F. Scott Fitzgerald, dead 75 years, publishes new short story

CARL VAN VECHTEN

If there's an afterlife and F. Scott Fitzgerald is in it, he must be furious he left the land of the living so soon. Since he died in December, 1940, when he was just 44, he's had some of the best years of his publishing career. New collections of stories and essays! A new piece in the New Yorker! Most of a novel, heralded as brilliant! Not to mention the movie adaptations and the millions of copies of The Great Gatsby sold to high school and college students! Can you imagine the royalties he's missed out on? Plus, he's finally a genius.

His posthumous career has been so successful, in fact, it's hard to believe that there's anything he left behind that hasn't been pawed over by dozens of scholars and copyright lawyers. But recently, while poking around the Fitzgerald papers at the Princeton University library, Andrew Gulli, publisher of the Strand, a literary magazine out of Birmingham, Michigan, that specializes in mysteries, came across the manuscript of a short story called "Temperature," written just a few months before Fitzgerald's fatal heart attack.

"The story did not look familiar at all," says Gulli. "But it was similar to Fitzgerald's life at the time. The main character was living on the estate of a famous Hollywood actor. He'd just hired a secretary and was trying to finish a book, he had heart problems, he mixed a drink with some pills his doctor had given him and started acting like a complete loony."

 Gulli's not a scholar—he jokes that his PhD is from the school of hard knocks—so he consulted some experts, who confirmed that the story was, indeed, by Fitzgerald and that it had never been published before. Fitzgerald's estate gave Gulli the green light to publish "Temperature" in the summer issue of the Strand, on newsstands this week.

This isn't the first time Gulli's found and published previously unknown work by a famous dead author. One of his hobbies is visiting the archives of writers he admires and going through their papers. "It's a fun, wonderful thing," he says. "As a kid, my greatest wish was to meet great writers." He's discovered short stories by James M. Cain, John Steinbeck, Joseph Heller, and Tennessee Williams, an essay by Robert Louis Stevenson, and an article by H.G. Wells. But he says "Temperature" is special.

"Many unpublished works by great writers are dreadful," he says. "But this one is very, very good. It's a comedy, with the great dialogue of F. Scott Fitzgerald. He uses his satirical abilities to great effect skewering Hollywood stereotypes. Fitzgerald knew how to capture a person with just a few sentences and leave you feeling satisfied. He wrote 300 stories, but this is one of the top 20.

"This is one of the highlights of my career," he continues. "I love F. Scott Fitzgerald. He could do so much, but we take him for granted. He dabbled in horror, science fiction, romance, autobiography. He wasn't writing the same thing 100 times. I love Eugene O'Neill, but some scenes he wrote over and over, like he was working on them and experimenting. Fitzgerald was very versatile."

Fragment of lost F. Scott Fitzgerald novel is found

An unfinished novel believed to be the writing of F. Scott Fitzgerald has been found by the editor of a mystery magazine who seems to have a knack for unearthing the lost works of famous authors.

Andrew Gulli, editor of the Strand mystery magazine, says he discovered the undated manuscript -- which apparently had been sitting in a box in the Princeton University library for decades -- called “Ballet School – Chicago” last year, The Washington Post reported.

Gulli initially thought the work was a short story, like the Fitzgerald work he published in the Strand a few weeks ago called “Temperature.”

Regarding the “Ballet School” work, which is about 2,500 words, Gulli told The Washington Post: “There was a scene that could have stood solely as a short story,” he says, “but then it went on one more paragraph, and then it just ended abruptly. And I realized, ‘Oh my God . . . it’s a novel.’”

“I really liked it,” Gulli said. “It’s romantic. There’s a ballerina trying to make her way in Chicago. She has an attraction to a wealthy neighbor because he can get her out of this tough existence . . . and she can have a happy life with him. The story goes into the very hard training for ballet dancers. But then something quirky and unsuspected happens that changes her impression of him.”

Gulli has also found lost works written by John Steinbeck, Tennessee Williams, Joseph Heller and Dashiell Hammett.

