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F. Scott Fitzgerald was born in 1896 in St Paul, Minnesota. He studied at Princeton University before joining the army in 1917. In 1920 he married Zelda Sayre. Their traumatic relationship and subsequent breakdowns became a major influence on his writing. Among his publications were five novels, This Side of Paradise, The Great Gatsby, The Beautiful and the Damned, Tender is the Night and The Last Tycoon (his last and unfinished work); six volumes of short stories and The Crack-Up, a selection of autobiographical pieces. F. Scott Fitzgerald died suddenly in 1940.
Again an author who has built up a more or less established market, and his non appearance (in book form) over a period of several years, has stimulated interest in this first full length work since the publication of THE GREAT GATSBY. A story of a psychiatrist, and of his lovely wife - a marriage, on the surface ideally happy, but eaten underneath by the insecurity of its basis, and the coils that riches have placed around the husband. Against a background of the Riviera, of Paris, of Switzerland and a mental sanitarium, the drama is played out. The comparison with PRIVATE WORLDS, which is inevitable, is not a sound one. The selling point of this book is the story itself, the almost morbid fascination of the lurking mystery, the deft shift of atmosphere from the gay nonchalance of the Riviera sands, to the horrors of the tragedy in a Paris hotel, and the final, and rather unexpected denouement. The psychological aspects are neither so sound nor so interesting as the Bottome book. This is for a less serious audience - though not the college crowd that drank in his early books. Not wholly satisfactory, in final analysis - but good reading. Headlined as the leading book on the publisher's list and sure of a good send-off. (Kirkus Reviews)
