F. Scott Fitzgerald Responds to Hate Mail

 

"The Rosseaus, Marxes, Tolstois – men of thought, mind you, 'impractical' men, 'idealist' have done more to decide the food you eat and the things you think + do than all the millions of Roosevelts and Rockerfellars."

F. Scott Fitzgerald – literary legend, master of the muse, star of early book ads, and one amazing dad – was born 116 years ago this week.

In 1920, shortly after the publication of his debut novel, This Side of Paradise, he received a piece of "hate mail" criticizing the book as an affront to the respectable members of society, particularly those in power. Fitzgerald's feisty, brilliant response, found in F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Life in Letters (public library), pulls into question – just as his fiction famously does – the superficial values high society holds so dear, touching on everything from education to ethics to politics to creative legacy with equal parts insight and irreverence:

TO: Robert D. Clark

38 W 59th St.

New York City

Feb 9th 1920

Dear Bob:

Your letter riled me to such an extent that I'm answering immediatly. Who are all these 'real people' who 'create business and politics'? and of whose approval I should be so covetous? Do you mean grafters who keep sugar in their ware houses so that people have to go without or the cheap-jacks who by bribery and high-school sentiment manage to controll elections. I can't pick up a paper here without finding that some of these 'real people' who will not be satisfied only with 'a brilliant mind' (I quote you) have just gone up to Sing Sing for a stay – Brindell and Hegerman, two pillars of society, went this morning.

Who in hell ever respected Shelley, Whitman, Poe, O. Henry, Verlaine, Swinburne, Villon, Shakespeare ect when they were alive. Shelley + Swinburne were fired from college; Verlaine + O Henry were in jail. The rest were drunkards or wasters and told generally by the merchants and petty politicians and jitney messiahs of their day that real people wouldn't stand it And the merchants and messiahs, the shrewd + the dull, are dust – and the others live on.

Just occasionally a man like Shaw who was called an immoralist 50 times worse than me back in the 90ties, lives on long enough so that the world grows up to him. What he believed in 1890 was heresy then – by by now its almost respectable. It seems to me I've let myself be dominated by 'authorities' for too long – the headmaster of Newman, S.P. A, Princeton, my regiment, my business boss – who knew no more than me, in fact I should say these 5 were all distinctly my mental inferiors. And that's all that counts! The Rosseaus, Marxes, Tolstois – men of thought, mind you, 'impractical' men, 'idealist' have done more to decide the food you eat and the things you think + do than all the millions of Roosevelts and Rockerfellars that strut for 20 yrs. or so mouthing such phrases as 100% American (which means 99% village idiot), and die with a little pleasing flattery to the silly and cruel old God they've set up in their hearts.

 

