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A comprehensive study of the life of F. Scott Fitzgerald, related in two-year chapters by twenty-three leading writers on the Jazz Age author

 

“There never was a good biography of a novelist,” F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in The Crack-Up. “There couldn’t be. He is too many people, if he’s any good.” Fitzgerald, a good novelist by any measure, has tested this challenge to the biographer’s art. A new star illuminating the literary scene; a chronicler of the Jazz Age in all its brilliance and tarnish; a romantic symbol of the American century; an acute observer of society’s best and worst, and of his own star-crossed career; a midlife burnout at forty-four, leaving an unfinished masterpiece in his wake—he was a man of many aspects, a writer whose complexity and multitudes this composite biography finally aptly portrays. 

Bringing together twenty-three leading writers and scholars on Fitzgerald, each focusing on two years of his life, this volume takes its cue from Henry James’s remark, cited by preeminent Fitzgerald biographer Scott Donaldson: “The whole of anything is never told; you can only take what groups together.” F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Composite Biography presents a new way of “grouping together” biographical material and perspectives, considering from various angles the author's best-known works as well as understudied writings, including neglected stories and forays into autobiography such as “What I Think and Feel at 25” and “How to Live on $36,000 a Year.” The glamor and fame that made F. Scott and Zelda mythic figures of their time appear here alongside the personal experiences that he occasionally included in his writing: the beginnings as well as the poignant end; the literary relationships that informed and framed his work, set against solitary effort, fame, and failures. This remarkable study of F. Scott Fitzgerald reflects the multifaceted whole of a “life in many parts” in new and revelatory ways.

Contributors: Jade Broughton Adams; Ronald Berman; William Blazek, Liverpool Hope U; Elisabeth Bouzonviller, Jean Monnet U; Jackson Bryer, U of Maryland; Kirk Curnutt, Troy U; Catherine Delesalle-Nancey, U Jean Moulin Lyon 3; Scott Donaldson; Kayla Forrest; Marie-Agnès Gay, U Jean Moulin Lyon 3; Joel Kabot, U of Maryland, Baltimore; Sara Kosiba; Arne Lunde, U of California, Los Angeles; Bryant Mangum, Virginia Commonwealth U; Martina Mastandrea; Philip McGowan, Queen’s U Belfast; David Page; Walter Raubicheck, Pace U; Ross Tangedal, U of Wisconsin–Stevens Point; Helen Turner, Linnaeus U; James L. W. West III, Pennsylvania State U.

Where ordinary lives kindle extraordinary reckonings.

In 1986, after years of publishing stories in literary magazines and periodicals, Mary Ward Brown published her first book, the story collection Tongues of Flame. It soon received regional and national attention, and the following year won the PEN/Hemingway Award for fiction. Mary Ward Brown was sixty-nine years old. Though she would go on to write and publish many more stories and a well-received second collection, It Wasn’t All Dancing, Mary Ward Brown’s late acclaim hardly hints at the rich and varied life that prepared the way for her success.

Fanning the Spark is the story of her life as a writer—her upbringing in rural Alabama; the joys of college, marriage, and motherhood; the sorrows of becoming a widow; and a lifelong devotion to writing, writers, and literature, and the company of those who shared those loves, nurturing and feeding her interior life in the face of many challenges, losses, and obstacles, both emotional and material.

Here, in prose every bit as eloquent, evocative, and incisive as her stories, are her remembrances of loved ones; her letters fraught with worry to her son in Vietnam; periods of emotional isolation and unbidden silence; her invaluable friendships with renowned writers, editors, and agents; her love of community and place; and immeasurable delight with every award, speech, and public reading, the many recognitions she has garnered late in life. Above all, it is the story of the competing demands of art and of life, the constant struggle between her need to write and the practicalities of family, duty, and day to day living.

The year was 1988, and Denis Johnson was at a low point. He caught malaria on a reporting trip into the jungles of the Philippines and was nearly pronounced dead. The disease left him unable to write. His second wife left him. He didn’t have enough money to pay his taxes. His publisher was waiting for a book that he hadn’t started. But in the life of Denis Johnson, when things were at their bleakest, something good was usually waiting around the next corner. This time, what emerged from the chaos was his masterpiece Jesus’ Son, a book that would tap into the zeitgeist of the 1990s and become a bible for Generation X and an American classic.

