In 1940, the year F. Scott Fitzgerald died, he sold only seven copies of The Great Gatsby and nine of Tender Is the Night, for a total income of $13.13. Neither he nor his wife Zelda lived to see the rebirth of their reputations, his as author of the Great American Novel, hers as his muse, and a gifted creator in her own right, doomed never to realise her potential. Much of the Fitzgeralds' blazing rise and dying fall took place in France. Both The Great Gatsby and Tender is the Night were written there, and their experience of les années folles informs such stories as Babylon Revisited, as well as Zelda's only novel, Save Me the Waltz, a vivid snapshot of the Lost Generation's self-indulgent existence along the Côte d'Azur. Scott Fitzgerald's A User's Guide follows the Fitzgeralds during the decade they lived intermittently in Paris and on the Riviera, with excursions to Rome and Capri. For visitor and armchair traveller alike, it provides an indispensible guide to those places on which this most brilliant of couples left their indelible signatures. John Baxter has lived in Paris for twenty-five years, for a large part of which he has led literary walks around Paris, visiting sites associated with such authors as Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway. His Hemingway's A User's Guide is available as a Kindle Single. Other prize-winning books about Paris include The Most Beautiful Walk in the A Pedestrian in Paris, and Saint-Germain-Des-Pré Paris' Rebel Quarter.
Author
John Baxter (born 1939 in Randwick, New South Wales) is an Australian-born writer, journalist, and film-maker. Baxter has lived in Britain and the United States as well as in his native Sydney, but has made his home in Paris since 1989, where he is married to the film-maker Marie-Dominique Montel. They have one daughter, Louise. He began writing science fiction in the early 1960s for New Worlds, Science Fantasy and other British magazines. His first novel, though serialised in New Worlds as THE GOD KILLERS, was published as a book in the US by Ace as The Off-Worlders. He was Visiting Professor at Hollins College in Virginia in 1975-1976. He has written a number of short stories and novels in that genre and a book about SF in the movies, as well as editing collections of Australian science fiction. Baxter has also written a large number of other works dealing with the movies, including biographies of film personalities, including Federico Fellini, Luis Buñuel, Steven Spielberg, Stanley Kubrick, Woody Allen, George Lucas and Robert De Niro. He has written a number of documentaries, including a survey of the life and work of the painter Fernando Botero. He also co-produced, wrote and presented three television series for the Australian Broadcasting Commission, Filmstruck, First Take and The Cutting Room, and was co-editor of the ABC book programme Books And Writing. In the 1960s, he was a member of the WEA Film Study Group with such notable people as Ian Klava, Frank Moorhouse, Michael Thornhill, John Flaus and Ken Quinnell. From July 1965 to December 1967 the WEA Film Study Group published the cinema journal FILM DIGEST. This journal was edited by John Baxter. For a number of years in the sixties, he was active in the Sydney Film Festival, and during the 1980s served in a consulting capacity on a number of film-funding bodies, as well as writing film criticism for The Australian and other periodicals. Some of his books have been translated into various languages, including Japanese and Chinese. Since moving to Paris, he has written four books of autobiography, A Pound of Paper: Confessions of a Book Addict, We'll Always Have Paris: Sex and Love in the City of Light, Immoveable feast : a Paris Christmas, and The Most Beautiful Walk in the World : a Pedestrian in Paris. Since 2007 he has been co-director of the annual Paris Writers Workshop.
