F. Scott Fitzgerald at Work: The Making of The Great Gatsby

Gatsby as Gangster Thomas H. Pauly Thomas H. Pauly University of Delaware Notes 1. Herbert Asbury, "The Passing of the Gangster," American Mercury, 4 (1925), 358, 362. 2. William E. Leuchtenburg, The Perils of Prosperity (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1958), pp. 178-203, and Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity 1920-40 (Berkley: Univ. of California Press, 1985). 3. Henry Don Piper, F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Critical Portrait (New York: Holt, Rinehart, Winston, 1965), pp. 114-15. 4. John Kobler, Ardent Spirits: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition (New York: Putnam, 1973), pp. 315-16. 5. This Fabulous Century: 1920-1930, Vol. 3 (New York: Time-Life, 1969), pp. 172-73 (includes photographs of Remus' mansion). 6. Kobler, p. 318. See also New York Times, May 17, 1924, p. 1. 7. The Letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald, ed. Andrew Turnbull (New York: Scribners, 1963), p. 551. 8. The Great Gatsby (New York: Scribners, 1925), pp. 84-85. Ensuing references are noted parenthetically in the text. Despite some minor factual errors, this account confirms Fitzgerald's extensive knowledge about Rothstein. For a thorough discussion of this episode see Leo Katcher, The Big Bankroll: The Life and Times of Arnold Rothstein (New York: Harper, 1959), pp. 72-97. 9. Katcher, pp. 109-12. 10. Rothstein was approached during the planning, but refused to participate and therefore was not involved in the actual fix. However, he used his knowledge to profit handsomely in the betting. See Katcher, pp. 138-48. 11. Scholars have never tracked Fitzgerald's idea for the stolen bonds beyond his interest in the Fuller-McGee case. However, the main issue of this case was the fact that Fuller & Co. was a "bucket shop," a brokerage house that pocketed customer money without actually buying the intended securities. Bonds figured into this case only peripherally but sensationally, when it was revealed that Arnold Rothstein owed Fuller $187,000 and that liberty bonds worth $58,925 that he had posted as collateral were missing. See New York Times, January 26, 1923, p. 1. 12. Katcher, pp. 98-99, 170-79. 13. Matthew Bruccoli, "How Are You and the Family Old Sport—Gerlach and Gatsby," Fitzgerald/Hemingway Annual, 1975, pp. 33-36. 14. Edmund Wilson, "The Crime in the Whistler Room" in This Room and This Gin and These Sandwiches (New York: New Republic, 1937), pp. 75-76. 15. Quoted in Arthur Mizener, The Far Side of Paradise: A Bibliography of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1951), p. 171. 16. Craig Thompson and Allen Raymond, Gang Rule in New York (New York: Dial, 1940), pp. 53-55, 59. See also Katcher, pp. 41, 53, 106, 115, 166. 17. Katcher, pp. 166 and 301. 18. New York Times, October 20, 1920, p. 14. 19. As one of the few fronts whom Rothstein did employ, Dapper Dan Collins (Robert Tourbillon) offers some compelling reasons to suspect Nick's perception of Gatsby. Collins was a tall man whose striking good looks owed much to his well barbered, peroxide blonde hair. As a life-long con artist and legendary womanizer, Collins invested enormous care in his grooming and attire in order to deceive and exploit his victims. He actively preyed on women, robbing some of their money and turning others into prostitutes. In sharp contrast to Gatsby and his unselfish devotion to Daisy, Collins sought what he wanted from his prey. He was a particularly good front because he was so adept at exploiting those taken in by his attractiveness; Katcher, pp. 241-42. 20. Matthew J. Bruccoli, F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Descriptive Bibliography (Pittsburgh: Univ. of Pittsburgh Press, 1987), p. 66. 21. Saturday Review (May 9, 1925), 740. See also New York Times, April 19, 1925, p. 9; Dial 79 (August 25, 1920), 163; and International Book Review (May 25, 1925), 426. 22. Nick's mediation in the reader's understanding of Gatsby has been the subject of numerous articles; see especially Scott Donaldson, "The Trouble with Nick," in Critical Essays on F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, ed. Scott Donaldson (Boston: G.K. Hall, 1984), pp. 131-39; Kent Cartwright, "Nick Carraway as an Unreliable Narrator," PLL, 20...

