James L. W. West III

Professional Bio

James L. W. West III is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English, Emeritus, at Pennsylvania State University.  He is a biographer, book historian, and scholarly editor.  West is the author of American Authors and the Literary Marketplace (1988), William Styron: A Life (1998) and The Perfect Hour: The Romance of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ginevra King (2005).  He has published two collections of essays: Making the Archives Talk (2011) and Business is Good: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Professional Author (2023).  West has held fellowships from the J. S. Guggenheim Foundation, the National Humanities Center, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.  He has had Fulbright appointments in England (at Cambridge University) and in Belgium (at the Université de Liège) and has been a visiting fellow at the American Academy in Rome. From 1994 to 2019, West was the General Editor of the Cambridge Edition of the Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald, recently completed in eighteen volumes, sixteen under his editorship.  West’s variorum edition of The Great Gatsby was the final volume in the series.