76 Years Later, Lost F. Scott Fitzgerald Story Sees The Light Of Day

AUGUST 01, 2015 5:10 PM ET

NPR STAFF

F. Scott Fitzgerald's story "Temperature" — which was found as an unpublished manuscript — appears in the new issue ofThe Strand Magazine.

AP

Andrew Gulli has an unusual passion: finding unpublished short stories by famous American authors. He searches through libraries and archives, finds works, researches to confirm they've never been published — then publishes them in the literary magazine he edits,The Strand.

Last fall, after he'd just found an unpublished story by John Steinbeck, Gulli told NPR's Arun Rath that he'd actually been looking for one by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Now, he's tracked it down — and he joined Rath again to talk about the find.

The story is called "Temperature," and Gulli says it has a little something for everyone. "There's some madcap comedy, some [P.G.] Wodehousian dialogue, some romance, even a little bit of some tragedy in it," he tells Rath.

"I just was struck by how funny, how interesting it was. And I said to myself, 'I really have to have this story.' "

And with some help from the Fitzgerald estate and the author's literary agency, he got it: The story appears in the current issue of The Strand.

________________________________________

Interview Highlights

On how he found the story at the Princeton University library

It was a tough hunt, because there were a lot of things that I had asked for, and there was an interesting fragment of [another] story. I was saying to myself, "Oh my God, I am so excited about this" — and it turned out that [Fitzgerald] had not finished it. For obvious reasons, you can't come back and say, "Please, will you just complete this story for me?"

But this one was finished. It took some research, but I looked through some archives, through some bibliographies by Fitzgerald scholars, and that indeed confirmed that it was never published before.

On how he knows it's a final version

The thing is, I can tell you definitely that it was a final version, because I'm the person who had to go through all these longhand, sloppily written manuscripts by F. Scott Fitzgerald, with a million corrections. And you sort of see the mind of the writer, how he would just scratch out whole pages and make notes in margins.

But this manuscript was very well-written, the typescript is very clean. There are maybe a couple of spelling errors that were very minor. So, this looked like it was ready for prime time.

On possible reasons why Fitzgerald didn't publish it

The manuscript is dated July 7, 1939. And Fitzgerald had sent a letter to his agent a week later, in which he asked to stop being represented by Harold Ober because Ober was tired of advancing Fitzgerald loans in lieu of work that had not been delivered to him. So that might have been one of the reasons why he'd not found a home for it.

On what's next

Well, I have something by a very, very famous writer of detective stories. And, as you can imagine, not all representatives of authors are as wonderful as the F. Scott Fitzgerald estate. So it's going to take some pressure to try to have this short story appear in The Strand Magazine. But I never quit.

Holden and the Central Park Carousel

Holden and the Central Park Carousel

When JD Salinger (Who grew up in the 1930s across the street from Central Park) wrote about the parks Carousel in his 1951 novel Catcher in the Rye, the ride was relatively new to the park. That is to say, it was the latest installation of the ride. Four other carousels versions had stood exact on the site since 1871, although the 1951 version was the only one built within a covered structure.

Actually, Salinger was probably referring to the carousel, one of the largest in the US, of his childhood since he had started writing the novel in the late 1930s. That version of the ride burned down in 1950 as did the prior version in 1924.

 Today’s version of the ride was made by Solomon Stein and Harry Goldstein in 1908. It was originally installed in the trolley terminal on Coney Island in Brooklyn, where it operated until the 1940s.

Over 250,000 people ride the carousel every year.

Excerpted from Catcher in the Rye

After we left the bears, we left the zoo and crossed over this little street in the park, and then we went through one of those little tunnels that always smell from somebody's taking a leak. It was on the way to the carrousel. Old Phoebe still wouldn't talk to me or anything, but she was sort of walking next to me now. I took a hold of the belt at the back of her coat, just for the hell of it, but she wouldn't let me. She said, "Keep your hands to yourself, if you don't mind." She was still sore at me. But not as sore as she was before. Anyway, we kept getting closer and closer to the carrousel and you could start to hear that nutty music it always plays. It was playing "Oh, Marie!" It played that same song about fifty years ago when I was a little kid. That's one nice thing about carrousels, they always play the same songs.

