Word: zelda
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...NATIONAL magazine recently pointed out that F. Scott Fitzgerald, for decades one of this country's most seriously neglected writers, is rapidly becoming an American industry. In the wake of Nancy Mitford's best-selling biography of the novelist's wife Zelda, no less than five books about Fitzgerald have found their way on to publishers' lists this year. It only makes sense...
...created for himself and for his era have more commercial allure. Nostalgia, we are told, is in. So is art deco. Alcohol is making a comeback on the college campus, according to the New York Times . And women's liberation, one of our honest national issues, can rightly claim Zelda as an early casualty to male chauvinist pigdom...
This work's author, Aaron Latham, has smartly limited his territory-to Fitzgerald's various stints in Hollywood as a screenwriter. The novelist went to the movie capital several times during the last downhill decade of his life, partly to raise money for Zelda's sanitarium expenses, partly to save himself as a writer. What biographer Latham has done-and it is surprising that no one ever did it before-is go to Los Angeles and dig out the screenplays Fitzgerald wrote. almost none of which appeared on film in anything like their original form...
Much of it has been told before. of course. Latham has drawn, for a large part, on Miss Graham's memoirs of the period ( Beloved Infidel and College of One ), as well as from Fitzgerald's published letters to Zelda and his daughter Scotty, other Fitzgerald biographies, and the novelist's own autobiographical fiction and essays of the period. Still, Latham has pulled together his resources neatly to tell of Fitzgerald's decline, and he has also filled in many of the gaps by interviewing the survivors of the period who remember the fading Scott...
...FASCINATING as all this may be, Crazy Sundays is not without its drawbacks. Some of the writing is contrived, bland or pedantic. Latham has a tendency to point too energetically at the irony of each incident; he also has a predilection for Time-ese ("Zelda was teaching Scott lessons about tragedy which Aristotle had left out.") For someone unfamiliar with Fitzgerald's novels, the analysis here may be too sketchy; in any case, it is occasionally banal (The rape of Nicole by her father in Tender is seen as a symbol of capitalism...