Gatsby:<i>The Cultural History of the Great American Novel</i><i>Beyond</i>Gatsby:<i>How Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Writers of the 1920s Shaped American Culture</i><i>So We Read On: How</i>The Great Gatsby<i>Came to Be and Why It Endures</i>

Dick Humbird and the Devil Wagon of Doom Cars, Carnivores, and Feminine Carnality in<i>This Side of Paradise</i>

Gatsby: <i>The Cultural History of the Great American Novel</i> <i>Beyond</i> Gatsby: <i>How Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Writers of the 1920s Shaped American Culture</i> <i>So We Read On: How</i> The Great Gatsby <i>Came to Be and Why It Endures</i>

F. Scott Fitzgerald in Context

The Challenges of Retranslating <i>The Great Gatsby</i> into Hungarian With a Focus on Metaphors of Emotion and Embodiment

High school and university students—and I've taught both—like to communicate with mystery, which likely accounts for the persistence of rituals even in this day of a post-lost, millennial generation, now nearly a hundred years removed from the one that Fitzgerald declared “grown up to find all gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken” (Paradise 260). Students, I think, are excited when they discover that some mysteries do, in fact, remain—and that contact with them is possible through works of fiction, quite often through short stories, taught in high school or university classrooms. These mysteries seem often associated with a place, whether a room, or a building, or a patch of soil, or a city that has been touched, even if just for a moment, by enchantment. Among many examples, Faulkner transforms Oxford, Mississippi, into Jefferson, located in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County in “A Rose for Emily” (1930), just one of his many works located in this setting; Sherwood Anderson immortalizes Clyde, Ohio, as Winesburg, Ohio, in the often-anthologized story “Hands” from Winesburg, Ohio (1919); Zora Neale Hurston mythologizes her hometown of Eatonville, Florida, as the home of Janie and Joe Starks in “Matt Bonner's Mule,” a section taken from Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) and frequently anthologized as a story. The list of literal places touched by a writer's magic and transformed into mythic settings that house mystery—that is, settings that create representations of reality that defy easy access through the senses—is long.Fitzgerald, of course, touched many actual places in this way, creating enchanted worlds sprung free of actual time and place and existing in a dimension filled with mystery. An actual Montana dude ranch that Fitzgerald once visited is now and forever also a diamond mountain as big as the Ritz-Carlton Hotel. Manhasset Neck and Great Neck, New York, will also never cease to be the mythical East Egg and West Egg in The Great Gatsby, as Louisville, Kentucky, will remain the enchanted Louisville of Gatsby and Daisy's first love, which keeps its actual name in Gatsby, but which also in the non-fictional world honors its mythic status through ongoing disputes over which house in Louisville was actually the house that belonged to Daisy Fay's parents in the novel. A less-often discussed example of Fitzgerald's touching a specific place with enchantment and, in the process, mythologizing it, is that of Montgomery, Alabama, which becomes the fictional town of Tarleton, Georgia, a thinly disguised Montgomery of the 1920s. The three stories in the group set in Tarleton—“The Ice Palace” (1920), “The Jelly-Bean” (1920), and “The Last of the Belles” (1928), now known as the Tarleton Trilogy—are among Fitzgerald's best stories. Whether read and studied singly or as a group, these stories, in my experience, draw students in by inviting them to examine the ways by which Montgomery, the place where Scott and Zelda fell in love, becomes the mythic Tarleton, an enchanted place where the mystery that was and is romantic love, remained alive, though certainly not always entirely well, from the first story in the trilogy to the last.Early in the final story in the trilogy, “The Last of the Belles,” the narrator, Andy, reveals retrospectively that love and mystery are at the heart of all three stories. He informs the reader that he has been told that there are “only three girls” in Tarleton, a fact that interests him because “there was something magical about there being three girls” (Short Stories 450). Each girl is loved romantically by at least one man in each story, and each of the love stories provides the central focus of its narrative: Harry Bellamy loves Sally Carrol Happer in “The Ice Palace”; Jim Powell loves Nancy Lamar in “The Jelly-Bean”; Andy loves Ailie Calhoun in “The Last of the Belles.” In each case the reader is led to question, not each man's conviction that what he feels for each of the women is love, but rather whether the passion is for something that is less personal than the individual herself—a question familiar to readers of The Great Gatsby. In the case of Harry's love in “The Ice Palace,” is it Sally Carrol that he loves, or is it the exotic South that she so strongly identifies with and finally winds up choosing over the life Harry could offer her in the North? In Jim Powell's case, he says of Nancy Lamar, “I love her…. God!” (Short Stories 156); but