Product Description

Paris in the 20s: The era of literary expatriates Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald continues to burn in the imagination as a time of unparalleled glamour and romance. Here, in Hemingway vs. Fitzgerald, prize-winning biographer Scott Donaldson goes beyond the mythologyzing to create a true, multi-faceted narrative of a great friendship fueled by admiration, jealousy, and liquor-a heady mixture of literary scholarship, history, and gossip.

The friendship started in Paris and the French Riviera where the more famous Fitzgerald introduced novice writer Hemingway to Gertrude Stein and socialites Gerald and Sara Murphy. As the years progressed, the friendship became as mercurial and complex as the writers themselves. With a dazzling cast of characters that includes legendary Scribner's editor Maxwell Perkins, Zelda Fitzgerald and Hadley Hemingway, and writers Morley Callaghan and Edmund Wilson, Scott Donaldson recounts the glory and pain the great literary friendship of our time.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #481308 in Books
• Published on: 2001-12-01
• Released on: 2001-01-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 352 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Perhaps a respite from the flood of work on these two writers is in order. Not that there's anything particularly wrong or especially bad about this effort; it merely demonstrates that for the moment there's little to add on the subject. For here are all the old familiar places (Paris, the French Riviera, Key West, Hollywood, peopled with all the old familiar faces) Gerald and Sara Murphy, Maxwell Perkins, John Dos Passos, Archibald MacLeish, Brett Ashley, Zelda, Hadley, Pauline, all coming and going in what have become virtually set pieces in the long-running drama of the lost generation. The oft-told anecdotes include, for instance, Fitzgerald's blunder in allowing a Hemingway boxing match to run too long, Fitzgerald's anxieties about the size of his penis, Fitzgerald's editing of The Sun Also Rises. And then there's Hemingway's bullying, his resentment of Zelda, the drinking, the letters of praise and recriminations, the jealousies, the insecurities. Only the most passionate devotee of Fitzgerald, the greatest fan of Hemingway, the true aficionado of the expatriates can possibly be interested in reading it all over again. As for the interested but uninitiated, many other sources (the Hemingway/Fitzgerald letters, their own memoirs and autobiographical ruminations, the countless critical studies and biographies)Aincluding Donaldson's own far superior work on Hemingway (By Force of Will) and Fitzgerald (Fool for Love)Awould provide a better starting place. (Nov.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
This anemic and unnecessary volume chronicles the often tempestuous relationship between the two writers. Donaldson, who has written well on both subjects in the past, unfortunately offers no new insight here; the book is a catalog of well-known facts about the duo's lives and work presented in a style as flat as last week's beer. Fitzgerald, one of American letters' most gifted sons, emerges as little more than a groveling toady who tirelessly promotes Hemingway's work while casually allowing his own career to founder. All this has appeared before in numerous top-shelf biographies, especially Matthew J. Bruccoli's superior Fitzgerald and Hemingway: A Dangerous Friendship (LJ 9/1/94). Though Donaldson chronicles Hemingway's many slights to Fitzgerald in his stories, he fails to include the most recent slam, which appears in Hemingway's True at First Light (LJ 5/1/99), even though he notes the book's release. The lack of an index further detracts from this volume's usefulness. Not recommended.AMichael Rogers, "Library Journal"
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews
A tidy though somewhat tedious history of the literary rivalry and oft-fractured friendship between Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Donaldson, biographer of Fitzgerald (1983) and John Cheever (1988), begins with a laborious introduction to his subjects childhoods and early romances that limply attempts to draw striking parallels between the two men based upon such unexceptional experiences as problems with parents and love affairs ending disastrously. After this lamentable opening, however, Donaldson's pacing and analysis improve markedly as he delineates the origins of the men's friendship amidst the snappy decadence of the American expatriate community in 1920s Paris. With their world populated by the likes of Gertrude Stein, John Dos Passos, Archibald MacLeish, and the cream of the Parisian social scene, Hemingway and Fitzgerald moved, frolicked, and fought in the limelight both of their private social circles and a scrutinizing public eye. Tempers frequently flashed over their criticisms of each other's works: Hemingway's attack on Tender Is the Night and Fitzgerald's suggested revisions for A Farewell to Arms are but two examples of their aggressive posturing, which stretched into long literary skirmishes. The many fracases the two men found themselves in, including Hemingway's pummeling of critic Max Eastman and Fitzgerald's alcohol-induced misadventures, provided the men with ample opportunities either to realign themselves as friends in mutual support or to distance themselves from each other. Even more, though, than their respective writings and celebrated social blunders, the friendship floundered over the question of reputation; as Fitzgerald succinctly stated, ``I talk with the authority of failureErnest with the authority of success. We could never sit across the same table again.'' Freed from Donaldson's armchair psychoanalysis of his subjects, Hemingway Vs. Fitzgerald would emerge a cleaner and tighter history of the men, whose heady lives and harrowing words could well be left to tell their own story without such an intrusive authorial presence. (18 b&w photos) -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Customer Reviews

Great Beginning, Dissapointing Ending
I feel as if I should write two reviews: one for the first 2/3 of this book, one for the final 1/3. The first part is an interesting account of the Hemingway-Fitzgerald friendship. From being expatriot friends to bitter enemies, the story is a facinating one, especially if you've read multiple works from the two Greats. Direct quotations from their letters to each other, Maxwell Perkins and other literary giants of the time make the book even more interesting.

Then they both die... and the book continues for another 100+ pages. It's as if the author realized his book was only 250 pages long and had to fill out the binding with unnecessary rehash. Obviously drinking played an important part in both writers' lives, and it was chronicled in their relationship. There's no need to devote 40 more pages to discussing their drinking further (actually, repeating the discussion would be more appropriate here)!

Ultimately, the first part is good if not amazing. It certainly isn't good enough to make up for the terribly dull ending. To be honest, I wish I'd have read a biography of each instead. Perhaps you should do the same. Even better, read their actual works!

P.S. I'm not exactly dissuading you from this book. It is well written and interesting. Just be prepared for some boring parts and an empty stomach at the end.

Still engrossing after all these years
Throughout "Hemingway vs. Fitzgerald - The Rise and Fall of a Literary Friendship," Scott Donaldson has both contributed to and distinguished himself from "the outpouring of biographical material that has kept them both in the public eye." This is a well-researched and fully documented discourse on the eventual reversal of mentor/novice roles and the concluding "exercise in sadomasochism" between these two giants of twentieth century American literature. Although my own studies (and the many, many research papers I've graded) on these men and their works made me hesitate to revisit it all again, I was pleasantly surprised by this fresh and very readable treatise.

A glimpse into a fragile friendship...

Fitzgerald appealed to me in high school, when I was pretty much a romantic teen-ager who fancied the tragic story of Daisy and the Great Gatsby.

Hemingway was my favorite author when I was in grad school. His writing is clean, precise and open to interpretation, unlike that of other writers of his time who told you every single thing about a character's motivation.

While I've read a lot about Hemingway's life, I never realized the two men were so close during Hemingway's rise and Fitzgerald's fall in the literary world. By following their relationship through their many letters, Scott Donaldson sheds light on two distinctly different literary careers. Fitzgerald was pretty much the voice of the jazz age, while Hemingway took up the torch for the lost generation. Each had his foibles, to be sure, but it seems Hemingway was the more disciplined of the two and, as such, enjoyed a longer career.

I enjoyed the book and am happy to add it to my collection of Hemingway resources.

Enjoy!