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: The Jazz Age
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…
Colwell and Young. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s trip to London, November 1925
In an entry in his ledger dated November 1925 Scott mentions his second trip to London. Like previous entries it is difficult to piece together any kind of meaningful narrative from the handful of names and places he lists and much of our understanding of this trip has been gleaned from supporting diary entries made…
Venice: The City of Dreamers. F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ruth Sturtevant and the 1921 trip to Venice
Before heading south to Rome, Scott and Zelda spent several days in Venice — the so-called ‘Queen of the Adriatic’. As with Paris and London, little of what they did here was ever recorded. In letters and writings the pair produced after their return home the references and allusions amount to little more than scraps….
A Confederacy of Dreamers: Scott Fitzgerald, his father and the American Civil War.
A discovery I made recently reveals that the best man at the wedding of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s parents, Edward and Mollie, was a lineal descendant of America’s first president, General George Washington. A look at the Fitzgerald family’s links to Washington D.C, Sixteenth Street and America’s founding fathers. During his time at prep school and…
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…
American Dreamer — Listen now at Audible.co.uk. Who was the Real Jay Gatsby?
It’s 11.30am on Friday, June 23 2023. I’ve been rifling the archives and punching in keywords for the past few hours. Suddenly I’m excited. I’ve found a report in a copy of Variety Magazine dated July 27, 1927. It’s unlikely to have been seen by another pair of eyes for close to a 100 years….
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…