Bright Star, Green Light: The Beautiful and Damned Lives of John Keats and F. Scott Fitzgerald

(Paperback)

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A dazzling biography of two interwoven, tragic lives: John Keats and F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Highly engaging Go now, read this book THE TIMES
For awhile after you quit Keats, Fitzgerald once wrote, All other poetry seems to be only whistling or humming.

John Keats died two hundred years ago, in February 1821. F. Scott Fitzgerald defined a decade that began one hundred years ago, the Jazz Age.

In this biography, prizewinning author Jonathan Bate recreates these two shining, tragic lives in parallel. Not only was Fitzgerald profoundly influenced by Keats, titling Tender is the Night and other works from the poets lines, but the two lived with echoing fates: both died young, loved to drink, were plagued by tuberculosis, were haunted by their first love, and wrote into a new decade of release, experimentation and decadence.

Luminous and vital, this biography goes through the looking glass to meet afresh two of the greatest and best-known Romantic writers in their twinned centuries.

Reviews

Keats is unmissably present throughout Fitzgeralds work [Bate] borrows a classic form to pay tribute to the broadest, extratemporal similarities between Keats and Fitzgerald
Sunday Times

Keats was Fitzgeralds guiding star An energetic and highly engaging game of literary ping-pong across the ages. Life, writing and inspiration are served and returned in a rapid rally of ideas What an immensely charismatic pair they are Powerful Go now, read this book
Laura Freeman, The Times

A daring, dizzying attempt to connect Keats and F Scott Fitzgerald has plenty to take pleasure in Bate, whose recent biography of WordsworthI admired, is at his best when he zeroes in on the work: his feeling for it, by being so exacting, is infectious, especially in the case of Keats But in the end, the principal achievement of this pairing is to remind us of the way that literature connects us
Rachel Cooke, Observer

Admirable lively and well researched Bates book is certainly an excellent introduction to each writer satisfying, engaging and accessible well designed to make us return to
the work of both Keats and his Keatzian devotee
New Statesman

Bate tells the tales of these accursed creatures frightfully well
Daily Mail

With a fine-tuned ear for poetic language, a master-biographers eye for the revealing detail, and an astonishing mental filing system that recognizes countless meaningful matches among the works and lives of these two great, doomed writers, Jonathan Bate has written a wonderfully illuminating and moving book
Robert Watson, Distinguished Professor of English, UCLA

Author Bio

Jonathan Bate, CBE, is Provost of Worcester College and Professor of English Literature at Oxford University. He is Vice-President of the British Academy, a Governor of the Royal Shakespeare Company, Honorary Fellow of St Catharines College, Cambridge, and a 2014 judge for the Man-Booker Prize. His biography of John Clare (a poet who was a key influence on Ted Hughes) was shortlisted for seven literary prizes and won three of them, including Britains two oldest literary awards, the James Tait Black Prize for Biography and the Hawthornden Prize.