"I thought the carrousel was closed in the wintertime," old Phoebe said. It was the first time she practically said anything. She probably forgot she was supposed to be sore at me.

"Maybe because it's around Christmas," I said.

She didn't say anything when I said that. She probably remembered she was supposed to be sore at me.

"Do you want to go for a ride on it?" I said. I knew she probably did. When she was a tiny little kid, and Allie and D.B. and I used to go to the park with her, she was mad about the carrousel. You couldn't get her off the goddam thing.

"I'm too big." she said. I thought she wasn't going to answer me, but she did.

"No, you're not. Go on. I'll wait for ya. Go on," I said. We were right there then. There were a few kids riding on it, mostly very little kids, and a few parents were waiting around outside, sitting on the benches and all. What I did was, I went up to the window where they sell the tickets and bought old Phoebe a ticket. Then I gave it to her. She was standing right next to me. "Here," I said. "Wait a second--take the rest of your dough, too." I started giving her the rest of the dough she'd lent me.

"You keep it. Keep it for me," she said. Then she said right afterward--"Please."

That's depressing, when somebody says "please" to you. I mean if it's Phoebe or somebody. That depressed the hell out of me. But I put the dough back in my pocket.

"Aren't you gonna ride, too?" she asked me. She was looking at me sort of funny. You could tell she wasn't too sore at me anymore.

"Maybe I will the next time. I'll watch ya," I said. "Got your ticket?"

"Yes."

"Go ahead, then--I'll be on this bench right over here. I'll watch ya." I went over and sat down on this bench, and she went and got on the carrousel. She walked all around it. I mean she walked once all the way around it. Then she sat down on this big, brown, beat-up-looking old horse. Then the carrousel started, and I watched her go around and around. There were only about five or six other kids on the ride, and the song the carrousel was playing was "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes." It was playing it very jazzy and funny. All the kids kept trying to grab for the gold ring, and so was old Phoebe, and I was sort of afraid she'd fall off the goddam horse, but I didn't say anything or do anything. The thing with kids is, if they want to grab the gold ring, you have to let them do it, and not say anything. If they fall off they fall off, but it's bad if you say anything to them.

When the ride was over she got off her horse and came over to me. "You ride once, too, this time," she said.

"No, I'll just watch ya. I think I'll just watch," I said. I gave her some more of her dough. "Here. Get some more tickets."

Annual F. Scott Fitzgerald Short Story Contest Accepting Entries

by Staff Writer

 As part of the 19th Annual F. Scott Fitzgerald Literary Festival taking place October 10, local writers are encouraged to enter the Short Story contest for a chance to win $500. The winner will have the opportunity to speak briefly at the Festival and their story will be published in the Festival program.

Residents of Maryland, Virginia, and Washington, D.C. are eligible to enter the contest. Stories must be fewer than 4,000 words and unpublished. There are no restrictions on the subject matter.

Submissions must be postmarked by Friday, August 14. There is a fee of $25 per entry.

For more information, visit the F. Scott Fitzgerald Literary Festival website or call 301.309.9461.

Zelda Fitzgerald: Beneath the Glittering Surface

Today, any mention of Zelda Fitzgerald's name is usually tinged with tragedy – the 1920s It Girl is remembered primarily for her dramatic fall from fashionable society to the hidden chambers of a Southern mental hospital. But in her glory days, she was known as a glittering, vivacious flapper who had all of New York City – and much of the nation – wrapped around her little finger. That's the image she put forth in the '20s when she and her husband, lauded author F. Scott Fitzgerald, were the toast of the town: a beautiful and irreverently silly young woman, prone to encouraging a scandal or starting a new fashion trend on a whim.

To list just a few of Zelda Fitzgerald's wacky characteristics and actions:

•           "She flirted because it was fun to flirt," Fitzgerald herself wrote in her essay "Eulogy on the Flapper."

•           She took a tipsy swim in the Union Square fountain in the heart of Manhattan.

•           She and her husband were kicked out of multiple hotels for their wildly drunken lifestyle.

