F. Scott Fitzgerald: Bloom's BioCritiques, Harold Bloom, c. 2003

F. Scott Fitzgerald: Bloom's BioCritiques, Harold Bloom, c. 2003. 813F.

Introduction to the series.

Attempts to explain the challenge of writing bio-critiques, how to separate the "works" from the writer.

Of course, Harold Bloom starts with Shakespeare: it's all about his works. We know nothing about the writer ... unless one knows / accepts the Shakespeare plays / sonnets were written by Sir Henry Neville. Then we know everything.

From Shakespeare, Bloom goes to Goethe, about whom we know everything.

I digress: actually Bloom began with James Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson, a biography that spoke both of Boswell's life and his works, though, if I recall, it seemed more about the lives of the two men much more than Johnson's works. 

From there, Harold Bloom mentions other examples of modern instances of literary biography: Richard Ellman's lives of W. B. Yeats, Joyce, and Oscar Wilde -- which essentially follow in Boswell's pattern.

After Shakespeare and Goethe, Bloom turns to Virginia Woolf, known more for her works and her boring life.

On the other hand, those with lives more livid than their works: Byron, Wilde, Malraux, Hemingway.

To that list, I would add F. Scott Fitzgerald, except for The Great Gatsby, of course.

Writers who struggled to be real heroes but never succeeded; their work outlived them: Tolstoy, Milton, Victor Hugo.

Others with "work in the work," and not "work in the person": Emily Dickinson, Wallace Stevens, and Willa Cather.

The extreme instance of the latter group: Emily Brontē.

And then the F. Scott Ffitzgerald bio-critique begins.

Harold Bloom
Introduction

Norma Jean Lutz
Biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald

 

Thomas Heise
The "Purposeless Splendor" of the Ideal in the Fiction of F. Scott Fitzgerald

Lionel Trilling
The Liberal Imagination

Malcolm Cowley
Romance of Money

 

The 1920s.

They were the age when the country ceeased to be English and Scottish and when the children of later immigrations moved froward to take their places in the national life. 

Edwin S. Fussell
Fitzgerald's Brave New World