the reader cannot ignore the subtext of Jim's feelings of social inadequacy that have perhaps led him to an idealization of this local doctor's daughter, a woman of privilege who has the luxury of declaring love for him in a moment of drunkenness and then proceeding on the same night to marry a man of higher social standing and more money than Jim. And in “The Last of the Belles,” Andy is fully convinced years after he had last seen Ailie Calhoun that he cares about her enough to return from his home in the North to Tarleton and marry her. When they are reunited he realizes that he had always been “deeply and incurably in love with her” (Short Stories 461). After he tells this to Ailie and asks her to marry him, she quickly turns him down because, as she says, she doesn't love him “that way” and, moreover, she could never “marry a Northern man” (Short Stories 461). The reader is left to question on what this love that Andy is convinced he feels for Ailie is founded. There is the hint that it is related to his wish to recapture a part of his youth and to his infatuation with the South. With Ailie gone, he realizes, “the South would be empty for [him] forever” (Short Stories 463).In all three Tarleton stories, Fitzgerald interrogates the subject of romantic love and its mysteries. However, in each story of the trilogy he complicates the love stories by closely connecting the passion that these men feel for the three women of Tarleton to other considerations—considerations of place (all of the women are associated with a magical city in the exotic South), of changing gender constructions (the three women exist in a time of dramatically increased freedom for women), and of social class (the personalities of all three women as well as their futures are, to some degree, tied to the privilege of their social position). The world of Tarleton is both of its time—that is, anchored in the rich cultural history of the Jazz Age—and beyond its time, sealed in the land of myth. In my experience of teaching all three of the Tarleton stories, I have found that they invite the reader both to enter contextually the world of 1920s Montgomery out of which the stories literally came and also to confront the world of mystery at the heart of three of Fitzgerald's most enchanted love stories.The roundtable discussion that follows addresses both of these worlds, and offers strategies for allowing students to view the Tarleton stories from many different perspectives.F. Scott Fitzgerald's writing is used in post-secondary classrooms around the world. While The Great Gatsby is his most widely recognized work, it is only one of his many texts taught in schools, from “Winter Dreams” (1922) to “Babylon Revisited” (1931). After all, there are approximately 175 short stories in his oeuvre, and over the years, critics have devoted more and more attention to his shorter works, offering educators a vast amount of secondary criticism to support their pedagogy.1 Three stories particularly useful in the classroom are “The Ice Palace,” “The Jelly-Bean,” and “The Last of the Belles.” Collectively known as the Tarleton Trilogy, these stories have received critical attention from academics since Arther Mizener discussed them in his 1951 biography of Fitzgerald, The Far Side of Paradise.2 In recent years, the Tarleton stories have been used in a number of university classrooms across North America.3What we lack, however, is pedagogy-oriented criticism that addresses the stories as educational tools. How exactly can the Tarleton Trilogy be used to foster learning experiences? As with many Fitzgerald stories, the trio offers a variety of possibilities. This roundtable will examine the Tarleton Trilogy from a pedagogical perspective, placing emphasis on deep learning.4 More specifically, it will describe the teaching philosophy and practices of Stella, a hypothetical professor, to illustrate how the trilogy might be used to foster critical inquiry by engaging dialogue and robust collaboration in a post-secondary setting.Varied classroom activities often lead students to take different approaches to their learning. A surface approach to learning “involves minimum engagement with the task, [and] typically a focus on memorization or applying procedures that do not involve reflection” (Smith and Colby 206). Conversely, in a deep learning approach, “the student focuses on relationships between various aspects of the content, formulates hypothesis or beliefs about the structure of the problem or concept, and relates more to obtaining an intrinsic interest in learning and understanding” (Smith and Colby 206). While surface learning and deep learning approaches are not defined as inherently good or bad processes, it is important to recognize that they are influenced by different approaches to teaching and assessment and may lead to very different sorts of learning experiences. In the following situations, Stella uses several teaching practices likely to inspire students to take deep learning approaches to their educational experience.Stella teaches in the English Department of her university. Her core research interests include social justice, self-identity, and modern American literature. She believes that for students to become invested in their learning they need to encounter