An air of transience pervades the biographies of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald and slips into their writing. This lack of permanence is a key to understanding their relationship with Paris and France. Unlike such contemporary American writers as John Dos Passos, John Peale Bishop, or Ernest Hemingway, Fitzgerald was never truly at home in Europe, despite the fact that he spent a total of six and a half years there--about a third of his professional lifetime, and almost half of the period (1920-1934) during which he was most productive. As his biographer Andrew Turnbull has observed, Fitzgerald was always an American in France, frequenting the Right Bank hotels and bars popular with American tourists rather than the Left Bank literary circles with which Hemingway was far more familiar. Nevertheless France for the Fitzgeralds was a strong influence on both life and art. Although much of...