Kirkus (STARRED review)
Churchwell... has written an excellent book... she's earned the right to
play on [Fitzgerald's] court. Prodigious research and fierce affection
illumine every remarkable page."
The autumn of 1922 found F. Scott Fitzgerald at the height of his fame,
days from turning twenty-six years old, and returning to New York for
the publication of his fourth book, Tales of the Jazz Age. A spokesman
for America's carefree younger generation, Fitzgerald found a home in
the glamorous and reckless streets of New York. Here, in the final
incredible months of 1922, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald drank and
quarreled and partied amid financial scandals, literary milestones, car
crashes, and celebrity disgraces.
Yet the Fitzgeralds' triumphant return to New York coincided with
another event: the discovery of a brutal double murder in nearby New
Jersey, a crime made all the more horrible by the farce of a police
investigation--which failed to accomplish anything beyond generating
enormous publicity for the newfound celebrity participants. Proclaimed
the "crime of the decade" even as its proceedings dragged on for years,
the Mills-Hall murder has been wholly forgotten today. But the enormous
impact of this bizarre crime can still be felt in The Great Gatsby, a
novel Fitzgerald began planning that autumn of 1922 and whose plot he
ultimately set within that fateful year.
Careless People is a unique literary investigation: a gripping double
narrative that combines a forensic search for clues to an unsolved crime
and a quest for the roots of America's best loved novel. Overturning
much of the received wisdom of the period, Careless People blends
biography and history with lost newspaper accounts, letters, and newly
discovered archival materials. With great wit and insight, acclaimed
scholar of American literature Sarah Churchwell reconstructs the events
of that pivotal autumn, revealing in the process new ways of thinking
about Fitzgerald's masterpiece.
Interweaving the biographical story of the Fitzgeralds with the
unfolding investigation into the murder of Hall and Mills, Careless
People is a thrilling combination of literary history and murder
mystery, a mesmerizing journey into the dark heart of Jazz Age America.
