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Bright Star, Green Light: The Beautiful Works and Damned Lives of John Keats and F. Scott Fitzgerald
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35/99
Critics
26/99
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Scholars
4/99
Rating
66/99
Volume
42/99
Rating
9/99
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About This Book
This immensely pleasurable biography of two interwoven, tragic figures, John Keats and F. Scott Fitzgerald, "unabashedly, cheerfully celebrates the lasting power of literature" (Christoph Irmscher, Wall Street Journal ) In this radiant dual biography, Jonathan Bate explores the fascinating parallel lives of John Keats and F. Scott Fitzgerald, writers who worked separately—on different continents, a century apart, in distinct genres—but whose lives uncannily echoed. Not only was Fitzgerald profoundly influenced by Keats, titling Tender Is the Night and other works from the poet's lines, but the two shared similar both died young, loved to drink, were plagued by tuberculosis, were haunted by their first love, and wrote into a new decade of release, experimentation, and decadence. Both were outsiders and Romantics, longing for the past as they sped blazingly into the future. Using Plutarch's ancient model of "parallel lives," Bate recasts the inspired lives of two of the greatest and best-known Romantic writers. Commemorating both the bicentenary of Keats's death and the centenary of the Roaring Twenties, this is a moving exploration of literary influence.
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Reviews
"the first in the rising tower of Mr."
"an energetic and highly engaging game of literary ping-pong across the ages."
"the principal achievement of this pairing is to remind us of the way that literature connects us."
"Using Sidney Colvin's biography of Keats, a copy of which was in Fitzgerald's library, Bate selects anecdotes, letters, major events and friendships to flesh out a comprehensive account of the man and his art...Less so with Fitzgerald."
"if Bright Star, Green Light gives Fitzgerald literary depth, it offers no great insight on Keats ..."
"Sure, it helps in understanding Fitzgerald's work to know how much Keats meant to him; tracking Fitzgerald's messy career does not equivalently help in understanding Keats, though, for obvious reasons of chronology — unless, that is, you are old-fashioned enough to believe in 'essences', as Bate stoutly does ..."
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