Customer Reviews

Romantic Egoists: A Pictorial Autobiography from the Albums of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald

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This large-format album approximates the Fitzgerald personal scrapbook, mirroring the dazzling couple as they rush to stardom and fade into memory. Until seeing this closely, I had thought biographers had done their best. Not so. Scott and Zelda left more than a literary legacy here for others to hope and dream upon. It not only tracks their public life but Scott's private musings on his art, life and his literary score in the marketplace. His private and personal demands on his artistry, his private thoughts and hopes, his advice to his surviving daughter in a few letters are on exhibit. Whether in seclusion at the height of his fame or in seclusion, forgotten and underused in Hollywood, his focus on the details, running not from the past but to an uncertain almost unattainable perfection are displayed for posterity in this book. To me, this book and Budd Schulberg's "The Disenchanted," which sketches in the unknown Hollywood Fitzgerald with sympathy and understanding, more completely renders this literary inspiration.