R. CLIFTON SPARGO
"Beautiful Fools is a vivid and revealing look at two charismatic, self-destructive people, and the love that sustained and ruined them. It's a real feat of historical imagination and novelistic empathy."
– Tom Perrotta
"The work of a genuine literary talent"
– The Spectator
"Historical fiction at its best"
– Times Literary Supplement
"A marvel of a book"
– Andrew Sean Greer
R. Clifton Spargo is a novelist and short story writer known for his ability to craft compelling narratives with psychological depth and dramatic tension. His novel Beautiful Fools (Overlook Press) tells the missing final chapter in the tragic romance of Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald. His fiction and music and cultural criticism have appeared in The Antioch Review, The Atlantic, The Baltimore Sun, Commonweal, Glimmer Train, Huffington Post, Kenyon Review, Newcity, North American Review, The Wall Street Journal, and The Yale Review. An expert on testimony, ethics, and the Holocaust, he has published two books of literature and philosophy with the Johns Hopkins University Press. He co-founded Center for Story & Witness, an award-winning global nonprofit organization, and he teaches creative writing at Yale University.
Praise
"Here is a writer possessing the greatest talent: that of fully inhabiting the lives of others. Spargo conjures up these two as no one has done before. Scott and Zelda become, in Spargo's remarkable novel, not people of history but of literature, and reminders of what we fight for, what we fail to win, and the beauty that abides between. A marvel of a book."
– Andrew Sean Greer, author of Pulitzer Prize winning Less
"Spargo's voice is entirely his own and is capable of articulating certain ranges of experience only rarely now available to us. At once we are in contemporary America and also in a timeless space of personal loss...His work seems to me marked for permanence."
– Harold Bloom, author of The Western Canon
"R. Clifton Spargo's Beautiful Fools is the work of a genuine literary talent...Spargo's characters transcend reality and become rich and fictional, and the novel, in the form's paradoxical brilliance (at its best, as often here) speaks truth through invention."
– The Spectator
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Upcoming events
September 6, 2025: Printers Row Lit Fest, Chicago, IL
"Using Story to Change the World, and Transform Ourselves," a conversation with Jimmie Briggs, Ruchira Gupta, Anne K. Ream, and R. Clifton Spargo
4:00 pm, Feinberg Foundation Stage (Corner of Polk and Clark)
Open to the Public
"Historical fiction at its best" – Times Literary Supplement
October 13, 2025 Panel at Yale University, New Haven, CT
"Bearing Witness: The Art and Ethics of Using Story to Create Social Change," a conversation with Janine Di Giovanni, Mariam el Marakeshy, David Morse, Anne K. Ream, and R. Clifton Spargo
5:00 pm, Horchow Hall, Jackson School of Global Affairs, Yale University
Open to the Public