'Gatsby' Author Fitzgerald Rests In A D.C. Suburb

Every weekday, thousands of commuters to the nation's capital drive past the grave of a celebrated American author, and it's a good bet they don't realize it.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, the author of The Great Gatsby, was born in St. Paul, Minn.; he's associated with that city, as well as Paris, the Riviera and New York. But he's buried in Rockville, Md., outside Washington, D.C., next to a highway between strip malls and train tracks.
Scott Fitzgerald, as he was known, was the prime chronicler of the Jazz Age of the Roaring '20s. He wrote of insouciant youth, flappers and millionaires — a postwar generation of young Americans skeptical of its elders and eager to embrace a prosperous age.
With his wife, Zelda, Fitzgerald became an emblem of the era, living out many of its excesses. His first novel, This Side of Paradise, begun while he was an undergraduate at Princeton University, earned acclaim among critics and instantly brought the author wealth and notoriety.
He followed that with The Beautiful and the Damned and The Great Gatsby, one of the most celebrated books of American literature. Gatsby was followed by two other novels and 180 short stories.
But Fitzgerald's heavy drinking took a toll on his health and wealth, as well as his critical reputation. He died at age 44 of a heart attack, while writing screenplays in Hollywood.
From California To Maryland
At the time of his death, Fitzgerald considered himself a failure. After the Great Depression, readers and publishers were no longer interested in tales of the Jazz Age, and he was hard-pressed to find his novels on bookstore shelves.
When he died unexpectedly before Christmas in 1940, Fitzgerald's wife and his lawyer arranged for his body to be sent from California to Maryland, to be buried next to his father in a family plot at St. Mary's Catholic Church.
The writer's family had deep roots in the state; he's named after distant relative and Maryland native Francis Scott Key, author of "The Star-Spangled Banner."
Writer Maureen Corrigan has visited Fitzgerald's grave often. The book critic for WHYY's Fresh Air is also a professor of literature at Georgetown University and gets her car fixed at a garage near the Rockville cemetery.
Corrigan says she always finds fresh gifts and tokens next to the grave.
"The two things that I've seen almost consistently at the gravesite," she says, "are small bottles of alcohol, that you would get on an airplane, and spare change."
Parallels With 'Gatsby'
Corrigan is at work on a book about how Americans read The Great Gatsby. She finds eerie similarities in Fitzgerald's burial and that of his most famous character.
Fitzgerald was initially refused burial at St. Mary's, on the grounds that he wasn't a "practicing" Catholic at his death. Instead, after an impersonal service, he was interred at another cemetery nearby.
"It was raining," says Corrigan, "and there were about 25 people, so he got more than Gatsby. But the Protestant minister who performed the service didn't know who he was. So when you read Gatsby's burial, you really do get a chill, because it almost seems to anticipate what would happen to the author."
And as for a grave marker for this landmark American author?
"I doubt there was one," says his granddaughter, Eleanor Lanahan. "He was totally broke when he died. I don't think anyone had much money to spend on a gravestone."
Lanahan's mother, Scottie, was the Fitzgeralds' only child. In family pictures, Scottie looks likes a third Musketeer to her dashing parents.
Eventually, Zelda Fitzgerald was institutionalized in Maryland for mental illness; her husband and daughter moved nearby. Lanahan says Zelda wrote that her husband "always thought he'd be going back to the rolling hills of Maryland."
Indeed, Fitzgerald wrote a friend, "I wouldn't mind a bit if Zelda and I could snuggle up under a stone in some old graveyard here."
'Borne Back ... Into The Past'
Seven years after his death, Zelda did join him in that cemetery, after she died in a fire at an asylum. Their graves were virtually forgotten for almost three decades, until a local women's group contacted Scottie about erecting a plaque.
Instead, the group and Scottie approached St. Mary's again, 35 years after Fitzgerald had been turned away. The church agreed to allow the couple to be moved into the family plot.
This time, there was a headstone, chosen by Scottie, with the famous last words of The Great Gatsby inscribed on it: "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."
Corrigan reads that last line as a challenge to Americans.
"What those last lines are asking us to think about," she says, "is whether or not it's a worthless effort to try to get ahead, run faster, be stronger, in light of the fact that ultimately we all die and are pulled back into the past, or whether that's what makes us great, that we do try."
In 1986, Scottie Fitzgerald was buried with her parents in the family plot at St. Mary's. Her grave is at their feet.

 

The Evolution of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Signature: From 5 Years Old to 21

Fun fact about F. Scott Fitzgerald: he was a terrible speller. No, really. And his grammar wasn’t much better. Literary critic Edmund Wilson described his debut novel This Side of Paradise (find in our Free eBooks collection) as “one of the most illiterate books of any merit every published.” Hemingway couldn’t spell either, and neither could Faulkner. Without the patient revision of great editors like Maxwell Perkins, much of the prose of these American masters may well have been unreadable. Novelists are artists, not grammarians, and their manuscript quirks—of spelling, handwriting, grammatical mistakes—can often reveal a great deal more about them than the typical reader can glean from clean, typeset copies of their work.

Take, for example, the evolution of Fitzgerald’s signature (above). From the labored scrawls of a five year-old, to the practiced script of an eleven-year-old schoolboy, to the experimental teenaged poses, we see the lettering get looser, more stylized, then tighten up again as it assumes its own mature identity in the confidently elegant near-calligraphy of the 21-year-old Fitzgerald–an evolution that traces the writer’s creative growth from uncertain but passionate youth to disciplined artist. Alright, maybe that’s all nonsense. I’m no expert. The practice of handwriting analysis, or graphology, is generally a forensic tool used to identify the marks of criminal suspects and detect forgeries, not a mindreading technique, although it does get used that way. One site, for example, provides an analysis of one of Fitzgerald’s 1924 letters to Carl Van Vechten. From the minute characteristics of the Gatsby novelist’s script, the analyst divines that he is “creative,” “artistic,” and appreciates the finer things in life. Color me a little skeptical.

