College of One

by Sheilah Graham

The story of a unique two-year liberal arts course--the student: Sheilah Graham; the teacher: F. Scott Fitzgerald.

The moving story of how F. Scott Fitzgerald—washed up, alcoholic and ill—dedicated himself to devising a heartfelt course in literature for the woman he loved.

In 1937, on the night of her engagement to the Marquess of Donegall, Sheilah Graham met F. Scott Fitzgerald at a party in Hollywood. Graham, a British-born journalist, broke off her engagement, and until Fitzgerald had a fatal heart attack in her apartment in 1940, the two writers lived the fervid, sometimes violent affair that is memorialized here with unprecedented intimacy.

When they met, Fitzgerald’s fame had waned. He battled crippling alcoholism while writing screenplays to support his daughter and institutionalized wife. Graham’s star, however, was rising, to the point where she became Hollywood’s highest-paid, best-read gossip columnist. But if Fitzgerald had lived out his "crack-up" in public, Graham kept her demons secret—such as that she believed herself to be "a fascinating fake who pulled the wool over Hollywood’s eyes."

Most poignantly, she keenly felt her lack of education, and Fitzgerald rose to the occasion. He became her passionate tutor, guiding her through a curriculum of his own design: a College of One. Graham loved him the more for it, writing the book as a tribute. As she explained, "An unusual man’s ideas on what constituted an education had to be preserved. It is a new chapter to add to what is already known about an author who has been microscopically investigated in all the other areas of his life."

Genres: Biography, Nonfiction, Memoir, Biography Memoir, Writing, Books About Books, 20th Century

245 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1967

About the author

Sheilah Graham (15 September 1904 – 17 November 1988) was an English-born, nationally-syndicated American gossip columnist during Hollywood's "Golden Age". Along with Louella Parsons and Hedda Hopper, Graham came to wield sufficient power to make or break Hollywood careers – prompting her to describe herself as "the last of the unholy trio."

Graham was also known for her relationship with F. Scott Fitzgerald, a relationship she played a significant role in immortalizing, through her autobiographical account of that period, Beloved Infidel, a best-seller, which was also made into a film. In her youth, she had been a showgirl, and a freelance writer for Fleet Street in London, and had published several short stories and two novels. These early experiences would converge in her career in Hollywood, that spanned nearly four decades, as a successful columnist and author.

(from Wikipedia)

Reviews

[Lisa of Troy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Contrary to what is taught in school, The Great Gatsby wasn’t created by harp music and soft beams of light. F. Scott Fitzgerald did not wave a magic wand, and The Great Gatsby magically materialized.

“Everything that I have ever attained has been through long and persistent struggle.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald

"As a matter of fact I am a professional literary thief, hot after the best methods of every writer in my generation.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald

In the years before his death, F. Scott Fitzgerald had a girlfriend, Sheilah Graham, and she was not formally educated—she had no college education. When attending dinner parties, Graham felt out of her element, unable to engage in academic discussions.

F. Scott Fitzgerald put together a curriculum for her. His plan would cover:
1. Poetry
2. History
3. Politics
4. Literature
5. Art
6. Music

This is my next big project. In 2026, I am going to begin The College of One.

Is it going to be difficult?

Undoubtedly, yes. There are just over 200 different books in the course.

But this is what is necessary to become a writer in the style of F. Scott Fitzgerald. The Great Gatsby didn’t materialize from magic—Fitzgerald incorporated the brilliance from other writers.

In my review of War and Peace, I detailed how the best lines from The Great Gatsby originated from War and Peace (which Fitzgerald was reading at the time he was writing The Great Gatsby). Additionally, Fitzgerald said that he used a line from John Keats’s poem, “Ode to A Nightingale” to inspire a line in The Great Gatsby.

Traditional education has left out the fact that to be a proper literary thief, we need a strong background in literature. It means reading books and lots of them. It means doing hard work with grit and determination.

Princeton has been kind enough to include a list of all of the books in The College of One, so I can follow along in the exact same version and copy that Fitzgerald had. Mel-Cat has been indispensable in this task (Mel-Cat is a free Michigan library program where a Michigan library card holder can request any book from any library in Michigan, and it will be shipped free of charge to your home library).

As far as the book itself, Graham has an interesting background, but she is woefully unprepared to write this book. She completed this course decades ago and, apparently, couldn’t be bothered to refresh her memory or reread. She does seem to give one sentence, vague comments about the books covered, offering no particularly spectacular literary insights.

At the end of the book, Graham was clearly light on material because she awkwardly dumped her awful lecture and boring short story to hit some arbitrary page count, and this loser material had only a very limited connection to The College of One. Even F. Scott Fitzgerald crossed off most of her writing!

