The 1982 biography of Preston Sturges by James Curtis, Between Flops, reflects Sturges's own evaluation of his Hollywood career. Curtis quotes Sturges as saying: “Between flops, it is true, I have come up with an occasional hit, but compared to a good boxer's record, my percentage has been lamentable.” Indeed, the current master narrative regarding Sturges's place in film history is that of a publicly flamboyant, self-promoting Hollywood writerdirector who experienced a dramatic critical and box-office rise and fall. This personal story is made even more compelling in that it parallels a key theme in his most canonical films, the collision of luck, fate, and human fragility played out in both personal and public spheres. As Jared Rapfogel noted with regard to Sturges's films:

Indeed, Sturges has become something like a character in one of his own movies, and his very public career in Hollywood has often overtaken a nuanced critical study of his body of work. As Dan Pinck complained in a 1992 essay in The American Scholar, in the five decades following the end of Sturges's Hollywood career the smattering of books on the writer-director had largely been limited to popular biographies. Pinck's review of three influential Sturges biographies—Curtis's Between Flops (1982), the adapted semi-autobiography by Sandy Sturges, Preston Sturges by Preston Sturges (1990), and Donald Spoto's Madcap: The Life of Preston Sturges (1990)—found all three wanting in providing critical insight into the value of Sturges's body of work. As Pinck says of Spoto's biography, “Moviemaking becomes a sideline, almost a framework of irrelevance; what is lacking is a sharp understanding of his movies and how Sturges made them … Analysis of Sturges's movies or what might have influenced his perceptions of comedy is thin.”