But maybe there is something to my theory of Fitzgerald’s growing maturity and self-conscious certainty as evidenced by his signatures. He published This Side of Paradise to great acclaim three years after the final signature above. In the prior signatures, we see him struggling for control as he wrote and revised an earlier unpublished novel called The Romantic Egotist, which Fitzgerald himself told editor Perkins was “a tedious, disconnected casserole.” The outsized, extravagant lettering of the artist in his late teens is nothing if not “romantic.” But Fitzgerald achieved just enough control in his short life to write a veritable treasure chest of stories (many brilliant and some just plain silly) and a handful of novels, including, of course, the one for which he’s best known. Most of the rest of the time, as most everyone knows, he was kind of a mess.

'Gatsby' Author Fitzgerald Rests In A D.C. Suburb

'Gatsby' Author Fitzgerald Rests In A D.C. Suburb

The grave of Great Gatsby author F. Scott Fitzgerald lies next to a major thoroughfare for commuters between Rockville, Md., and Washington, D.C.

F. Scott Fitzgerald was born in St. Paul, Minn.; he's associated with that city, as well with Paris, the Riviera, and New York. But the author of The Great Gatsby is buried in suburban Maryland, next to a highway between stripmalls and train tracks.

Fitzgerald's grave lies in Rockville, Md., and every weekday, thousands of Washington, D.C., commuters drive past his grave, not realizing the celebrated author is buried nearby.

Scott Fitzgerald, as he was known, was the prime chronicler of the Jazz Age of the Roaring '20s. He wrote of insouciant youth, flappers and millionaires — a postwar generation of young Americans skeptical of its elders and eager to embrace a prosperous age.

With his wife Zelda, Fitzgerald became an emblem of the era, living out many of its excesses. His first novel, This Side of Paradise, begun while he was an undergraduate at Princeton University, earned acclaim among critics and instantly brought the author wealth and notoriety.

He would follow that with The Beautiful and the Damned and The Great Gatsby, one of the most celebrated books of American literature. Gatsby was followed by two other novels and 180 short stories.

But Fitzgerald's heavy drinking took a toll on his health and wealth, as well as his critical reputation. He died at age 44 of a heart attack, while writing screenplays in Hollywood.

After the Great Depression, readers and publishers were no longer interested in more tales of the Jazz Age. Fitzgerald was hard-pressed to find his novels on bookstore shelves. At the time of his death, he considered himself a failure.

Fitzgerald's family had deep roots in Maryland. He was named for distant relative Francis Scott Key, author of "The Star-Spangled Banner."

When Fitzgerald died unexpectedly before Christmas in 1940, his wife, Zelda, and his lawyer arranged for the writer's body to be sent from California to Maryland, to be buried next to his father in a family plot at St. Mary's Catholic Church.

Writer Maureen Corrigan has visited Fitzgerald's grave often. The book critic for WHYY's Fresh Air is also a professor of literature at Georgetown University, who comes to Rockville to get her car fixed at a garage near the cemetery.

Corrigan says she always finds fresh gifts and tokens next to the grave.

"The two things that I've seen almost consistently at the gravesite," she says, "are small bottles of alcohol, that you would get on an airplane, and spare change."

Corrigan is at work on a book about how Americans read The Great Gatsby. She finds eerie similarities in Fitzgerald's burial and that of his most famous character.

Fitzgerald was initially refused burial at St. Mary's, on the grounds that he wasn't a "practicing" Catholic at his death. Instead, after an impersonal service, he was interred at another cemetery nearby.

"It was raining," says Corrigan, "and there were about 25 people, so he got more than Gatsby. But the Protestant minister who performed the service didn't know who he was. So when you read Gatsby's burial, you really do get a chill, because it almost seems to anticipate what would happen to the author."

And as for a grave marker for this landmark American author?

"I doubt there was one," says his granddaughter, Eleanor Lanahan. "He was totally broke when he died. I don't think anyone had much money to spend on a gravestone."

Lanahan's mother, Scottie, was Scott and Zelda's only child. In family pictures, Scottie looks likes a Third Musketeer to her dashing parents.

Eventually, Zelda's mental illness led to her being institutionalized in Maryland; Scott and Scottie moved nearby. Granddaughter Eleanor Lanahan says Zelda wrote that her husband "always thought he'd be going back to the rolling hills of Maryland."

Indeed, Scott wrote a friend, "I wouldn't mind a bit if Zelda and I could snuggle up under a stone in some old graveyard here."

Seven years later, Zelda did join him in that cemetery, after she died in a fire at an asylum. Their graves were virtually forgotten for almost three decades, until a local women's group contacted Scottie about erecting a plaque at her parents' grave.

Instead, the group and Scottie approached St. Mary's Church again, 35 years after Fitzgerald had been turned away. The church agreed to allow Scott and Zelda to be moved into the family plot.

