"I doubt if, after all, I'll ever write anything again worth putting in print". F. Scott Fitzgerald was twenty-six when he wrote this lament to his editor, Maxwell Perkins, in 1923 - two years before Scribners published The Great Gatsby. Soon after Gatsby appeared, Fitzgerald wrote to H. L. Mencken, "I think the book is so far a commercial failure - at least it was two weeks after publication - hadn't reached 20,000 yet". Gatsby turned out all right in the end. But while Fitzgerald's roller-coaster reputation fell precipitously in the years approaching his death in 1940, his stature in American literature has risen steadily in the five decades that followed - the strongest restoration in American literary history. Yet his life and work have remained obscured by myth and misconceptions. In this new collection of his letters, edited by leading Fitzgerald scholar and biographer Matthew J. Bruccoli, we see through his own words the artistic and emotional maturation of one of America's most enduring and elegant