Thomas Birch, associate professor of economics at UNHM, has recently coauthored a biography of Jazz Age legend F. Scott Fitzgerald titled F. Scott Fitzgerald:  Under the Influence [Paragon House, 2006]. Birch cites the book as an “accompaniment” to the Fitzgerald revival underway both popularly and among scholars.  “Although giving Fitzgerald his due as a literary artist and cultural icon, our biography is distinctive in tracing the intellectual influences on Fitzgerald that he absorbed and integrated into his fiction.”  The biography surveys Fitzgerald’s entire life including his precocious boyhood, dropping out of Princeton, his emergence as a Jazz Age legend, his Great Depression “crack-up” and, finally, his career in Hollywood where he died in 1940. 

A book reception will be held at noon, Wednesday, May 10, 2006, in the UNHM Library Mezzanine. The reception is free and open to the public. The book is available through Paragon House, a publisher located in Fitzgerald’s hometown of St. Paul, Minnesota that specializes in interdisciplinary work