Flagrant, Self-Destructive Gestures tells the complete story of Johnson’s fascinating life, his thrill-seeking trips into war zones as a magazine correspondent, his battles with addiction, his live-it-before-you-write-it style of fiction. It follows the arc of his tremendous body of work as a novelist, journalist, poet, and playwright, and in the process recovers the true stories from the hazy myths that one of our most beloved, yet enigmatic, writers left behind.

Michigan is renowned for its natural beauty and automotive history, yet its rich literary heritage often goes unrecognized. This engaging and extensively researched book aims to change that by providing vivid portraits of both well-known and overlooked authors. It also offers an enjoyable tour through the state’s libraries and bookstores. The book takes readers on a fascinating journey across the back roads and highways of Michigan writing, showcasing the remarkable diversity of authors who have called the state home as well as those who have found it inspirational. It is perfect for anyone interested in reading, Michigan’s literary heritage, and its culture.

Frank Norris Remembered is a collection of reminiscences by Norris’s contemporaries, friends, and family that illuminate the life of a popular American novelist.

Considering his undergraduate education spent studying art at Académie Julian in Paris and creative writing at Harvard and his journalism career reporting from the far reaches of South Africa and Cuba, it is difficult to fathom how Frank Norris also found time to compose seven novels during the course of his brief life. But despite his adventures abroad, Norris turned out novels at a dizzying pace. He published Moran of the Lady Letty in 1898, McTeague early in 1899, Blix later that year, A Man’s Woman in February 1900, and The Octopus, the first in his ultimately unfinished “Epic of the Wheat” trilogy, in 1901. By informing his novels with his own experiences abroad, Norris composed works that were politically charged and culturally relevant and that made considerable contributions to the character of American literature in the twentieth century.

Frank Norris died at the age of thirty-two in 1902 from peritonitis resulting from a burst appendix, leaving behind a wife, a daughter, and an unfinished series of novels (two of which, The Pit and Vandover and the Brute, were published posthumously). The aim of Frank Norris Remembered, edited by Jesse S. Crisler and Joseph R. McElrath Jr., is to re-create the short, spectacular life of this American author through the eyes of those who knew him best. The fifty reminiscences included in this book feature the voices of Frank N. Doubleday; William Dean Howells; Hamlin Garland; Norris’s wife, Jeannette; and many others who were lucky enough to form a relationship with this vital twentieth-century American author, artist, and adventurer.

Franz Kafka remains one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century. His novels, stories, and letters are still regarded today as the epitome of the dark, fascinating, and uncanny, a model of the modernist aesthetic. Peter-André Alt’s landmark biography, Franz Kafka, the Eternal Son, recounts and explores Kafka’s life and literary work throughout the cultural and political upheavals of central Europe.

Alt’s biography explores Franz Kafka’s own view of life and writing as a unity that shaped his identity. He locates links and echoes among the author’s work, life, and surroundings, situating him within the traditions of Prague's German literature, modernity, psychoanalysis, and philosophy as well as within its Jewish culture, arts, theater, and intellectual tradition.

In this biographical tour de force, Kafka emerges as an observant flaneur and wistful loner, an anxious ascetic, an ecstatic and skeptic, a specialist in terror, and a master of irony. Alt masterfully illuminates Kafka's life not as source material but as a mirror of his literary genius. Readers begin to see Kafka’s unforgettable novels and stories as shards reflecting the life of their creator.

Although this book does not attempt to revive the image of Frost as a benign, white-haired sage, it does present him in a strikingly different light than did Lawrence Thompson’s controversial three-volume biography. William H. Pritchard sees Frost whole, demonstrating the complex interaction between the poet’s life and work. Based not only on the poetry, but on letters, notebooks, recorded interviews, and public appearances as well, Frost: A Literary Life Reconsidered examines the most interesting and significant aspects of Frost’s life and poetry and offers an attentive, sensitive portrait of an artist whose critical reputation continues to grow.