planted opportunities to solve problems. She also holds that classrooms should be spaces where teachers and students engage in thoughtful dialogue on a variety of matters, including social issues.5 When teaching, Stella strives to foster an atmosphere that is conductive to collaboration and critical inquiry.To foster engaging learning experiences, Stella believes that teachers need to respond to the learning context. When reflecting on her own context, she asks herself a number of critical questions before preparing for a course, including the following: Who are the students? What do they know and what are they able to do? What are the skills they need to develop through taking this course, and why are these skills important? Stella believes that formulating these questions helps her to devise and facilitate learner-centered experiences. Moreover, she believes that deep learning experiences should present students with opportunities to solve problems creatively, collaborate, and critically inquire. She believes that students should have a voice, and she encourages students to articulate how they strategize their own work. Stella believes that student-centered deep learning shifts students from the more passive dynamic of information consumption to the more active interplay of dialogue and meta-cognitive awareness. Ultimately, she feels that learning is an intersection of context, active learning, and student engagement.One summer, Stella was given a copy of Some Sort of Epic Grandeur, Matthew J. Bruccoli's extensive 1981 biography of Scott Fitzgerald, revised in 1993 and 2002. With interest, she noted that Bruccoli described “The Last of the Belles” as a story that “examines the Yankee narrator's response to the South as expressed through his feelings for Ailie Calhoun” (267). Reading this passage prompted Stella to revisit the Tarleton Trilogy, and what follows is a description of three different contexts within which she used the stories in her teaching.Before choosing stories for her courses, Stella asks herself this question: What is the desired learning I intend to foster? Which stories could be used to support this learning? To address these questions, she reflects on the learning context within which she is teaching. Stella concludes that her twentieth-century literature class would benefit from further developing their critical literary skills. After all, critical literacy helps readers analyze thoughtfully the texts they encounter in their everyday lives. Struck by the retrospective nature and socio-cultural dimensions of the “The Last of the Belles,” Stella decides to use the story as an object and tool of study.Drawing from the socio-cultural dimensions of the story, she sets the following two learning outcomes: (1) identify key aspects of the socio-cultural context within which a story was written and published, and (2) draw conclusions from fictional social contexts regarding wider social issues. While both learning outcomes have benefits, the second can help to open critical conversations about social issues of the past and then compare and contrast them to issues of the present. “The Last of the Belles” struck Stella. From the perspective of the narrator's present time, the late 1920s, Andy gazes back to his past. He recalls a summer he was stationed in Tarleton, Georgia, Fitzgerald's fictionalized version of his wife Zelda's hometown of Montgomery, Alabama.In Stella's view, while critics have given limited attention to the socio-cultural dimensions of “The Last of the Belles,” the story presents a number of pedagogical possibilities in this regard.6 Consequently, she decides that a key question for her students to explore would be what “The Last of the Belles” can tell us about gender, class, and ethno-racial identity in 1920s America. Stella opens this unit by exploring the concept of socio-cultural context with her class. At the start of her first lesson she poses the following questions: What is socio-cultural context and what is a social issue?What do we need to know better to understand these things?During this discussion Stella invites students to list different dimensions of socio-cultural context on the board. Some key ideas the class identifies include ethno-racial identity, class, and gender. Stella makes a point of highlighting these three dimensions, informing students that as the unit continued they would reexamine the story in relation to these important dimensions of Fitzgerald's context. She also informs the class that learning about Fitzgerald's context will lead students to draw conclusions about his society, and make connections to their own.Stella then asks the class this question: How can we, as readers, learn about the context within which a writer writes and publishes? As the class brainstorms a number of ideas Stella invites some students to write their ideas on the board. She then focuses students on Fitzgerald himself by asking: How can we learn about the personal context within which Fitzgerald wrote and published “The Last of the Belles”? As the class discusses this question, students identify a variety of ways they might learn about Fitzgerald's context, including reading his correspondence and examining the ledger in which he recorded not only biographical events but also his earnings and