Customer Reviews

Hemingway vs. Fitzgerald

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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.

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.

While any study of a private friendship--even one of two such public men as Hemingway and Fitzgerald--must necessarily contain a good deal of speculation, Scott Donaldson's speculations always sound just and reasonable. He relies on the considerable documentary evidence left by both men and their numerous friends, and the dual portrait he paints is convincing. Much of what he presented was quite new to me--such as the considerable editorial assistance Fitzgerald gave Hemingway on "The Sun Also Rises," or the quasi-Lesbian relationship between Hemingway's mother and a much younger woman. This book is a must for anyone who cares about Hemingway and Fitzgerald, and who believes that, in the end, the work was more important than the men. It isn't the only Fitzgerald or Hemingway biography you'll ever need, but it stands as an important supplement to the other books, and as a valuable key to understanding both men and why they wrote what they wrote.

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!

Ernest Miller Hemingway(1899-1961) was born in the upper middle class suburb Oak Park while Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was born in St. Paul in 1896 dying in Hollywood in 1940. They were both great novelists having much in common:
1. Both were middle class Midwesterners who had strong mothers and weak fathers.
2. Both were jilted in love: Hemingway ditched by nurse Agnes Kurowsky in Italy and Fitzgerald failing to win the hand of rich and socially connected Ginevra King.
3. Hemingway and Fitzgerald were both alcoholics who could become abusive and ugly when inebriated.
4. Both were star thoroughbreds in the Charles Scribner's stable of novelists. Fitzgerald produced such masterpieces as The Beatiful and the Damned; This Side of Paradise; The Great Gatsby; Tender is the Night; The Last Tycoon and great short stories of the caliber of "Babylon Revisited"; The Rich Boy and "The Diamond Big as the Rich. Hemingway produced "In Our Time": "The Sun Also Rises"; "A Farwell to Arms" "For Whom the Bell Tolls" among several other novels. He too was a great short story writer.
5. Both men spent long periods of time in Europe especially Paris where they first met.
6. Neither man was a college graduate. Hemingway did not attend college while Scott flunked out of Princeton in his junior year.
Donaldson makes clear that their differences far outweighed their similarities.
1. Hemingway was a macho man who was cruel to Fitzgerald. In "The Snows of Kilimanjoro" Hemingway poked fun at Scott for his failure to utilize his literary gift to best effect.
2. Hemingway was an outdoorsman while Fitzgerald was an indoor chap.
3. Hemingway was wed four times and had countless affairs. Fitzgerald traveled to the altar one time. His wife was Zelda Sayre who became mad. Fitzgerald did have mistresses including gossip columnist Sheila Graham. Hem was macho and Scott was not!
4. Hemingway became rich and a literary celebrity during his lifetime while Scott became unpopular and almost forgotten following his early success in the Jazz Age.
5. Fitzgerald allowed Hemingway to dominate their friendship which ended in 1936.
6. Hemingway committed suicide in 1961 and Fitzgerald committed slow suicide by his reckless drinking.
7. Hemingway had been wounded driving at ambulance in Italy during World War I. Scott Fitzgerald never left the United States during his army time in World War I.
Scott Donaldson has studied both men throughout his long scholarly career. He has written full biographies of both authors. This book is filled with literary gossip, rivalries and fights over book contracts. Neither Hemingway or Fitzgerald had a happy life; both were great writers and much less than great men.
The book is well written but some parts may become dull to those not familiar with the books by Hemingway and Fitzgerald. It is a fine literary dual biography which adds to our understanding of the authors and their times.

This says it all:

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November 30, 1999
With Hemingway as Friend, Who Needed Enemies?
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
HEMINGWAY VS. FITZGERALD
The Rise and Fall of a Literary Friendship.
By Scott Donaldson.

Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald must surely rank as one of the oddest couples in literary history. Best friends briefly and later acrimonious rivals, they were two of their generation's pre-eminent writers, their mutual achievements obscured by the potent legends that accrued around their names.

Hemingway, whose hard, clean prose helped reinvent 20th-century English, is too often remembered for his posturing as an adventurer and macho man, while Fitzgerald, the author of ''The Great Gatsby,'' a signal work in American literary history, is frequently shrugged off as a social historian of the 1920's, a Jazz Age playboy who allowed alcohol and self-indulgence to dissipate his charm.

In ''Hemingway vs. Fitzgerald,'' Scott Donaldson, author of earlier biographies of both men, laments the cult of celebrity that has diminished the accomplishments of artists, while putting ''every detail of their private lives'' under ''intense scrutiny.'' His own book, however, turns out to be another exercise in what Joyce Carol Oates has called ''pathography,'' a form of biography that pays scant attention to an artist's work and instead focuses on his dysfunctional relationships and his slide into disrepute.

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How is it we in America hero-worship ego-driven alcoholics, criminals, sex addicts and drug addicts? Over and over again... Do we really wish to be the same?

But I still read these books wondering all the same... can't NOT do it. Something in there "shining" ...

Hemingway and Fitzgerald were and still are my two favorite authors. It's a shame that their friendship at times wasn't as beautiful as some of their works were, but if you're a literary nut who loves either or both of these brilliant men, please read. Even if you don't like the end, it's worth reading just to see what their relationship entailed.

Any attempt to analyze the Hemingway/Fitzgerald friendship involves (at best) pure speculation and (at worst) cheap psychology. This book offers equal measures of both. Devotees of either of the two legendary authors will no doubt already be familiar with the anecdotes recounted in Hemingway vs. Fitzgerald. For them, this book is a dry well. (And who, besides this group, would be interested in the book in the first place?)