A touching remembrance of F. Scott Fitzgerald, truly a tragic figure in the classical sense of the word. For decades I believed the conventional story about his final years - of humiliating poverty, uncontrolled alcoholism, and general dissolution. But subsequent biographies make clear that at the time of his death he was in something close to recovery - not drinking, his debts finally paid, and for the first time in his life in a comfortable relationship with a supportive woman, the columnist Sheila Graham. Fitzgerald suffered from heart disease, and a rare syndrome that made him highly sensitive to alcohol. One drink could set him off, and did, for years. But the notion that he was a mess when his days came to and end is inaccurate; his final days were level-headed, hopeful ones, despite all.
Proof reading the section on Horace Walpole would have revealed the error in the dates of his letters as in the wrong century.
A touching remembrance of F. Scott Fitzgerald, truly a tragic figure in the classical sense of the word. For decades I believed the conventional story about his final years - of humiliating poverty, uncontrolled alcoholism, and general dissolution. But subsequent biographies make clear that at the time of his death he was in something close to recovery - not drinking, his debts finally paid, and for the first time in his life in a comfortable relationship with a supportive woman, the columnist Sheila Graham. Fitzgerald suffered from heart disease, and a rare syndrome that made him highly sensitive to alcohol. One drink could set him off, and did, for years. But the notion that he was a mess when his days came to and end is inaccurate; his final days were level-headed, hopeful ones, despite all.