Matthew J. Bruccoli – författare

The introduction to this volume charts the fortunes of The Great Gatsby from its mixed reception and disappointing sales on publication in 1925, through its increasing popularity in the 1940s, to its critical and popular elevation from the standing of an important 'period piece' to that of an undisputed classic of American literature. Of the five essays that follow, one traces this revival in greater detail, and another sets the book in the context of the perennial quest for the 'great American novel'. Two other essays examine the central from the perspective of a practising contemporary novelist.

Since its publication in 1925, The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald's account of the American dream gone awry, has established itself as one of the most popular and widely read novels in the English language. Until now, however, no edition has printed the novel exactly as Fitzgerald himself wrote it. From its first edition onward, the text has been subject to rigorous house-styling that has distorted the characteristic rhythms and structure of his sentences. This critical edition draws on the manuscript and surviving proofs of the novel, together with Fitzgerald's subsequent revisions to key passages, to provide the first authoritative text of The Great Gatsby. This volume also includes a detailed account of the genesis, composition, and publication of the novel; a full textual apparatus; crucial early draft material; helpful glosses on the peculiar geography and chronology of the book; and explanatory notes on topical allusions and historical references that contemporary readers might otherwise miss. Fitzgerald's great masterpiece is thus brought closer to a cross-section of readers, more accessibly and more authentically than ever before.

A collection of short stories and other miscellaneous writings by Joseph Heller, one of America’s most influential and idiosyncratic writers.Years before the publication of Catch-22—which was called “a monumental artifact of contemporary literature” by The New York Times, “an apocalyptic masterpiece” by the Chicago Sun-Times, and “one of the most bitterly funny works in the language” by The New Republic—Joseph Heller began sharpening his skills as a writer, searching for the voice that would best express his own peculiarly wry view of the world. In Catch As Catch Can, editors Matthew J. Bruccoli and Park Bucker have for the first time collected the short stories Heller published prior to that first novel, along with all the other short pieces of fiction and nonfiction that were published during his lifetime. Also included are five previously unpublished short stories, most reflecting the influence on Heller of urban naturalist writers such as Irwin Shaw and Nelson Algren. The result is an important and significant addition to our understanding and appreciation of Joseph Heller, showing his evolution as a writer and artist. For those unfamiliar with his work, it will serve as an excellent introduction; for everyone else, Catch As Catch Can is a chance to explore a new aspect of Heller''s remarkable career.

Working with the complete collection of Tender is the Night manuscripts in the Princeton University Library, Matthew J. Bruccoli reconstructs seventeen drafts and three versions of the novel to answer questions about F. Scott FitzgeraldÆs major work that have long puzzled critics of modern literature.In 1934, nine years after the appearance of The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald permitted publication of Tender is the Night. Disappointed by its critical reception, Fitzgerald suggested that the structure of the novel should be drastically rearranged. In 1951, eleven years after his death, Charles ScribnerÆs Sons brought out an edition that incorporated FitzgeraldÆs changes. Controversy arose over the merits of the two published versions and over the \u201cnine lost years\u201d in FitzgeraldÆs life between his two great novels, years of rewriting before publication of Tender is the Night that resulted in six cartons of notes and drafts. After analyzing this wealth of material, Bruccoli reconstructs every working stage in the novel and reaches his own conclusions about which edition is the most valid.

Since its publication in 1925, The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald's account of the American dream gone awry, has established itself as one of the most popular and widely read novels in the English language. Until now, however, no edition has printed the novel exactly as Fitzgerald himself wrote it. From its first edition onward, the text has been subject to rigorous house-styling that has distorted the characteristic rhythms and structure of his sentences. This critical edition draws on the manuscript and surviving proofs of the novel, together with Fitzgerald's subsequent revisions to key passages, to provide the first authoritative text of The Great Gatsby. This volume also includes a detailed account of the genesis, composition, and publication of the novel; a full textual apparatus; crucial early draft material; helpful glosses on the peculiar geography and chronology of the book; and explanatory notes on topical allusions and historical references that contemporary readers might otherwise miss. Fitzgerald's great masterpiece is thus brought closer to a cross-section of readers, more accessibly and more authentically than ever before.

Even in its incomplete form The Love of The Last Tycoon has achieved a reputation as the best novel about Hollywood. When F. Scott Fitzgerald died in 1940 he had written seventeen of thirty projected episodes. In 1941 the 'unfinished novel' was published in a text for general readers by Edmund Wilson under the title The Last Tycoon. For more than fifty years this edition, which is not true to the original work in progress, has been the only one available. This critical edition of The Love of The Last Tycoon, first published in 1994, utilises Fitzgerald's manuscript drafts, revised typescipts, and working notes to establish the first authoritative text of the work. The volume includes a detailed history of the gestation, composition, and publication of the novel; full textual apparatus with editorial notes; fascimiles of the drafts; and explanatory notes on topical allusions and historical references for contemporary readers. The reconstruction of Fitzgerald's plan for the thirteen unwritten episodes is particularly useful. F. Scott Fitzgerald's incomplete masterpiece is restored its 1940 state, and thus made fully accessible to a cross-section of readers.