•           She took up ballet at 27, determined to become a professional dancer despite the strong odds against anyone succeeding at a dance career after starting that late.

•           She went on wild shopping sprees, buying whatever struck her fancy.

•           Asked to contribute a recipe to a celebrity cookbook, she submitted: "See if there is any bacon, and if there is, ask the cook which pan to fry it in. Then ask if there are any eggs, and if so try and persuade the cook to poach two of them. It is better not to attempt toast, as it burns very easily. Also, in the case of bacon, do not turn the fire too high, or you will have to get out of the house for a week. Serve preferably on china plates, though gold or wood will do if handy."

•           Dorothy Parker, herself a New York City luminary, said of the Fitzgeralds, "They did both look as though they had just stepped out of the sun; their youth was striking."

Zelda Fitzgerald was fun, but she was unreasonable. She was rich, charming and luminous. She did things for the sake of whimsy alone. Probably most of us have known people like Zelda and Scott – the couple who are so much fun that they get invited to all the parties (and go to all of them, their manic energy lighting up the room). The modern-day Scott or Zelda probably has thousands of Instagram followers.

But as we know today, turmoil lurked beneath the glittery surface. The couple's marriage was far from perfect; in private, they fought. They had money troubles; Scott had affairs; and they both drank heavily, especially Scott, who had been an alcoholic since before they were married. And Zelda's attempts at creativity were neither valued nor supported. When Scott wrote his novels, he drew on aspects of their marriage for plot points and Zelda's life for character development – he even included bits of her diaries, lifted word for word and inserted into his text. But when Zelda wrote her lone novel, Save Me the Waltz, a fictionalized account of their marriage, Scott was livid. He accused her of plagiarism for drawing on their life story – even though he did the same and had planned to use some of the same source material for his own novel, Tender Is the Night. He demanded that she revise it. She did, and it was published in 1932, and that's when things got worse.

Save Me the Waltz was a flop – a massive flop. The critics disliked it just as much as Scott did, and the reading public was none too impressed either (that is, those who even bought it or heard about it at all – the Great Depression was in full swing, and novels were too much of a luxury for many). The book sold 1,392 copies, from a print run of 3,010, and Zelda earned a paltry $120 from it.

After that, Zelda didn't write anymore for quite some time. She painted a bit, as she had in the past, and she sought to have her paintings exhibited. When they were shown, in 1934, the public's response was just as dismal as the response to her novel.

Zelda had been in and out of mental hospitals before, but by the mid-1930s, she spent more time in than out. She endured electroshock therapy while attempting to write a second novel, one that would never see completion. Scott lived nearby, stationed within glamorous Grove Park Inn, but visited his wife infrequently. In 1940, he died of a heart attack at age 44. It had been years since he had visited Zelda in the hospital. Zelda followed suit in 1948. It wasn't her formerly wild lifestyle that got her in the end – it was a deadly fire at Highland Mental Hospital, where she was undergoing treatment. Locked in a room in preparation for an electroshock therapy session, she couldn't escape the flames.

Zelda died in relative obscurity. Her Jazz Age heyday must have seemed a lifetime past to late-1940s America, its whimsical spirit overtaken by the grim intensity of the Great Depression and World War II. But decades after her death, artists and biographers rediscovered Zelda's life. She was portrayed on film, and books were published about her. She even inspired the Eagles song "Witchy Woman." She became remembered as a tragic beauty, a Marilyn Monroe for the Jazz Age. Critics decided that her novel wasn't so bad after all, and feminists embraced her for her struggle against Scott's controlling tendencies.

Though Zelda's public persona had been an open book during her lifetime, it seems that the general public wrote its own sequel after her death.

Zelda Fitzgerald's story has evolved to reveal much more than the glitzy, fun parts – more, even, than the beautiful-but-doomed stereotype suggested by her struggle with mental illness. From the distance of decades, we can see beneath the sparkling surface to discover the whole person: the discouraged artist, the wife in the shadow of her husband's greatness, the sun-kissed party girl, the obsessive schizophrenic and the dancer-in-fountains.

Written by Linnea Crowther. 

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