Books by Scott Donaldson

At the time of his death in 1935, Edwin Arlington Robinson was regarded as the leading American poet-the equal of Frost and Stevens. In this biography, Scott Donaldson tells the intriguing story of this poet's life, based in large part on a previously unavailable trove of more than 3,000 personal letters, and recounts his profoundly important role in the development of modern American literature. Born in 1869, the youngest son of a well-to-do family in Gardiner, Maine, Robinson had two brothers: Dean, a doctor who became a drug addict, and Herman, an alcoholic who squandered the family fortune. Robinson never married, but he fell in love as many as three times, most lastingly with the woman who would become his brother Herman's wife. Despite his shyness, Robinson made many close friends, and he repeatedly went out of his way to give them his support and encouragement. Still, it was always poetry that drove him. He regarded writing poems as nothing less than his calling-what he had been put on earth to do. Struggling through long years of poverty and neglect, he achieved a voice and a subject matter all his own. He was the first to write about ordinary people and events-an honest butcher consumed by grief, a miser with "e;eyes like little dollars in the dark,"e; ancient clerks in a dry goods store measuring out their days like bolts of cloth. In simple yet powerful rhetoric, he explored the interior worlds of the people around him. Robinson was a major poet and a pivotal figure in the course of modern American literature, yet over the years his reputation has declined. With his biography, Donaldson returns this remarkable talent to the pantheon of great American poets and sheds new light on his enduring legacy.

Scott Donaldson is one of the nation’s leading literary biographers. Among his many books are By Force of Will: The Life and Art of Ernest Hemingway; Archibald MacLeish: An American Life, winner of the Ambassador Book Award for Biography; and Hemingway vs. Fitzgerald: The Rise and Fall of a Literary Friendship.

Death of a Rebel tells the story of Charles Andrews Fenton (1919-1960), a charismaticteacher, scholar, and writer who took his own life by jumping from the top of the Washington Duke Hotel in Durham, North Carolina. At the time he was apparently at the peak of his career. He had written excellent books on Hemingway and Stephen Vincent Benet, had three other books in press, and was working on a new version of his novel about World War II (a 1945 account won the Doubleday Twentieth Century Fox award). He had earned Guggenheim and ACLS grants. Students flocked to his courses. He was widely regarded as the most popular professor at Duke.Charlie Fenton's story is a compelling one, and takes on further meaning in the context of the times. An individualist during the notoriously conformist 1950s, he swam against the current, defying authority and openly inviting controversy. This jaunty refusal to accept received wisdom made him an appealing figure to many of his students and colleagues. But it was a dangerous stance that did not sit well with his superiors, and it cost him when his fortunes took a turn for the worse in the spring and summer of 1960.Love and war had a lot to do with his suicide as well. Charlie Fenton, who had come down to Duke from Yale two years earlier with a promotion to full professor, fell in love with one of his graduate students. His wife, outraged, left and took their son Andy with her. The scandal left him alone and a social pariah around campus. Then he suffered one of his bouts of depression. Usually these periods were triggered by trauma, most of it derived from his service as a tail gunner with the RAF bomber command in the summer and fall of 1942. In the past he'd always been able to shake free of his despondency. This time he was overcome by psychological pain deriving from loss: of wife and family, of public admiration, of companionship, and worst of all, of self-regard. The book recounts Fenton's last days in vivid detail. In writing it, Donaldson had the assistance of family members, of his devoted students, and even at a painful distance of the woman he fell in love with fifty years ago. They all share an abiding sense of what might have been, and a deep regret that he could not go on to inspire the uncounted students who would never get to know and admire and learn from him.

F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway might have been contemporaries, but our understanding of their work often rests on simple differences. Hemingway wrestled with war, fraternity, and the violence of nature. Fitzgerald satirized money and class and the never-ending pursuit of a material tomorrow. Through the provocative arguments of Scott Donaldson, however, the affinities between these two authors become brilliantly clear. The result is a reorientation of how we read twentieth-century American literature.Known for his penetrating studies of Fitzgerald and Hemingway, Donaldson traces the creative genius of these authors and the surprising overlaps among their works. Fitzgerald and Hemingway both wrote fiction out of their experiences rather than about them. Therefore Donaldson pursues both biography and criticism in these essays, with a deep commitment to close reading. He traces the influence of celebrity culture on the legacies of both writers, matches an analysis of Hemingway's Spanish Civil War writings to a treatment of Fitzgerald's left-leaning tendencies, and contrasts the averted gaze in Hemingway's fiction with the role of possessions in The Great Gatsby. He devotes several essays to four novels, Gatsby, Tender Is the Night, The Sun Also Rises, and A Farewell to Arms, and others to lesser-known short stories. Based on years of research in the Fitzgerald and Hemingway archives and brimming with Donaldson's trademark wit and insight, this irresistible anthology moves the study of American literature in bold new directions.