F. Scott Fitzgerald died on the afternoon of December 21, 1940, suffering a fatal heart attack as he was finishing a chocolate bar--one of his placebos for the alcohol that had ravaged both his talent and health. He was with his lover, the British gossip columnist Sheilah Graham, at the time, living in Los Angeles and working as what he termed a Hollywood hack. The author of such classics as The Great Gatsby and Tender is the Night had taken any script work he could get in his final years in order to support his wife, Zelda, in a private mental institution, and his daughter, Scottie, at Vassar. Most of America had long forgotten this symbol of the Jazz Age, dead at forty-four--the handsome young writer who had won instant popularity with his first novel, This Side of Paradise. Eulogies were left for his few remaining friends to make; the...