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F. Scott Fitzgerald on Authorship, edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli with Judith S. Baughman. University of South Carolina Press, Columbia, SC, 1996. 203 pp. Index. Hardcover. ISBN 1-57003-146-0. $29.95.
The seemingly indefatigable Matthew J. Bruccoli has become the leading scholarly authority on F. Scott Fitzgerald, having published a standard biography of the author, and edited thirty-three books on or by Fitzgerald. So much curatorial attention paid to the works of an author who died at the age of forty-four with some of his best work yet to come, and convinced that he was a failure, his books out of print, his work largely ignored, will strike some as excessive, others as richly deserved. I suppose I must declare myself as one of the latter. I can truly say that my writing and reading life was changed forever when, as a young GI shortly after the end of World War II, I picked up a Bantam paperback copy of The Great Gatsby in Seattle. What I read then was a revelation to me. The author I had...