Overview

Surely enough has been written about F. Scott Fitzgerald, the man who coined ""the Jazz Age"" and symbolized the Roaring Twenties, whose very name conjures up a meteoric rise and an equally spectacular fall? But the better question might be, why has so much ink been spent on a writer who completed only four novels, who fell from grace in the 1930s only to be resurrected twenty years later? The answer, according to the cultural critic Arthur Krystal, ""is the problem that is Fitzgerald."" Drawn to the glitter of fame but aspiring to the empyrean heights of Joseph Conrad and James Joyce, Fitzgerald careened from the perfection of The Great Gatsby to the hack world of Hollywood screenwriting, penning stories that were either brilliant distillations of the age or superficial works of fiction. Like America itself, Fitzgerald was a work in progress, a self-created and conflicted human being striving for ideals that neither he nor the nation could ever live up to. In this unusual biography Krystal gives us not only the peripatetic and turbulent life of a cultural icon but also the intellectual sweep of a period in history that created our modern America. Some Unfinished Chaos delivers a nuanced portrait of a man whose various sides embodied the trends, passions, and pursuits of the imperfect society that both glorified and dismissed him.

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Arthur Krystal has written for the New Yorker, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the TLS, Harpers, and the American Scholar, among other publications. His book Agitations: Essays on Life and Literature was a finalist for the 2003 PEN Award for the Art of the Essay. Paul Woodson has won SOVAS & Earphones awards, and has recorded close to 350 audiobooks in many different genres--including romance, fiction, history, biography, and mystery--in American and British accents--and received his BFA in acting at Boston University. In his theater days, he worked in many NYC shows, toured the USA and Europe, and starred in NYC as Vincent van Gogh in the sung-through, OOBR Award-winning musical Vincent. He enjoys backpacking the Appalachian Trail and visiting national parks in his spare time. He is a member of SAG-AFTRA.

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