This comprehensive collection of Zelda Fitzgerald’s work—including her only published novel, Save Me the Waltz—puts the jazz-age heroine in an illuminating literary perspective.Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald has long been an American cultural icon. Born in Montgomery, Alabama, this southern belle turned flapper was talented in dance, painting, and writing but lived in the shadow of her husband F. Scott Fitzgerald’s success. This meticulously edited collection includes Zelda’s only published novel, Save Me the Waltz, an autobiographical account of the Fitzgeralds’ adventures in Paris and on the Riviera; her celebrated farce, Scandalabra; eleven short stories; twelve articles; and a selection of letters to her husband, written over the span of their marriage, that reveals the couple’s loving and turbulent relationship. The Collected Writings affirms Zelda’s place as a writer and as a symbol of the Lost Generations as she struggled to define herself through her art.

“Epic indeed, this is the definitive biography of Fitzgerald, plain and simple. There’s no reason to own another.” —Library Journal  The Great Gatsby, The Beautiful and Damned, Tender Is the Night, “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.” These works and more elevated F. Scott Fitzgerald to his place as one of the most important American authors of the twentieth century. After struggling to become a screenwriter in Hollywood, Fitzgerald was working on The Last Tycoon when he died of a heart attack in 1940. He was only forty-four years old.   Fitzgerald left behind his own mythology. He was a prince charming, a drunken author, a spoiled genius, the personification of the Jazz Age, and a sacrificial victim of the Depression. Here, Matthew J. Bruccoli strips away the façade of this flawed literary hero. He focuses on Fitzgerald as a writer by tracing the development of his major works and his professional career. Beginning with his Midwest upbringing and first published works as a teenager, this biography follows Fitzgerald’s life through the successful debut of This Side of Paradise, his turbulent marriage to Zelda Sayre, his time in Europe among The Lost Generation, the disappointing release of The Great Gatsby, and his ignominious fall. As former US poet laureate James Dickey said, “the spirit of the man is in the facts, and these, as gathered and marshalled by Bruccoli over thirty years, are all we will ever need. But more important, they are what we need.”

Tender is the Night, the novel F. Scott Fitzgerald worked longest and hardest on, has not achieved its proper recognition because the text is peppered with errors and chronological inconsistencies. Moreover, the novel has a concentration of references to people, places and events that most readers no longer recognize. In this guide to the novel, Matthew J. Bruccoli corrects those errors and explains the factual details. He also offers maps, photos, correspondence and notes that demystify the writing of one of literature's most misunderstood - and underrated - masterpieces.

In 1924, F. Scott Fitzgerald told his editor Maxwell Perkins about a young American expatriate in Paris, an unknown writer with a ""brilliant future"". When Perkins wrote to Ernest Hemingway several months later, he began a correspondence spanning more than two decades and charting the career of one of the most influential American authors of this century. The letters collected here are the record of that professional alliance and of Hemingway's development as a writer.

FOR THE FIRST TIME, all the commercially published short stories F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote before and during his work on what would become his great American novel, The Great Gatsby, have been collected in one volume. Published between 1919 and 1923, these twenty-six stories - most of which appeared in the Saturday Evening Post and in two Fitzgerald volumes, Flappers and Philosophers and Tales of the Jazz Age - document the striking development of Fitzgerald's professionalism and short-story craftsmanship during his twenties. Edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli, the foremost expert on Fitzgerald, the annotated and generously illustrated collection reproduces magazine artwork, manuscripts, advertisements, and photographs that provide a rich contextual backdrop for understanding the ways American life shaped Fitzgerald's fiction.

The standard work on Fitzgerald, revised, enlarged, and updated; Since its first publication in 1981, Some Sort of Epic Grandeur has stood apart from other biographies of F. Scott Fitzgerald for its thoroughness and volume of information. It is regarded today as the basic work on Fitzgerald and the preeminent source for the study of the novelist. In this second revised edition, Matthew J. Bruccoli provides new evidence discovered since its original edition. This new edition of Some Sort of Epic Grandeur improves, augments, and updates the standard biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald.

This collection of fiction by writer, critic and sports editor Ring Lardner celebrates the American pastime of baseball.