The Green Light at the End of the Dock (How much I spent):
Hardcover Text – $34.90 from Burning Tree Books

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[Danielle · Rating 2 out of 5]

I had heard about this book and thought it would be interesting to see what F. Scott Fitzgerald considered worthy to be added to an educational reading list. I was originally going to just get it from the library to see the list, but I was somewhat confused as to the structure, so I decided to read the whole thing. There were a couple interesting anecdotes, but overall this book was not very interesting and did not flow well. It felt like there was a lot of filler, not much was explained well, and the author's commentary on what she read was short and not interesting (kind of like many of my reviews!). Overall, disappointing, but the list was still interesting. For those of you who are interested, skip this book. The list in a nutshell was some Thackarey, James, Hemingway, Ibsen, Dreiser, Dickens, the great English poets and some other classics sprinkled in. I've added many of the books onto a 'college of one' shelf that you are welcome to browse through.

[Jessica · Rating 3 out of 5]

The first half of this book is about Sheilah Graham herself, and her own transformation. The second half focuses primarily on her relationship with F. Scott Fitzgerald. If you know this, it might be easier to get through.


Sheilah Graham writes like a columnist and not like a novelist. Which is okay, because she was a columnist by trade. However, the book took entirely too long to get to the actual College of One, and when it finally arrived, she only dedicated a sentence or two to each work she read.

I loved the parts where she describes what she and Scott did in order to learn the material, how he influenced her, how eventually she read these books again and changed her opinion.

I loved the times she defended Scott, how she described him in his final years without being too harsh on him or calling him names. I like that she didn't focus on his alcoholism, but allowed us to see the polarity of it in its truest form. I enjoyed how much she told the reader that despite his failing health and his addiction, he was a gentle, hardworking human being. People fail to mention this a lot of the time when discussing the later years of his life so I really enjoyed learning about my favorite author from her perspective.

I enjoyed the book because it meant spending more time in the world of one of the most influential writers of the period. FSF is my favorite, and so I was so happy to be sucked into the moment that Sheilah was describing. For that, I give it 3 stars. But her prose was a little tough to handle, as she isn't really a prose writer. So, in her defense, it is understandable.

Thank you, Sheilah, for writing so many books and being so passionate about a person you loved. :)

[Stacy Wilhoit DeCoste · Rating 3 out of 5]

I recently read an account of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Sheilah Graham's love affair in the late 30's. Quite the mismatched couple, their attraction to each other was instantaneous and intense. Scott was well read and a master of words. Sheilah left school at 14, woefully uneducated. The Hollywood world of cocktail parties, discussions and debates left Sheilah feeling ignorant. Scott soon remedied this. He
devised a course of study to take two years for Sheilah to read and learn the classics. Scott outlined her reading schedule. He always read ahead and made notes for her in the margins. They discussed what she had read in the evenings. It was a time together Sheilah relished, only to be unfinished when Scott died of a heart attack. In 1967, Sheilah requested Scott's papers, housed at Princeton, to write this book of their special time together. I was curious to see his lists of readings, including Greek writings, parts of the Bible, poetry, classics, novels and short stories, and classical music which they listened to together. Fascinating.

[zespri · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found this little book in a bookshop, and as it mentioned it was about Scott Fitzgerald, it had to come home with me.

Sheilah wrote this book many years after Scott Fitzgerald died, and it is the account of how he gave her an education, her very own College of One. When she met him in Hollywood she was largely uneducated, so Scot set out a programme of reading and music for her to follow. Together they would discuss her findings and growing awareness of the literary world, and she credits him with planting the seed of her lifelong learning.

But it is not just a dry discourse of books and authors, the warmth and affection of their relationship filters through the narrative.

[Teremarie · Rating 2 out of 5]

It would have been better if it had been written by someone else, a third person. Graham goes out of her way to show just how uneducated she was until Fitzgerald came along, and then she just forgot the whole thing. In the last chapter, I don't care about the accomplishments of her children...we have all picked up this book because we wanted a different perspective on Fitzgerald, but it's like he's a secondary or third character in the whole story. I only kept going in hopes that it would evolve into a story more about him. It didn't really.

[Linds · Rating 3 out of 5]

For hard core fans of Scott Fitzgerald only. It shares a lot of the books and poems he felt most important.

I highly recommend Sheila’s Graham’s first biography Beloved Infidel instead.

[Kate · Rating 4 out of 5]

The relationship between Fitzgerald and Sheilah Graham is an interesting and overlooked part of his biography. It's a shame that he couldn't teach her to be a better writer, but her books are valuable for what they tell us about him.

[KCFarrah · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed this book, but more the pretext than the actual writing. Undertaking my own self-guided review of the history and classic literature of the 20th century, decade by decade, I was highly interested to see what texts F Scott Fitzgerald considered fundamental to the education of his companion Sheilah Graham in 1940.

Graham’s account contains the specific curriculum she studied during her two year course...which Fitzgerald drew up tediously upon the historical framework of excerpts of HG Wells’s Outline of History, and supplemented profusely with literature. Her curriculum was about two hundred works in all.

