Many people won’t know that The Great Gatsby once had a prologue. It was ditched by Fitzgerald when he realised that it didn’ fit with the ’general neatness’ of the book’s design. Instead, he offered to H. L. Mencken’s new American Mercury magazine for a $118. It’ s a deeply enigmatic tale, so what is…
Category: Repeating the Past
A Film about Studio Electrophonique. Ken Patten — Sheffield’s Joe Meek.
I have an entry in my ‘Dairy Diary’ for 1984: Wednesday, July 18, 1984: “Demo Day. Got up at 8.00am and had a drink, then took sarnies and guitar up to Frazer’s. We left for Sheffield about 9.00am. We got there about 9.40 and got properly started about 10.05. We did Freezeframe first, then Friction (1…
J.G. ROBIN — The Incredible Rise and Fall of the Ukrainian Gatsby
The scholar Thomas P. Riggio was among the first to explore the similarities between Theodore Dreiser’s Mr X in Twelve Men and Fitzgerald’s titular hero, Jay Gatsby, but few if any have explored Robin’s life in any real detail. This mini-book takes a look at the life and times of the sky-rocket millionaire from his…
Back to New York with Ambassador Bryce. Freedom in the Old World. Censorship in the New World.
In this final look look at Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald’s trip to Europe in 1921 we see the couple head back on the RMS Celtic to New York. Topics include The Anglo-Irish Treaty, the publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses, Shane Leslie’s review of Ulysses, Prince Val Engalitcheff, the Cotillo-Jesse Clean Book Bill and Sherwood Anderson’s…
Fitzgerald back in London: The Hotel Cecil, the Empire Council and the Fourth of July Celebrations
In Part One of this look at Scott Fitzgerald’s trip to Europe in the summer of 1921 we discovered that when the author left for England on the R.M.S Aquitania on May 3rd he was joined by some of the most prominent men in New York and Washington including the new American Ambassador, George Harvey,…
The Usual ‘Unusual’ Suspects
“I was immediately struck by the number of young Englishmen dotted about; all well dressed, all looking a little hungry, and all talking in low, earnest voices to solid and prosperous Americans.” The Great Gatsby I’d like to go back to another Max Gerlach conundrum. On Max’s 1942 World War II Draft Registration Card, Gerlach…
“God damn the continent of Europe”. F. Scott Fitzgerald letter to Edmund Wilson, Hotel Cecil, July 1921.
A ‘violent’ xenophobic letter written by author F. Scott Fitzgerald to his friend Edmund Wilson from the Hotel Cecil in London in July 1921 has been a constant source of embarrassment to his biographers. “The negroid streak creeps northward to defile the Nordic Race,” he writes. How much does the letter tells us about Scott…
The Shining Ending, July 4 1921. The Shining, Isolationism and the American Dream
The ending of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining has chilled and intrigued movie-goers for years. In the closing scene of the film the camera moves from Jack Nicholson’s Jack Torrance sitting upright, dead in the snow, to a gallery of pictures in the ballroom of the Overlook Hotel. On one of the pictures is Jack in…
Designs on Gatsby: Max Gerlach, Francis Cugat and F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Max von Gerlach, an associate of gangster Arnold Rothstein and author Scott Fitzgerald, made regular trips to Havana. At one time, Havana was also the home of Francis Cugat, the Spanish-Cuban artist who designed the famous dust-jacket for Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel, The Great Gatsby. Here we explore the possibility that it may have been Gerlach…
A New Race of Man — How Trotsky’s Dream of a Soviet Superman Helped Perfect the American Dream
When F. Scott Fitzgerald sat down to work on his third novel, The Great Gatsby there was probably no greater influence on its composition than the author’s rediscovery of Percy Bysshe Shelley, a poet once memorably described by Harold Bloom as the Leon Trotsky of his day. D. Appleton and Company had just that year…