Bright Star, Green Light

A dazzling biography of two interwoven, tragic lives: that of John Keats and F. Scott Fitzgerald.

‘For awhile after you quit Keats,’ Fitzgerald once wrote, ‘All other poetry seems to be only whistling or humming.’

John Keats died two hundred years ago, in February 1821. F. Scott Fitzgerald defined a decade that began one hundred years ago, the Jazz Age.

In this biography, bestselling author Jonathan Bate puts these two shining, tragic lives in parallel. Not only was Fitzgerald profoundly influenced by Keats, titling ‘Tender is the Night’ and other works from the poet’s lines, but the two lived with echoing fates: both died young, loved to drink, were plagued by tuberculosis, loved one woman fiercely and without consummation, were writing into a new decade of release, experimentation and decadence.

Luminous and vital, this biography goes through the looking glass to meet afresh two of the greatest and best-known Romantic writers in their twinned centuries.