F. Scott Fizgerald

'Penguin Illustrated Lives' is a series of photographic biographies that offers a fresh, intimate portrait of some of our favourite writers. An incisive, lively text is accompanied by over 100 evocative images, many in colour and some previously unpublished, which depict the author's world - family, friends and artistic circle together with original book jackets, letters and other ephemera. Scott Fitzgerald's life reads like one of his own stories: a young man of great promise marries into wealth, but beneath the golden surface lie alcoholism, debt, insecurity and in Fitzgerald's particular case the mental instablity of his beautiful, unconventional wife, Zelda. In the face of these sorrows, Fitzgerald wrote brilliant, diamond-sharp prose and in 'The Great Gatsby' he captured for all time the sham of the American Dream.