sales figures.Stella then asks students to form groups and collaboratively identify ways readers might gather information about Fitzgerald's social context, specifically relating to ethno-racial identity, class, and gender. She instructs students to make a list and provide a rationalization for each of their choices, explaining that some groups will be called on to share their results with the class. During the subsequent class discussion, students identify a variety of ways of learning about 1920s America, such as examining laws, newspaper headlines, and advertisements. Stella tells students that the Saturday Evening Post itself could be a useful artifact to use to this end, and she also informs them that they will engage in this process later in the unit. Toward the end of the lesson, Stella asks students to reread the story and identify places where Fitzgerald portrays aspects of ethno-racial identity, class, or gender. After monitoring this process, she informs students that they will complete this task for homework and bring these context notes to the next lesson.Stella opens the second lesson by briefly sharing some background information regarding Fitzgerald and “The Last of the Belles.” She indicates that Fitzgerald wrote the story in late 1928 while struggling with his follow-up novel to The Great Gatsby. She also tells the class that Fitzgerald wrote “The Last of the Belles” with the intent of earning money, and the Post paid him $3,150 for the story. The Post itself, Stella explains, was widely distributed in Fitzgerald's era and had a circulation of nearly three million in the 1920s (Bruccoli Some Sort 534, 103). Stella explains that in the 1920s, editor George Horace Lorimer packaged the Post “for men, particularly the upwardly mobile, middle-class businessman of the Northeast, where America's financial life was based” (Potts 14). As with any magazine, the Post had certain boundaries regarding content (i.e., sexual content) and language (i.e., profanity) in the stories it published. As Fitzgerald had eighteen stories published in the Post from 1927 to 1929 alone, Stella explains that it would be reasonable to expect that he was familiar with these expectations.7 She asks the class to keep the final two points in mind when rereading the story, because the way Fitzgerald represents identity, class, and gender connects to the of the which itself to the social of next instructs students to take out their homework and share their context notes with the in their She asks students to their context notes from the ideas of the in their After students complete this process, Stella asks groups to three of their key ideas questions and she of group one draw attention to the way Andy, the narrator, the of a in the story it is to Andy and his for from with the that she is not The group makes of the fact that the is an in a and uses in his of information about she just she I tell her that when she Ailie she to that other about She in if (Short Stories The group connects this to a that struck them in the notes in her that (Short Stories second group is to the of who is seen by both Ailie and Andy through the of social class and take of the way Andy first in of and of as a as I have He was with high and He very and he was he was a and and with that of that well on the (Short Stories The students question the of the connecting it to an in the same how to from a have in and seem to background at (Short Stories The students then to explore the to which Andy is because of his and how the makes to that readers to share the also after is from the and has a to Andy and when his of had about with him that could be was with a his was and in a that and the have an end he had been to his for his on his as though he had been and but the background of and out at rather out at she had never quite the in these even the of that had (Short Stories their to the in the story, exploring how the their for points out that through the of Andy, Fitzgerald uses a as an to describe to Ailie from other Tarleton by I that she was and different from these other who and in the (Short Stories The group decides that in its reading it is what Fitzgerald actually by student if Andy to as or if he some other of such as The group notes that Andy uses this not in a moment of or but as an that his is The point is by a later use of the as Andy and years after the end of the Great revisit the of the the of a where there was the of and and over a that to into the the the of the (Short Stories of the group that the was by the and by its and they explore its on their for Andy and in the group on the way that gender Ailie in the story, her for her as a students what it to be a that women in the era not free them from The students why Ailie would be to at all and what her with a man of her social class could both and her in of the group discusses through their to his of his feelings whether his for her from a to her from her in gender or whether it her in The ideas and questions by different groups to engaging dialogue regarding the world in “The Last of the Belles.” In this second lesson, Stella asks students to two questions for should we use the Post to learn about socio-cultural can the Post be used to learn about Fitzgerald's social opens the lesson by the two homework questions