Graham’s recounting of her academic endeavors with Fitzgerald clearly shows her appreciation for the exposure to history, philosophy, literature, art, and music Fitzgerald gave her, as well as her adoration of the man himself, but her writing is mostly dry, occasionally non sequitur . Still, it’s an easy read, the recounting of their shared educational process bulked up by brief summaries and frank opinions of the works she read. Some of the most charming moments of the book are, unsurprisingly, the quotations of Fitzgerald’s annotations left in the margins of her required reading. Particularly humorous is Fitzgerald’s “translation” of Ode To A Grecian Urn into a James Cagney-like monologue. Perhaps more through the echo of Fitzgerald, than through Graham’s recount, we feel the enthusiasm of the educational experiment they undertook.

What FSF did for Sheilah Graham—singled-handedly undertaking her advanced education—is both an incredibly romantic but alarmingly despotic notion. Fitzgerald’s College of One was a labor of love to be sure, but even Graham does not deny his “jealousy” of her education. At one point she recounts his anger at her reading a text he did not recommend, and his irritation at her discussing an alternate reading program of “the one hundred best books” with a famous actor of the time.

Anecdotes like this are scattered throughout the book, but reader’s seeking satisfying insight into Fitzgerald and Graham’s personal relationship should probably look to her first book upon the subject, Beloved Infidel, which I have not read. This book is focused almost exclusively on the concept and curriculum of the College of One, and to a lesser extent, how Fitzgerald sought to contrast Graham’s“classical education” with the in-situ experiences the two were having in Hollywood at the time. Not a terribly inspiring read, but moderately interesting to a true Fitzgerald fan. This book is a peak inside Fitzgerald’s mind and literary soul.

[Linda Goodman · Rating 3 out of 5]

I knew I wanted to read this book after reading West of Sunset by Stewart O'Nan which is about the last 3 years of F. Scott Fitzgerald's life when he worked in Hollywood as a screen writer and had an affair with Sheilah Graham. West of Sunset, which is a historical novel, was the better book. I found the writing in College of One to be very uneven, especially the section when she discusses the curriculum devised by FSF...lots of incomplete sentences. The author's story was interesting, just not written particularly well, in my opinion.

[Kevin Raney · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fantastic story about self-directed learning and love.

[Mandi Bean · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book fess short of what I hoped it would be. I hoped it would give real insight into the intellectual part of F. Scott Fitzgerald and present in more depth how Fitzgerald formed his craft. To some extent, the novel did, but Graham’s writing struck me as more self-indulgent than anything else. This was reinforced by her daughter’s afterword in which she shares that Graham donated all of the books Fitzgerald gave her to Princeton’s special collection to prove her legitimate connection to him. It seems like she exploited her connection with Fitzgerald to validate her own “fame.”

[Sam Berner · Rating 4 out of 5]

Old stuff, this one. Quaint English, quaint customs in a troubled world. I read Fitzgerald's books in my early twenties, and knew a bit of his alcoholism and of Zalda, but this is new stuff to me - the best part being the actual curriculum he put together - gave me ideas as to what to put on the reading list for my own little Lilly Shiel :-)

[Lauren · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved this. When they met, Graham was very self-conscious about the holes in her spotty education and FSF took it upon himself to design a reading curriculum just for her which they followed together until his death about two years later.

A wonderful testament to the power of reading. the afterword by Graham's daughter is especially poignant.

[Sazuru · Rating 4 out of 5]

I *like* Graham's writing style. And knowing what books F. Scott Fitzgerald would recommend is fascinating for both social history and for informed perceptions of his writing. Graham's own life story is riveting as well.

[Susan Keegan · Rating 2 out of 5]

Interesting book. Not well written. The author bored bored bored me, however the creation and implementation of the College of One (and FSF's enthusiasm regarding it ) was satisfying in and of itself.

[Kait · Rating 2 out of 5]

I loved the premise, but the execution was weak. Some of the anecdotes were interesting, but it felt like there was a lot of padding and Graham’s commentary didn’t add a lot of insight. It was interesting to see the list but everything else was not worth the read.

[Lisa · Rating 1 out of 5]

I really wanted to like this book and learn more about F. Scott in the last years of his life. I was very disappointed. This book is extremely boring and gives little insight to the man behind The College Of One. I gave it 2 stars because it is a very good resources for what to read.

[John · Rating 2 out of 5]

Rated: D

[Alan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I heard about this from Beloved Infidel. F Scott set out a reading course for Graham to supply school education she never had.

[Stephanie · Rating 3 out of 5]

The curriculum is a bit dated and the book has been padded to make it more substantial. It is a rather lightweight book but does offer a glimpse of F. Scott Fitzgerald's last years.

[El]

Never heard of it until this article in The Rumpus.

[Henry Sturcke · Rating 3 out of 5]

The third star is for the valuable reading suggestions.