And this time there was a headstone, chosen by Scottie, with the famous last words of The Great Gatsby inscribed on it: "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."

Corrigan reads that last line as a challenge to Americans.

"What those last lines are asking us to think about is whether or not it's a worthless effort to try to get ahead, run faster, be stronger, in light of the fact that ultimately we all die and are pulled back into the past, or whether that's what makes us great, that we do try."

In 1985, Scottie Fitzgerald was buried with her parents in the family plot at St. Mary's churchyard. Her grave is at their feet.

 

The quotable Fitzgerald

“It’s just that I feel so sad these wonderful nights. I sort of feel they’re never coming again, and I’m not really getting all I could out of them.”  This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald

 “Youth is like having a big plate of candy. Sentimentalists think they want to be in the pure, simple state they were in before they ate the candy. They don’t. They just want the fun of eating it all over again. The matron doesn’t want to repeat her girlhood — she wants to repeat her honeymoon. I don’t want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again.” F. Scott Fitzgerald, in This Side of Paradise

 “That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you’re not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong.” F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby)

 “There was one of his lonelinesses coming, one of those times when he walked the streets or sat, aimless and depressed, biting a pencil at his desk. It was a self-absorption with no comfort, a demand for expression with no outlet, a sense of time rushing by, ceaselessly and wastefully - assuaged only by that conviction that there was nothing to waste, because all efforts and attainments were equally valueless.” F. Scott Fitzgerald

 “It was a gray day, that least fleshly of all weathers; a day of dreams and far hopes and clear visions. It was a day associated with those abstract truths and purities that dissolve in the sunshine or fade out in the light of the moon.” F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise

 “Youth is like having a big plate of candy. Sentimentalists think they want to be in the pure, simple state they were in before they ate the candy. They don’t. They just want the fun of eating it all over again.” F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise

 “…it was only the past that ever seemed strange and unbelievable.”          F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise

 “Out of the deep sophistication of Anthony an understanding formed, nothing atavistic or obscure, indeed scarcely physical at all, an understanding remembered from the romancings of many generations of minds that as she talked and caught his eyes and turned her lovely head, she moved him as he had never been moved before. The sheath that held her soul had assumed significance - that was all. She was a sun, radiant, growing, gathering light and storing it - then after an eternity pouring it forth in a glance, the fragment of a sentence, to that part of him that cherished all beauty and all illusion.”- F. Scott Fitzgerald , The Beautiful and the Damned

For what it’s worth: it’s never too late or, in my case, too early to be whoever you want to be. There’s no time limit, stop whenever you want. You can change or stay the same, there are no rules to this thing. We can make the best or worst of it. I hope you make the best of it. And I hope you see things that startle you. I hope you feel things you never felt before. I hope you meet people with a different point of view. I hope you have a life you’re proud of. If you find you’re not, I hope you have the strength to start all over again.”  F. Scott Fitzgerald

 “This is a valley of ashes—a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and, finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air. Occasionally a line of gray cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak, and comes to rest, and immediately the ash-gray men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud, which screens their obscure operations from your sight.” - F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, 

 “She felt a little betrayed and sad, but presently a moving object came into sight. It was a huge horse-chestnut tree in full bloom bound for the Champs Elysees, strapped now into a long truck and simply shaking with laughter - like a lovely person in an undignified position yet confident none the less of being lovely. Looking at it with fascination, Rosemary identified herself with it, and laughed cheerfully with it, and everything all at once seemed gorgeous.”  Tender is the Night, F. Scott Fitzgerald

 “And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.” The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald

 “He wanted to recover something, some idea of himself perhaps, that had gone into loving Daisy. His life had been confused and disordered since then, but if he could once return to a certain starting place and go over it all slowly, he could find out what that thing was.”  F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

 “Life is so damned hard, so damned hard… It just hurts people and hurts people, until finally it hurts them so that they can’t be hurt ever any more. That’s the last and worst thing it does.” F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned.