The definitive introduction to the complex author of ""The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter."" Updated with a discussion of recent scholarship, ""Understanding Carson McCullers"" provides a balanced introductory study of the Georgia-born novelist's major fiction and the reasons for her extraordinary and lasting acclaim. Carson McCullers was deemed the ""find of the decade"" when she appeared on the literary scene at the age of twenty-three and is best remembered for her celebrated novels ""The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter"" and ""The Member of the Wedding."" Through Virginia Spencer Carr's insightful discussion and lucid analysis of these and lesser-known works, McCullers is shown here as more than a southern writer, more than a lesbian novelist. McCullers emerges as a complex and multifaceted artist not yet fully comprehended and deserving of more contemplative study and thoughtful understanding.

This is a collection of Wolfe's earliest publications from his college years.The ""Magical Campus"" collects for the first time Thomas Wolfe's earliest published works - including poems, plays, short fiction, news articles, speeches, and essays - both signed and unsigned, assembled in chronological order. The collegiate career of Wolfe began at UNC Chapel Hill in 1916, at the age of fifteen, with a freshman year marked by obscurity and loneliness. By his junior year, he had emerged as a recognized and popular figure in campus life, a central participant in numerous organizations and fraternities, and the editor of several student publications. Wolfe began in these apprenticeship years his ascendancy to iconic literary status.Included in ""The Magical Campus"" is Wolfe's first published work, the poem ""A Field in Flanders"" from the November 1917 issue of the University of North Carolina Magazine. Here too is the poem ""The Challenge,"" Wolfe's first piece to be subsequently reprinted off campus in his hometown newspaper. ""A Cullenden of Virginia"" marked his inaugural foray into the realm of published fiction and his folk plays, such as ""The Return of Buck Gavin"" and ""Deferred Payment,"" are illustrative of his unrealized ambitions to be a playwright. Though they lack the sophistication and scale of the grand fictions that now define Wolfe's place in literature, his student publications speak to the potential he had tapped into.

Conversations with F. Scott Fitzgerald assembles over thirty interviews with one of America's greatest novelists, the author of The Great Gatsby and Tender Is the Night. Although most of these are not standard interviews in the modern sense, the quotes from Fitzgerald and the contemporary journalistic reaction to him reveal much about his writing techniques, artistic wisdom, and life. Editors Matthew J. Bruccoli, the foremost Fitzgerald scholar, and Judith S. Baughman have collected the most usable and articulate pieces on Fitzgerald, including a three-part 1922 interview conducted for the St. Paul Daily News. Fitzgerald (1896-1940) died before the authorial interview became a literary subgenre after World War II. Although Fitzgerald enjoyed his celebrity, as is clear in these pieces, he had a poor sense of public relations and provided interviewers with opportunities to trivialize him. As a result, Fitzgerald was often treated condescendingly in the press. Seven of his interviews-five printed before 1924-have flapper in their headlines. In the Jazz Age-a term Fitzgerald coined-he was regarded as a spokesman for rebellious youth, as a playboy, as an authority on sex and marriage, as an expert on Prohibition, and as an immensely popular writer for his work published in the Saturday Evening Post. Yet his literary ambitions were sizable and his impact on American fiction immeasurable. Matthew J. Bruccoli is Jefferies Professor of English at the University of South Carolina. He has written or edited thirty volumes on Fitzgerald, including the standard biography, Some Sort of Epic Grandeur: The Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Judith S. Baughman, who works in the department of English at the University of South Carolina, has written the F. Scott Fitzgerald volume in the Gale Study Guides series and has edited American Decades: 1920-1929.

John le Carré (b. 1931) is the pen name of David Cornwell. Under that pseudonym he has become the leading writer of contemporary spy thrillers. Tremendously popular and deeply influential, his novels feature a level of psychological depth and narrative complexity that makes them as rewarding as the most highly-touted literary fiction. Weaving incisive political commentary, razor-sharp satire, and suspense, his work reflects upon and dissects both Cold War anxieties and the complications of social relationships. Several of his novels-including The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, The Russia House, and The Tailor of Panama-have been adapted into award-winning movies. In Conversations with John le Carré, the acclaimed writer talks about his craft, the nature of language, the literature that he loves, and the ways in which his own life influences the creation of, and characters within, his novels. He worked for the British Foreign Office in the 1960s, and although his works are dazzlingly informed about global politics, le Carré's voice is distinctively British. His love of language, particularly the ways in which it can reveal or conceal thought and action, is evident in every piece here. In interviews with George Plimpton, Melvyn Bragg, and others, le Carré proves himself to be quick witted, engaging, and deeply passionate. Though often self-deprecating in his humor, le Carré reveals his commitment to the spy thriller and tells us why he thinks it is just as capable of exploring human consciousness as any other literary genre. Matthew J. Bruccoli is Jefferies Professor of English at the University of South Carolina. He has written or edited thirty volumes on F. Scott Fitzgerald, including the standard biography, Some Sort of Epic Grandeur. Judith S. Baughman works in the department of English at the University of South Carolina. With Bruccoli she is co-editor of Conversations with F. Scott Fitzgerald (University Press of Mississippi).