Reviews for Scott and Ernest

The average rating for Scott and Ernest based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2008-01-08 00:00:00 Victor Lebron Bruccoli gives a very good, measured, and concise account of the Fitzgerald/Hemingway relationship. He draws extensively on primary sources - of which there are many. It's entertaining, especially if you are a geeky English major.

Review # 2 was written on 2011-07-27 00:00:00 Thomas Hunt This was an okay biography of the love/hate friendship between F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway. I'm not real sure why I only thought it was "okay" -- it just felt ... not necessarily superficial, but almost like ... I don't know, like maybe it didn't really dig down deep ... maybe. I just didn't get as much out of it as I expected, so I feel like the book was lacking. Bruccoli definitely does his research, though, using lots of letters and telegrams between Scott and Ernest, or to other people about each other. He also makes some good points about where in their own literature Scott and Ernest lie or exaggerate about their relationship. For example, the book begins with a quote from Hemingway's A Moveable Feast about "The first time I ever met Scott Fitzgerald," including mentioning Dunc Chaplin, a pitcher from Princeton. Bruccoli soon after notes "Chaplin was not [at the Paris bar where they met] that spring day in 1925. Chaplin was not in Paris. Chaplin was not even in Europe in 1925. Perhaps it was someone else--another Princetonian. But Chaplin is carefully identified as part of the sense of exact recall Hemingway develops in these memoirs. ... One wrong detail undermines the whole thing: all of it has to be right." Similarly, there's an episode where Ernest is boxing another man, and Scott is tasked with keeping time... or not. There are (I think) three different versions of the story that float around, and Bruccoli points out that, since there are different versions, we don't know who's telling the truth. The book also serves as a semi-good history of each author's bibliography and their writing processes (only semi-good because the book's about two people, so it can't go as in-depth as if it were only about one person).