title: Scott Fitzgerald: A Biography
author:  Jeffrey Meyers 
description: Meyers's compulsively readable, marvelously vivid biography of Jazz Age novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) uncovers a wealth of new details that cumulatively bring into focus a tragic figure torn between the struggle for artistic integrity and the desire to live up to his glamorous image. Biographer of Hemingway, Poe and D. H. Lawrence, Meyers is especially adept at discussing Fitzgerald's alcoholism, which alienated his friends; the devastating impact of his wife Zelda's three mental breakdowns and her plunge into madness; and Fitzgerald's well-intentioned but misguided parenting of their daughter Scottie whom he raised virtually on his own. Meyers provides much new material on Fitzgerald's numerous love affairs, on his friendships with Edmund Wilson, Hemingway and others, on his formative years at a Catholic boarding school and on his academic disaster at Princeton. He is also insightful in ferreting out links between Fitzgerald's "extremely autobiographical" fiction and his chaotic life. Photos. BOMC alternate; QPB selection. <br />Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
zlib_text: John D. MacDonald
  
  The Girl In The Plain Brown
  
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  1
  
  IT IS ONE of the sorry human habits to play the game of: What was I doing when
  it happened?
  
  After I heard that Helena Pearson had died on Thursday, the third day of
  October, I had no trouble reconstructing the immediate past.
  
  That Thursday had been the fourth and final day of a legitimate little job of
  marine salvage. Meyer made a lot of small jokes about Travis McGee, salvage
  expert, actually doing some straight-arrow salvage. He kept saying it almost
  made my cover story believable. But he did not say such things for any ears
  but mine own.
  
  Actually it was not my ball game. Meyer gets himself involved in strange
  little projects. Somewhere, somehow he had gotten interested in the ideas of a
  refugee Cuban chemist named Joe Palacio. So he had talked a mutual friend of
  ours, Bobby Guthrie, a damned good man with pumps and pressures and
  hydraulics, into listening to Joe's ideas and going to Joe's rooming house in
  Miami