When Andrew Turnbull was a boy, Scott Fitzgerald rented a house on the family’s estate. Even then, Turnbull found him an intriguing and sympathetic man; and it is with sympathy that he has approached this biography.

          Going thoroughly into Fitzgerald’s early life, showing us his eccentric, doting mother, his pathetic, nebulous father, he gives us an idea of why Fitzgerald became what he was: at once a playboy and a serious artist, a drunkard with a highly developed literary conscience. He does not romanticise Fitzgerald, though he plainly admires him. Nor does he spare us his outrageous escapades – on the Riviera, where even the kindly Gerald Murphys had to bar him from their house; in Rome, where he was beaten up by police and taximen; at Dartmouth, Mass., where he was supposed to write a film with young Bud Schulberg but was fired by the producer who lost patience with his general rowdiness.

          It is at once a fascinating and painful story; a story dominated, perhaps, by Fitzgerald’s ambivalent, self-destructive marriage to his "Southern belle", Zelda, a relationship in which each consumed the other, and where neither could be wholly blamed – or wholly excused.

          Since his death, the story of Scott Fitzgerald has taken on a certain almost archetypal quality; a parable and a warning for our days. Mr Turnbull, whose book is both a comprehensive biography and a personal memoir, tells it in all its poignancy.