A full-scale portrait of one of the most important American writers of the twentieth century provides an in-depth critical analysis of Fitzgerald's life, writings, and the relationship between them. National ad/promo. Fitzgerald once observed that "there are no second acts in American lives"--too bad, he could have used one. Meyers's often brutally honest portrait of the short, unhappy lives of Scott and Zelda is a disturbing inventory of excess and squandor. Myers presents his subjects as self-centered and irresponsible scamps who get their comeuppance manyfold, with Scott corrupting his great talent with alcohol and second-rate work hacked out for easy money and Zelda freefalling into madness. As in his many other fine biographies (e.g., Edgar Allan Poe , LJ 7/92), Meyers adds a portion of literary criticism by dissecting Fitzgerald's major writings in detail. Though it is repetitive in spots, Meyers scores another hit with this work--the most important book on Fitzgerald in 20 years. Coupled with Cambridge University Press's outstanding series of definitive editions of Scott's novels, this biography may spark a new perspective on Fitzgerald. Highly recommended. BOMC alternate; previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 12/93. - Michael Rogers, "Library Journal" Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. Although this is the first in-depth biography of the tragically great American writer Scott Fitzgerald to be published in several decades, it tells the same old sad story. Not to say that Meyers, an accomplished literary biographer who has written about D. H. Lawrence and Hemingway, hasn't unearthed fresh material. He has, but it all substantiates our image of Fitzgerald as beautiful and damned, a genius forced by circumstance and temperament to squander his talent. Indeed, Meyers provides us with a dizzying number of anecdotes about Fitzgerald's dismaying behavior, profligacy, and fear of sexual intimacy and inadequacy, but it is Meyers' compassionate interpretation of Fitzgerald's weaknesses and appreciation for his achievements that make this an invaluable and unforgettable portrait. Meyers explores all the ramifications of Fitzgerald's complex and destructive marriage to the once vivacious, later incurably mad Zelda, concluding that when it came down to it, Fitzgerald demonstrated admirable loyalty and compassion. Torn between the need for money and the demands of serious art, and saddled with an overwhelming sense of inferiority that drove him to drink--a habit his hypoglycemic body couldn't handle--Fitzgerald did the best he could, ultimately enriching our lives with his achingly original and enduring fiction. Donna Seaman This easygoing, academically voiced bio of F. Scott Fitzgerald calls itself the first ``full-scale contemporary'' life since Turnbull's in 1962. Approvingly quoting Jay McInerney, Meyers dismisses lives by Bruccoli (``hagiographic''), Mellow (``peevish, sordid''), and Donaldson (``folksy psychoanalysis''), as well as Nancy Mitford's Zelda (``feminist revisionist''). Meyers, who has written biographies of Lawrence (1990), Conrad (1991), and Poe (1992), calls his own foray into Fitzgerald ``analytic and interpretive'' and claims to be hunting for psychological patterns in the writer's life (1896-1940). In addition to examining Fitzgerald's professional and personal relationships with literary and Hollywood figures like Donald Ogden Stewart, Edmund Wilson, Hemingway, and Irving Thalberg, Meyers peers into the private, personal lives of Scott and Zelda, zealously following the former's drinking career and the latter's encounters with various hospitals and doctors. Among the oddities he spies are Fitzgerald's bizarre foot phobia (he said that his naked feet filled him with ``embarrassment and horror''). Meyers does indulge in some obvious, dime-store psychoanalysis, asserting that the deaths of Fitzgerald's two older sisters, aged one and three, while his mother was pregnant with him, and of a younger sibling who lived for only one hour, not only doomed Fitzgerald to an overprotected and delicate childhood but also saddled him with survivor's guilt. Meyers asserts that Scott encouraged Zelda's escapades as subject matter for his writing, that much of their outrageous behavior was meant to keep themselves in the public eye and to sell books. He goes more deeply here into the Hemingway/Fitzgerald friendship than in his Hemingway (1985) and thinks the famous penis-measuring episode in Hemingway's A Moveable Feast highly suspect. Factually rich, if uninspired. (Book-of-the-Month Club alternate) -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. Jeffrey Meyers has been Jemison Professor at the University of Alabama in Birmingham.