Bright Star, Green Light: The Beautiful and Damned Lives of John Keats and F. Scott Fitzgerald, by Jonathan Bate

‘For a while 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, Jonathan Bate recreates 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, were haunted by their first love, and wrote 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.

“Bate tells the tales of these accursed creatures frightfully well” - Daily Mail