Used very good, has tear on the jacket on the back.
In September of 1929, nineteen-year-
old Kit Quayle (the narrator of A Sporting
Proposition and The Untouchable Juli) is re-
leased from the tedium of rural Australian
life by a rich unce, who stakes him to a
year in Europe. While Kit is waiting in Lon-
don for a newspaper job to open, an Aus-
tralian reporter persuades him to visit Paris,
and gives him a letter of introduction to
Ernest Hemingway-currently busy "build-
ing himself up as the great white hope of
American literature"Who answers the door
of Hemingway's Paris apartment? None
other than F. Scott Fitzgerald, about to em-
bark with Hemingway on a motor tour
through Brittany. Fitzgerald sweeps Kit
along as "ground support... in case Ernest
and I get drunk at the same time," and thus
involves him in the tumultuoUs, celebrated
friendship that is the center of this poignant
novel.
Hemingway and Fitzgerald are both in
their early thirties, with A Farewell to Arms
and The Great Gatsby behind them, literary
golden boys and part-time disturbers of the
peace. Ostensibly they are headed for the
village of Fougères to settle an argument
about Balzac and Hugo, but there are
deeper motivations for the trip: Fitzgerald's
struggle to prevent both writers from becom-
ing lost in their public personas, Heming-
way's concern over Fitzgerald's alcoholism,
a rivalry between the vocations of hunting
and carousing, and a deliberate test of an
already strained friendship. As the two
authors drink, insult each other, rage, rec-
oncile, and stumble across the countryside,