 “It was always the becoming he dreamed of, never the being.” — F. Scott Fitzgerald

 “I’m not sentimental—I’m as romantic as you are. The idea, you know, is that the sentimental person thinks things will last—the romantic person has a desperate confidence that they won’t”  F. Scott Fitzgerald - This Side of Paradise

 “Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.”  F. Scott Fitzgerald

 “I like people and I like them to like me, but I wear my heart where God put it, on the inside.” F. Scott Fitzgerald

 “I want to give a really BAD party. I mean it. I want to give a party where there’s a brawl and seductions and people going home with their feelings hurt and women passed out in the cabinet de toilette. You wait and see.” Dick Diver, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night

 “You’re the only girl I’ve seen for a long time that actually did look like something blooming.” F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender is the Night

 “…and there was never any doubt at whom he was looking or talking — and this was flattering attention, for who looks at us? — glances fall upon us, curious or disinterested, nothing more.”  F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender is the Night

“I hope she’ll be a fool - that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.”           F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

 “Don’t let yourself feel worthless: often through life you will really be at your worst when you seem to think best of yourself; and don’t worry about losing your “personality,” as you persist in calling it: at fifteen you had the radiance of early morning, at twenty you will begin to have the melancholy brilliance of the moon, and when you are my age you will give out, as I do, the genial golden warmth of 4 p.m.”  F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise

 “She doesn’t think; her real depths are Irish and romantic and illogical.”  Tender is the Night, F. Scott Fitzgerald

 “That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you’re not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong.” —    F. Scott Fitzgerald

 “And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow fast in movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.” F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

 “That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you’re not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong.” F. Scott Fitzgerald

 “If we could only learn to look evil as evil, whether it’s clothed in filth or monotony or magnificence.”  This Side of Paradise, F. Scott Fitzgerald

 “You see I usually find myself among strangers because I drift here and there trying to forget the sad things that happened to me.” —   F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

 “The world exists in your eyes only. You can make it as big or as small as you want.” F. Scott Fitzgerald

 “For what it’s worth: it’s never too late or, in my case, too early to be whoever you want to be. There’s no time limit, stop whenever you want. You can change or stay the same, there are no rules to this thing. We can make the best or the worst of it. I hope you make the best of it. And I hope you see things that startle you. I hope you feel things you never felt before. I hope you meet people with a different point of view. I hope you live a life you’re proud of. If you find that you’re not, I hope you have the strength to start all over again.”  F. Scott Fitzgerald

 “It seemed that the only lover she had ever wanted was a lover in a dream.” F. Scott Fitzgerald. The Beautiful and Damned.

 “It was only a sunny smile, and little it cost in the giving, but like morning light it scattered the night and made the day worth living.” F. Scott Fitzgerald

 “I fell in love with her courage, her sincerity, and her flaming self -respect. And it’s these things I’d believe in, even if the whole world indulged in wild suspicions that she wasn’t all she should be. I love her and it is the beginning of everything.” F. Scott Fitzgerald

 “In the dead white hours in Zurich staring into a stranger’s pantry across the upshine of a street-lamp, he used to think that he wanted to be good, he wanted to be kind, he wanted to be brave and wise, but it was all pretty difficult. He wanted to be loved, too, if he could fit it in.” Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald

 “There’s so much spring in the air - there’s so much lazy sweetness in your heart.” This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald

 “I tried to go then, but they wouldn’t hear of it; perhaps my presence made them feel more satisfactorily alone.”  The Great Gatsby

 “It’s just that I feel so sad these wondrous nights. I sort of feel they’re never coming again, and I’m not really getting all I could out of them.” F. Scott Fitzgerald

 “Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.”  F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby)

“In a real dark night of the soul, it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day.” F. Scott Fitzgerald.

 

What a 1925 Ad for The Great Gatsby Tells Us About Book Prices

If you were a Princeton undergrad in 1925, and you happened to be reading lacrosse team news from the school newspaper, you might well have stopped and glanced at this ad for the brand new novel from F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby.
If you were to buy said novel, it would cost you $2, or $26.18 adjusted for inflation -- roughly the price of a hardcover today.
As The Awl found earlier this year when it compared several decades worth of New York Times best sellers, the cost of a new book in the U.S. has stayed remarkably even over time. By contrast, if you bought a movie ticket back in 1925, it would have cost you around $0.25, or $3.27 in present dollars. Today, it would run you around $8.00.
The average family is now vastly more wealthy than they were in the '20s, which in turn means books are much more affordable. But it's fascinating to see that publishing houses have essentially been finding new material and debuting it at roughly the same price point for almost a century. I can't say precisely why that's the case. But if I had to guess, I'd venture that it's because the production of a book hasn't fundamentally changed much since Fitzgerald's days, while film making been completely transformed. Publishers are also a frighty bunch, prone to worrying about the death of their industry, and nervous about hiking the price of a bundle of pages in a digital entertainment world. That just might have something to do with it too.

 

Fitzgerald quotes

 

 

 “It’s just that I feel so sad these wonderful nights. I sort of feel they’re never coming again, and I’m not really getting all I could out of them.”  This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald

 

 “Youth is like having a big plate of candy. Sentimentalists think they want to be in the pure, simple state they were in before they ate the candy. They don’t. They just want the fun of eating it all over again. The matron doesn’t want to repeat her girlhood — she wants to repeat her honeymoon. I don’t want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again.” F. Scott Fitzgerald, in This Side of Paradise

 

 “That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you’re not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong.”        F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby)

 

 “There was one of his lonelinesses coming, one of those times when he walked the streets or sat, aimless and depressed, biting a pencil at his desk. It was a self-absorption with no comfort, a demand for expression with no outlet, a sense of time rushing by, ceaselessly and wastefully - assuaged only by that conviction that there was nothing to waste, because all efforts and attainments were equally valueless.”     F. Scott Fitzgerald

 

 “It was a gray day, that least fleshly of all weathers; a day of dreams and far hopes and clear visions. It was a day associated with those abstract truths and purities that dissolve in the sunshine or fade out in the light of the moon.”       F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise

 

 “Youth is like having a big plate of candy. Sentimentalists think they want to be in the pure, simple state they were in before they ate the candy. They don’t. They just want the fun of eating it all over again.” F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise

 

 “…it was only the past that ever seemed strange and unbelievable.”          F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise

 

 “Out of the deep sophistication of Anthony an understanding formed, nothing atavistic or obscure, indeed scarcely physical at all, an understanding remembered from the romancings of many generations of minds that as she talked and caught his eyes and turned her lovely head, she moved him as he had never been moved before. The sheath that held her soul had assumed significance - that was all. She was a sun, radiant, growing, gathering light and storing it - then after an eternity pouring it forth in a glance, the fragment of a sentence, to that part of him that cherished all beauty and all illusion.”- F. Scott Fitzgerald , The Beautiful and the Damned

 

For what it’s worth: it’s never too late or, in my case, too early to be whoever you want to be. There’s no time limit, stop whenever you want. You can change or stay the same, there are no rules to this thing. We can make the best or worst of it. I hope you make the best of it. And I hope you see things that startle you. I hope you feel things you never felt before. I hope you meet people with a different point of view. I hope you have a life you’re proud of. If you find you’re not, I hope you have the strength to start all over again.”  F. Scott Fitzgerald

 

 “This is a valley of ashes—a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and, finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air. Occasionally a line of gray cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak, and comes to rest, and immediately the ash-gray men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud, which screens their obscure operations from your sight.” - F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby 

 

 “She felt a little betrayed and sad, but presently a moving object came into sight. It was a huge horse-chestnut tree in full bloom bound for the Champs Elysees, strapped now into a long truck and simply shaking with laughter - like a lovely person in an undignified position yet confident none the less of being lovely. Looking at it with fascination, Rosemary identified herself with it, and laughed cheerfully with it, and everything all at once seemed gorgeous.”  Tender is the Night, F. Scott Fitzgerald

 

 “And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.”             The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald

 

 “He wanted to recover something, some idea of himself perhaps, that had gone into loving Daisy. His life had been confused and disordered since then, but if he could once return to a certain starting place and go over it all slowly, he could find out what that thing was.”     F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

 

 “Life is so damned hard, so damned hard… It just hurts people and hurts people, until finally it hurts them so that they can’t be hurt ever any more. That’s the last and worst thing it does.” F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned.

 

 “It was always the becoming he dreamed of, never the being.” —F. Scott Fitzgerald

 

 “I’m not sentimental—I’m as romantic as you are. The idea, you know, is that the sentimental person thinks things will last—the romantic person has a desperate confidence that they won’t”  F. Scott Fitzgerald - This Side of Paradise

 

 “Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.”  F. Scott Fitzgerald

 

“I like people and I like them to like me, but I wear my heart where God put it, on the inside.” F. Scott Fitzgerald

 

 “I want to give a really BAD party. I mean it. I want to give a party where there’s a brawl and seductions and people going home with their feelings hurt and women passed out in the cabinet de toilette. You wait and see.” Dick Diver, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night

 

 “You’re the only girl I’ve seen for a long time that actually did look like something blooming.”         F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender is the Night

 

 “…and there was never any doubt at whom he was looking or talking — and this was flattering attention, for who looks at us? — glances fall upon us, curious or disinterested, nothing more.”  F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender is the Night

 

“I hope she’ll be a fool - that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.”           F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

 

 “Don’t let yourself feel worthless: often through life you will really be at your worst when you seem to think best of yourself; and don’t worry about losing your “personality,” as you persist in calling it: at fifteen you had the radiance of early morning, at twenty you will begin to have the melancholy brilliance of the moon, and when you are my age you will give out, as I do, the genial golden warmth of 4 p.m.”  F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise

 

 “She doesn’t think; her real depths are Irish and romantic and illogical.”            Tender is the Night, F. Scott Fitzgerald

 

 “That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you’re not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong.” —   F. Scott Fitzgerald

 

 “And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow fast in movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.”          F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby)

 

 “That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you’re not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong.” —    F. Scott Fitzgerald

 

 “If we could only learn to look evil as evil, whether it’s clothed in filth or monotony or magnificence.”  This Side of Paradise, F. Scott Fitzgerald

 

 “You see I usually find myself among strangers because I drift here and there trying to forget the sad things that happened to me.” —   F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

 

 “The world exists in your eyes only. You can make it as big or as small as you want.” F. Scott Fitzgerald

 

 “For what it’s worth: it’s never too late or, in my case, too early to be whoever you want to be. There’s no time limit, stop whenever you want. You can change or stay the same, there are no rules to this thing. We can make the best or the worst of it. I hope you make the best of it. And I hope you see things that startle you. I hope you feel things you never felt before. I hope you meet people with a different point of view. I hope you live a life you’re proud of. If you find that you’re not, I hope you have the strength to start all over again.”  F. Scott Fitzgerald

 

 “It seemed that the only lover she had ever wanted was a lover in a dream.” F. Scott Fitzgerald. The Beautiful and Damned.

 

 “It was only a sunny smile, and little it cost in the giving, but like morning light it scattered the night and made the day worth living.” F. Scott Fitzgerald

 

 “I fell in love with her courage, her sincerity, and her flaming self -respect. And it’s these things I’d believe in, even if the whole world indulged in wild suspicions that she wasn’t all she should be. I love her and it is the beginning of everything.”        F. Scott Fitzgerald

 

 “In the dead white hours in Zurich staring into a stranger’s pantry across the upshine of a street-lamp, he used to think that he wanted to be good, he wanted to be kind,he wanted to be brave and wise, but it was all pretty difficult. He wanted to be loved, too, if he could fit it in.” Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald

 

 “There’s so much spring in the air - there’s so much lazy sweetness in your heart.” This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald

 

 “I tried to go then, but they wouldn’t hear of it; perhaps my presence made them feel more satisfactorily alone.”  The Great Gatsby

 

 “It’s just that I feel so sad these wondrous nights. I sort of feel they’re never coming again, and I’m not really getting all I could out of them.” F. Scott Fitzgerald

 

 “Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.”  F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby)

 

“In a real dark night of the soul, it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day.” F. Scott Fitzgerald.

 

F. Scott Fitzgerald's 'new' story rounds out our view

The New Yorker has just done a favor for all of us who are admirers of F. Scott Fitzgerald and "The Great Gatsby." Earlier this month, the magazine published a story of Fitzgerald's, "Thank You for the Light," that it rejected in 1936. In so doing, it opened up the whole question of what we should expect from posthumously published writing.

The New Yorker got its second chance at "Thank You for the Light" because Fitzgerald's grandchildren found it while going through his papers for an auction at Sotheby's. It wasn't the first Fitzgerald story to be discovered after his death. His uncompleted final novel, "The Last Tycoon," was edited by his friend, the literary critic Edmund Wilson, and published in 1941, a year after Fitzgerald died from a heart attack at the age of 44.

In the case of "Thank You for the Light," the good news is that the one-page story required no editing. It stands as Fitzgerald wrote it, so we don't have to wonder about his intentions.

Most writers who have their work published after their deaths have no such luck. Their unfinished art is finished by someone else, and they lose the authority death should give them over what they meant to say.

Ernest Hemingway's "A Moveable Feast," an account of his Paris years in the 1920s, was published in 1964, three years after he died, with only one added feature -- the title, supplied by Hemingway's friend, A. E. Hotchner, on the basis of a remark Hemingway made to him. But in 2009, the book was extensively reworked by Hemingway's grandson Sean, who didn't like what it said about his grandmother, Pauline Pfeiffer, Hemingway's second wife.

Ralph Ellison, who died in 1994, had equally bad luck with his posthumous novel, "Juneteenth," which was published in 1999. Ellison, who had started it decades earlier, left no instruction about what he wanted done with his work, and it took his literary executor, John F. Callahan, more than three years to whittle down some 2,000 pages of typescript and printouts into 354 pages. We will never know what Ellison, the author of the 1952 classic, "Invisible Man," had in mind for his second and final novel, a tale of the relationship between a black preacher and a bigoted Northern senator.

Hemingway, who suffered from depression, and Ellison, who suffered from pancreatic cancer, were in fragile condition when they died. It's understandable why their executors felt free to make changes in both novelists' work. Neither writer was in full control of himself at the end of his life.

Still, for most of us a flawed work -- true to an author's original intentions -- seems preferable to a tidy work that may be misleading. That's why the "new" Fitzgerald story is so interesting.

In the case of Hemingway and Ellison, the posthumous publication of their writing did not add to their reputations. Publication simply gave us more of them to read. Even today, it's not clear that their last books would have found a publisher if they'd been written by unknown authors.

Fitzgerald is a different case. In "Thank You for the Light" he has taken on a central character, Mrs. Hanson, who is the very opposite of the wild and ambitious Jay Gatsby, who lived so lavishly on Long Island's North Shore. In rejecting the story in 1936, the editors of The New Yorker wrote, "It seems to us so curious and so unlike the kind of thing we associate with him and really too fantastic." The editors were right -- but that's why Fitzgerald's story deserved publication.

Mrs. Hanson, who sells girdles and corsets, is "a pretty, somewhat faded woman of forty," so desperate for a cigarette that she stops in a church for a smoke and believes the Virgin Mary has lit her cigarette. She shows us a softer side of Fitzgerald. She's a figure he never would have been interested in at the height of his powers.

Mrs. Hanson lets us see that during 1936, the year he was also writing "The Crack-Up," his personal account of his own depression, Fitzgerald had widened his sympathies. He had outgrown his need to be spokesman for the Jazz Age or distance himself from his most eccentric characters.

"So unlike the kind of thing we associate with him," indeed. And that's exactly the point.

 

Things to Worry About: (Complete) Letter from F. Scott Fitzgerald to his daughter, Scottie

 

La Paix, Rodgers’ Forge

Towson, Maryland

August 8, 1933

 

Dear Pie:

 

I feel very strongly about you doing duty. Would you give me a little more documentation about your reading in French? I am glad you are happy — but I never believe much in happiness. I never believe in misery either. Those are things you see on the stage or the screen or the printed pages, they never really happen to you in life.

All I believe in in life is the rewards for virtue (according to your talents) and the punishments for not fulfilling your duties, which are doubly costly. If there is such a volume in the camp library, will you ask Mrs. Tyson to let you look up a sonnet of Shakespeare’s in which the line occurs “Lillies that fester smell far worse than weeds.”

Have had no thoughts today, life seems composed of getting up aSaturday Evening Post story. I think of you, and always pleasantly; but if you call me “Pappy” again I am going to take the White Cat out and beat his bottom hard, six times for every time you are impertinent. Do you react to that?

I will arrange the camp bill.

 

Halfwit, I will conclude.

Things to worry about:

Worry about courage

Worry about Cleanliness

Worry about efficiency

Worry about horsemanship

 

Things not to worry about:

Don’t worry about popular opinion

Don’t worry about dolls

Don’t worry about the past

Don’t worry about the future

Don’t worry about growing up

Don’t worry about anybody getting ahead of you

Don’t worry about triumph

Don’t worry about failure unless it comes through your own fault

Don’t worry about mosquitoes

Don’t worry about flies

Don’t worry about insects in general

Don’t worry about parents

Don’t worry about boys

Don’t worry about disappointments

Don’t worry about pleasures

Don’t worry about satisfactions

 

Things to think about:

What am I really aiming at?

How good am I really in comparison to my contemporaries in regard to:

 

(a) Scholarship

(b) Do I really understand about people and am I able to get along with them?

(c) Am I trying to make my body a useful instrument or am I neglecting it?

 

With dearest love,

Daddy

 

P.S. My come-back to your calling me Pappy is christening you by the word Egg, which implies that you belong to a very rudimentary state of life and that I could break you up and crack you open at my will and I think it would be a word that would hang on if I ever told it to your contemporaries. “Egg Fitzgerald.” How would you like that to go through life with — “Eggie Fitzgerald” or “Bad Egg Fitzgerald” or any form that might occur to fertile minds? Try it once more and I swear to God I will hang it on you and it will be up to you to shake it off. Why borrow trouble?

 

Love anyhow.