Throughout his writing life Hemingway constantly criticized and satirized Fitzgerald, whom he felt had been psychologically castrated by Zelda, couldn’t hold his liquor, had no personal dignity, and publicly humiliated himself. In the magazine version of “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936), the dying Harry “remembered poor Scott Fitzgerald and his romantic awe” of the rich. Twenty years later, after Fitzgerald’s death, Hemingway continued to mock him. A Moveable Feast (1964) described Fitzgerald’s pretty, effeminate, and even decadent good looks, and portrayed him as reckless, hypochondriac, and foolish. In conversation and letters, Hemingway condemned him as a self-confessed cuckold, artistic whore, and destroyer of his own talent. Fitzgerald was even pilloried as a poor boxing timekeeper who let the clock run and subjected Hemingway to unnecessary punishment in the ring.

Like most of Fitzgerald’s friends, Hemingway was attracted to the sexy and uninhibited Zelda, and wrote that she “was very beautiful and was tanned a lovely gold color and her hair was a beautiful dark gold.” But he also resented her and told Fitzgerald that “Zelda is crazy. . . . Zelda just wants to destroy you.” Fitzgerald abjectly submitted to Zelda, yet was proud of the defects of her character, which he defined as a “complete, fine, and full-hearted selfishness and chill-mindedness.”

Despite all his notorious defects, Fitzgerald surprised everyone—including himself—by producing a masterpiece, The Great Gatsby (1925), which Hemingway respectfully called “an absolutely first-rate book.” Hemingway had taken the famous last sentence of A Farewell