxieties,