F. Scott Fitzgerald's Letter to a Fellow Author: Compliments, Criticism, and Applejack

This 1927 letter from F. Scott Fitzgerald to Charles Green Shaw, held in the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art, offers commentary on Shaw’s recently published novel Heart in a Hurricane.
Fitzgerald, who had already published This Side of Paradise (1920), The Beautiful and Damned (1922), and The Great Gatsby (1925), was younger than Shaw, but more successful. The letter is an exercise in constructive criticism, offering compliments layered with gentle recommendations.
Fitzgerald posted this letter from Ellerslie, a mansion on the Delaware River north of Wilmington where the Fitzgeralds lived for two years from 1927-1929.
The postscript is mysterious. Did Fitzgerald forget to send this letter, and add a note before mailing it “years later’? Regardless, his list of rustic alcohols followed by a prayer is not to be missed.
Fitzgerald died in Hollywood in 1940. Charles Green Shaw lived until 1974, and had a long and varied career, publishing children’s books and poetry and working as an abstract painter.
Transcript:

June 21st, 1927
Ellerslie, Edgemoor, Delaware
Dear Charlie: My reason for the long delay is the unusual one. That, owing to a review I’d read, I didn’t approach “Heart in a Hurricane” with high expectations. I’m happy to say that I was absolutely wrong. It is a damn good piece of humorous writing from end to end —much better than anything of its sort I’ve read in years. The character is quite clear—clearest, if I may say so, when his tastes are least exhaustively cataloged. And the three girls are all recognizable and thoroughly amusing. Best of all is the background. I liked the scene in the Colony, in the tough dive and at the houseparty—and forgave such episodes as the false [thug?] and such epigrams as—but looking over the pages I don’t find any that are so bad! I wish you’d try something with a plot, or an interrelation between two or more characters, running through the whole book. Episodes held together an “idea,” in its fragilest sense, don’t give the opportunity for workmanship or for really effective effects. I take the liberty of saying this because there is so much talent and humor and discernment in the book as a whole.
Remember, if George comes down here we’d love to have you too. This sounds rude—but you know what I mean. Sorry I was so drunk & dull the other night.
With Many Congratulations and Cordial Good Wishes,
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Years Later: Dear Charlie: We are at last at peace in the wilderness with nothing to drink but rasberry shrubb, medeaeval mead and applejack. Pray gravity to move your bowels. Its little we get done for us in this world. F.S.F.

Live like F. Scott Fitzgerald: Buy his Baltimore town house

 Bathtub gin? A Victrola playing the Charleston? How about their very own Baltimore town house?

F. Scott Fitzgerald's town house at 1307 Park Ave. in Baltimore is up for sale. For $450,000, it could be yours.

From the photographs, it looks as if the town house has retained many of its early 20th century appointments. It's easy to imagine that it looks much as it did in the 1930s when Fitzgerald lived there; it was his home from 1933-35.

Zelda was with him only part of the time. It was their second home in Baltimore, where they had moved so she could receive psychiatric treatment -- the first was damaged in a fire Zelda set when burning papers in a fireplace.

Fitzgerald was also in a bad place; living in Baltimore meant he could dry out at Johns Hopkins Hospital, which he tried to do more than once.

While Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby" is often called the Great American Novel, at the time Fitzgerald was feeling a failure. When his follow-up, "Tender is the Night," was published in 1934, it didn't sell as well and wasn't well-received by critics. Around that time, Fitzgerald wrote to his editor, Maxwell Perkins, “I have drunk too much and that is certainly slowing me up. On the other hand, without drink I do not know whether I could have survived this time.”

The Park Avenue town house carries more Depression-era heritage -- to say nothing of depression -- than Fitzgerald's earlier high-flying Jazz Age party life. Nevertheless, it was a home where he lived, and a fairly grand one.

Built in 1900, the town house has four bedrooms over four levels, including a basement. It has porches in the front and back, two full bathrooms, two half baths, at least three decorative fireplaces, a carriage house/garage, built-in bookshelves and a decorative plaque that notes F. Scott Fitzgerald lived there.

The house has been on the market for four days. There will be an open house Feb. 3.

That's my middle-west - not the wheat or the prairies or the lost Swede towns but

That's my middle-west - not the wheat or the prairies or the lost Swede towns but the thrilling, returning trains of my youth and the street lamps and sleigh bells in the frosty dark and the shadows of holly wreaths thrown by lighted windows on the snow.”― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

Beautiful cover

F. Scott Fitzgerald In Drag: Vintage Photo Of Author In Women's Costume Surfaces

 A vintage photo of F. Scott Fitzgerald in full drag is making the blogosphere rounds.

Buzzfeed reports that the photo was snapped in 1916 when the future "Great Gatsby" scribe was in his third year at Princeton University. Fitzgerald was then performing a play called "The Evil Eye," which he also wrote the lyrics for, with a musical-comedy troupe known as the Princeton Triangle Club.

View the photo below:

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.