Subtitled The Fitzgerald-Perkins Correspondence, this collection offers a fascinating peek into the pair's friendship as well as their relationship as author and editor. The book begins with Fitzgerald's confident submission of This Side of Paradise in 1919: "It is a well-considered finished whole this time and I think its a more crowded (in the best sense) piece of work than has been published in this country for some years." It ends days before Fitzgerald's death in 1940 with exchanges of literary gossip and an update on the unfinished The Love of the Last Tycoon: "This is the first day off I have taken for many months and I just wanted to tell you the book is coming along and that comparatively speaking all is well."

Harold Check