College of One

The moving story of how F. Scott Fitzgerald—washed up, alcoholic and ill—dedicated himself to devising a heartfelt course in literature for the woman he loved.

In 1937, on the night of her engagement to the Marquess of Donegall, Sheilah Graham met F. Scott Fitzgerald at a party in Hollywood. Graham, a British-born journalist, broke off her engagement, and until Fitzgerald had a fatal heart attack in her apartment in 1940, the two writers lived the fervid, sometimes violent affair that is memorialized here with unprecedented intimacy.

When they met, Fitzgerald’s fame had waned. He battled crippling alcoholism while writing screenplays to support his daughter and institutionalized wife. Graham’s star, however, was rising, to the point where she became Hollywood’s highest-paid, best-read gossip columnist. But if Fitzgerald had lived out his “crack-up” in public, Graham kept her demons secret—such as that she believed herself to be “a fascinating fake who pulled the wool over Hollywood’s eyes.’’

Most poignantly, she keenly felt her lack of education, and Fitzgerald rose to the occasion. He became her passionate tutor, guiding her through a curriculum of his own design: a college of one. Graham loved him the more for it, writing the book as a tribute. As she explained, “An unusual man’s ideas on what constituted an education had to be preserved. It is a new chapter to add to what is already known about an author who has been microscopically investigated in all the other areas of his life.”