The 22 books everyone should read… according to F Scott Fitzgerald:

List of novels he dictated to nurse is revealed

He is widely acclaimed as being one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century, but little has been known about his own personal choice of literature - until now.A list containing 22 books that F Scott Fitzgerald thought were essential reading has just come to light, which the author of The Great Gatsby dictated to his nurse while convalescing in a North Carolina hotel in 1936.The hard-drinking Fitzgerald was battling alcoholism, and struggling financially. 

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Hard drinker: F Scott Fitzgerald pictured in the 1920s, the party age he was to write about so vividly. Right, a first edition of his most famous work. His wife Zelda had recently been admitted to the nearby psychiatric Highland Hospital in Asheville.

FITZGERALD'S ESSENTIAL READING

Sister Carrie: Theodore Dreiser
The Life of Jesus: Ernest Renan
A Doll’s House: Henrik Ibsen
Winesburg, Ohio: Sherwood Anderson
The Old Wives’ Tale: Arnold Bennett
The Maltese Falcon: Dashiel Hammett
The Red and the Black: Stendahl
The Short Stories of Guy De Maupassant
An Outline of Abnormal Psychology: edited by Gardner Murphy
The Stories of Anton Chekhov
The Best American Humorous Short Stories
Victory: Joseph Conrad
The Revolt of the Angels: Anatole France
The Plays of Oscar Wilde
Sanctuary: William Faulkner
Within a Budding Grove: Marcel Proust
The Guermantes Way: Marcel Proust
Swann’s Way: Marcel Proust
South Wind: Norman Douglas
The Garden Party: Katherine Mansfield
War and Peace: Leo Tolstoy
John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley: Complete Poetical Works

It was a dark time for the 40-year-old.

Esquire had recently published his essay The Crack Up, in which he stated 'my life had been a drawing on resources that I did not possess, that I had been mortgaging myself physically and spiritually up to the hilt.'

That summer he had fractured his shoulder while diving into the hotel swimming pool. According to Michael Cody, at the University of South Carolina's Fitzgerald's website, he had also fired a revolver in a suicide threat.

It was after this incident that the hotel where he was staying in Asheville, the Grove Park Inn, refused to let him continue living there unless he had a nurse to look after him.

Mr Cody states: 'He was attended thereafter by Dorothy Richardson, whose chief duties were to provide him company and try to keep him from drinking too much.

'In typical Fitzgerald fashion, he developed a friendship with Miss Richardson and attempted to educate her by providing her with a reading list.'

According to website Open Culture, which published the list, at the top of the page, Richardson had written: 'These are books that Scott thought should be required reading.'

Decadence: Fitzgerald is credited with encapsulating the excess of American high society. Pictured here with his wife Zelda and their daughter Scottie

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