F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Literary Life (Literary Lives) - Softcover

ANDREW HOOK retired from the Bradley Chair in English Literature at Glasgow University in 1988, having previously taught at the universities of Edinburgh and Aberdeen. In session 1999-2000 he was Visiting Fellow in the English Department at Princeton University, and in 2001-2 he is Gillespie Visiting Professor in the College of Wooster, Ohio. His teaching and research interests have involved English, Scottish and American literature. In 1998 the Andrew Hook Centre for American Studies was named in his honour at the University of Glasgow.

Like the other 39 volumes in the "Literary Lives" series (all but three covering British authors), this one purports to "trace the professional, publishing and social contexts which shaped [the writer's] writing." Although concise, this volume offers some astounding facts about Fitzgerald's life: his total earnings in 1939, for instance, amounted to $21,466.67. Hook, a visiting professor at the College of Wooster, OH, has mined a broad spectrum of sources, although he leans heavily on Fitzgerald scholar Matthew Brucolli. To a reader of Fitzgeraldiana, most of the contents of this book constitute pretty familiar ground, but the thesis is fresh: according to Hook, Fitzgerald recognized early in his writing career that a novelist is caught between his "tender-minded" impulses to be a good person and his "tough-minded" impulses to be a good writer, no matter what the cost to others. Hook claims that by the 1930s Fitzgerald seemed stymied as a novelist because of his inability to choose between these two impulses. Although this book presents a reasonably convincing sketch of Fitzgerald's life, it doesn't offer much of a look into his subject's five novels. If you are looking for a wide-ranging introduction to Fitzgerald and his work, you might spend the $35 on a more detailed, novel-centered, critical study, such as Jeffrey Meyers's Scott Fitzgerald: A Biography. Charles C. Nash, Cottey Coll., Nevada,
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