Novelist Jay McInerney explores the life and writing of F Scott Fitzgerald, whose masterwork The Great Gatsby has just been filmed for the fifth time.

Fitzgerald captured the reckless spirit of New York life in the roaring twenties - the flappers, the parties, the bootleg liquor, the inevitable reckoning, and the hangover to come. In Gatsby, he created a character who reinvented himself for love - just as Fitzgerald would, not once, but twice. Fitzgerald never wrote an autobiography. He left us something better - letters. Romantic, arrogant, humble letters; letters to editors, publishers, lovers, or friends.

These letters reveal the inner thoughts of a man whose real life was never far from the fiction he wrote. Show less