Magnificent Possibilities: The Lives of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, undertakes an examination of the book-length biographies of the Fitzgeralds. By a close reading of the texts, the dissertation uncovers a number of significant controlling metaphors that characterize not only Fitzgerald biography, but also appear to constitute a community of metaphor generalized in American literary biography written in the twentieth-century. Such metaphors seem to arise from a complex interaction between literary, critical, and biographical conventions and the cultural context that gives rise to them. The dissertation explores this interaction and its implications for traditional notions of the conventions of twentieth-century American literary biography, and examines in detail the problematic relationship between literary biography, literary criticism, and fiction