Pigeonholed in popular memory as a Jazz Age epicurean, a playboy, and an emblem of the Lost Generation, F. Scott Fitzgerald was at heart a moralist struck by the nation’s shifting mood and manners after World War I.
In Paradise Lost, David Brown contends that Fitzgerald’s deepest allegiances were to a fading antebellum world he associated with his father’s Chesapeake Bay roots. Yet as a midwesterner, an Irish Catholic, and a perpetually in-debt author, he felt like an outsider in the haute bourgeoisie haunts of Lake Forest, Princeton, and Hollywood—places that left an indelible mark on his worldview.
Order Your Copy Now From the Following Retailers:
In this comprehensive biography, Brown reexamines Fitzgerald’s childhood, first loves, and difficult marriage to Zelda Sayre. He looks at Fitzgerald’s friendship with Hemingway, the golden years that culminated with Gatsby, and his increasing alcohol abuse and declining fortunes which coincided with Zelda’s institutionalization and the nation’s economic collapse.
Placing Fitzgerald in the company of Progressive intellectuals such as Charles Beard, Randolph Bourne, and Thorstein Veblen, Brown reveals Fitzgerald as a writer with an encompassing historical imagination not suggested by his reputation as “the chronicler of the Jazz Age.” His best novels, stories, and essays take the measure of both the immediate moment and the more distant rhythms of capital accumulation, immigration, and sexual politics that were moving America further away from its Protestant agrarian moorings. Fitzgerald wrote powerfully about change in America, Brown shows, because he saw it as the dominant theme in his own family history and life.
What the Critics Are Saying
“Brown’s book is a useful corrective to the figure of F. Scott Fitzgerald as a hopeless drunk and unrestrained reveler―diving into the fountain at the Plaza and all that―which has been vastly overdone…One of the splendid services rendered by Brown is to have convincingly made the case that F. Scott Fitzgerald was an original in a way much grander than he himself realized.”
Joseph Epstein
Wall Street Journal“Brown has delivered an insightful, thought-provoking and at times entertaining rendering of [Fitzgerald’s] life…For fans of The Great Gatsby, there is much to like in Paradise Lost.”
James McGrath Morris
Dallas Morning News“[An] excellent book… Paradise Lost…conjures up an entirely different portrait from the one painted by previous biographers… Brown’s book,…in its breadth of perspective and seriousness of intent, makes most biographies seem to consist mainly of tittle-tattle and random gossip.”
John Banville
New York Review of Books“Paradise Lost accomplishes much in its aim to contextualize Fitzgerald within both American historical and literary historical parameters. This new biography manages to get past the trappings of Fitzgerald’s boozy flapper-era persona and to credit his talent for taking the pulse of the America in which he lived.”
Christina Hunt Mahoney
Irish Times“With a surer sense than more gossipy writers, [Brown] fits Fitzgerald’s life into the broader American history.”
Sam Tanenhaus
New Republic“What I admire about Paradise Lost is that it moves well beyond the hackneyed images in which the author lives in the prison house of his own fragile dreams, a sybaritic social climber who squanders his talent by drinking…This biography seems wildly relevant in a time when raw wealth has again taken on such an emblematic value…More than any biographer before him, Brown reveals the degree to which Fitzgerald understood the politics of his era…A splendid biography.”