with the class. offer a number of different for the Post to learn about Fitzgerald's context, and they also have a variety of ideas regarding how to this Stella one in the of as She then informs the class that they will use a copy of the Post to learn about Fitzgerald's world. During the of this lesson, Stella uses a to from a 1929 of the at three attention to the and students are to while examining each of the What is being is the this ethno-racial identity, social class, has led the class to these examining each students have a to take notes and on the way they what they each Stella the class in a discussion regarding the itself as well as her After the content and of the Stella asks groups to develop a list of conclusions they could draw about the way ethno-racial identity, class, and gender are in the story as well as in the in the She also asks groups to identify wider social issues relating to these three dimensions, as in the story the advertisements. groups are not able to complete this task in class, Stella asks students to their of conclusions as homework for the following She also informs students that each group will one social to focus on as the unit In subsequent Stella to use “The Last of the Belles” to focus students on developing their at key aspects of the socio-cultural context within which the stories that they read written and published. She also how conclusions them to aspects to social issues to their own social Ice Palace” is the first in Scott Fitzgerald's trilogy of stories set in fictional Tarleton, Georgia, in the 1920s. As a love story, it provides an tool for students to the of gender in romantic As a out of story, it is useful for exploring that to the particularly the North and the South. because the story as it Sally Carrol Happer her on the of an open on a day as provides an structure for exploring how experience is in the process of the of her Sally Carrol to out from home to marry a to the she feels as a woman in To her the South is a place where never and she to experience the North where on a big (Short Stories the of her Harry Sally Carrol is first by the land (Short Stories she becomes by several cultural by the of her to make her feel at home (Short Stories by Harry's that she only to about by Harry's about (Short Stories by the and by Harry's on her of her When Sally Carrol becomes from Harry in the that is the of his hometown she up in its for two and becomes and finally she was to the and of Tarleton (Short Stories In this way, the story questions about the of out from for women who have that at least to hypothetical Stella, is by Fitzgerald's rich use of to socio-cultural between the North and the South in “The Ice Palace,” and she decides to present a on the story at an literature in She to with her and while at the is now a of who teachers for high school English classrooms. She also teaches a on research in an of While Stella will one in past conversations with Stella that inquiry is a form of research that to learn more about life experiences by the stories that tell about experiences. that makes of their through had of the best ways to learn more about experience is by examining the stories that tell about their that typically or conversations with the who have to in their and to the stories that these share then in their own or the stories that they have been the stories for key and then the stories to provide to them so that they can be further or with The story may be around the of events that it it might be around such as and

Teaching Tarleton

F. Scott Fitzgerald, Virginia Woolf, and the Watch for Spots of Time

Reviewed by: Gatsby's Oxford: Scott, Zelda, and the Jazz Age Invasion of Britain, 1904–1929 by Christopher A. Snyder Kevin J. Hayes Gatsby's Oxford: Scott, Zelda, and the Jazz Age Invasion of Britain, 1904–1929. Christopher A. Snyder. New York: Pegasus Books, 2019. Pp. xxii + 346. $28.95 (cloth). What does Oxford mean to Americans? This, the question Christopher A. Snyder attempts to answer in his new book, Gatsby's Oxford, reminds me of a recurrent episode in the freshman composition class I used to teach. Once every semester I would bring to class a big box of books, which my students would use to compile practice bibliographies. The box contained several Oxford World's Classics. The title page of each listed two cities as places of publication: Oxford and New York. Inevitably, several students would identify the book's place of publication as "Oxford, NY." They obviously assumed Oxford was a town located somewhere in upstate New York. What does Oxford mean to Americans? Nothing, if my students are any indication. Snyder never actually asks the question he attempts to answer, but I have formulated the question as such to help explain his book. The ostensible purpose of Gatsby's Oxford is to gloss what F. Scott Fitzgerald meant when he had his eponymous hero briefly attend Oxford University after World War I. Snyder hardly needed a whole book to explain Gatsby's brief time at Oxford. One long footnote in an annotated edition of The Great Gatsby would be sufficient. Topping out at over three-hundred pages, Snyder's study goes far beyond his ostensible subject. Gatsby's Oxford might more accurately be titled, "A History of Oxford University from Percy Shelley to Evelyn