Books: Honi Soit Qui Malibu

BELOVED INFIDEL (338 pp.)—Shellah Graham and Gerold Frank—Holt ($3.95).

The dictum that "there are no second acts in American lives" was true at least of the man who wrote it, F. Scott Fitzgerald. The dazzled darling of the champagne revels of the '20s woke to the hungover desolation of the '30s. He found his talent depleted, his nerves unstrung, his wife Zelda mad, and he faced a literary fate that to a writer can be worse than death—public and critical neglect. In 1937 Fitzgerald packed himself, like "a cracked plate," off to Hollywood, not to...