Waugh." Gatsby's Oxford gets off to a slow start. Two pages into his preface Snyder admits that he is a New Historicist, identifying himself with a critical approach to American literature that emerged in the 1980s. Snyder's admission seems strange—for at least two reasons. For one, the explicit identification of a critical approach seems inappropriate in a book for general readers published by Pegasus Books, a trade press. For another, the term "New Historicism" is passé, not because so few people do New Historicism but, paradoxically, because so many do. New Historicism has been so successful that it is now the dominant critical approach to American literature, so dominant that most current criticism of American literature is New Historicist without saying so. Overall, Snyder's preface adds little to the book as a whole. It is especially unnecessary because chapter one constitutes the book's introduction. I recommend skipping the preface altogether and going straight to the first chapter. The first part of chapter one recaps the references to Oxford University in The Great Gatsby. Even for those of us who count Fitzgerald's masterpiece among the top ten novels in American literature, it is good to be reminded of Oxford's significance to the book. Snyder quotes too much for my taste, but his numerous long quotations do reinforce the importance of understanding Jay Gatsby's status as an "Oxford man." To help reveal what Oxford symbolizes in The Great Gatsby, Snyder recalls the Oxford references in Fitzgerald's other fiction in the second part of chapter one, providing another useful survey. Snyder should have quit while he was ahead. The third part of chapter one is a review of secondary scholarship, which is much too dissertationy. By chapter two, subtitled "Oxford from Percy Shelley to Oscar Wilde," Snyder is already stretching the bounds of his ostensible topic, going back in Oxford's history a century before Gatsby arrived. For those of us with a fair knowledge of British educational history, this chapter is unnecessary, but for many readers, it will supply some curious background information, though its relevance to The Great Gatsby is questionable. Sometimes while reading chapter two, I almost forgot I was reading a book about Fitzgerald. Every once in a while Snyder interjects a modal phrase—"Fitzgerald would have known…"—in an effort to make the chapter relevant. [End Page 419] Though Snyder provides much historical background about Oxford University, in some cases he...

Irwin on Fitzgerald James L. W. West III (bio) F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Fiction: “An Almost Theatrical Innocence” by John T. Irwin ( Johns Hopkins University Press , 2014 . xiv + 234 pages. $39.95 ) This new book by John Irwin brings to completion a trilogy in which he examines the work of four writers—Edgar Allan Poe and Jorge Luis Borges; Hart Crane; and now F. Scott Fitzgerald. In the writings of each, Irwin recognizes a deep engagement with Platonic idealism. Certainly this is correct for Fitzgerald, a romantic whose fiction is marked throughout by a fondness for Keats, Shelley, and Swinburne—and by an obsession with the “golden moment” of fulfillment that most of his protagonists are pursuing. Some of them achieve such a moment, but it is evanescent, vanishing when they attempt to arrest and preserve it. This is a personal book for Irwin, growing out of a fascination with Fitzgerald that began over fifty years ago when he first read The Great Gatsby. Irwin’s tone is agreeably self-revelatory—about his own life, his previous writings, and his long experience in reading and teaching Fitzgerald. It is a great pleasure to make one’s way through his extended analysis of the Fitzgerald oeuvre. He possesses a fluent style and a well-furnished mind; he deploys quotations from Fitzgerald’s fiction and letters with great skill. The discussion ranges widely, from the songs of Cole Porter to the myths of Pygmalion and Galatea, and Orpheus and Eurydice. Asides about Freud, Veblen, Eliot, and Sartre are on the mark. One of the works that Irwin explores for supporting ideas is Erving Goffman’s The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959), a seminal work of sociology that helps to open up new interpretations of some of Fitzgerald’s best-known characters—Amory Blaine from This Side of Paradise, Jay Gatsby and Daisy Buchanan from The Great Gatsby, Dick Diver from Tender Is the Night, and Basil Duke Lee, the autobiographical hero of a series of superb stories about adolescence that Fitzgerald published in the Saturday Evening Post in 1928 and 1929. All of these characters are playacting, inventing social roles for themselves that, they imagine, will allow them to achieve their dreams of status and fulfillment. One of the great mysteries about Fitzgerald’s career is that he did not put such characters on the stage. He spent much of his apprenticeship scribbling plays for an amateur theater group in his native St. Paul, Minnesota; he also wrote some unusually good lyrics for the Triangle Club productions at Princeton between 1915 and 1917. But his one professional stab at Broadway, a satirical play called The Vegetable, flopped in tryouts in Atlantic City, sending Fitzgerald scurrying back to the mass-circulation “slicks”—the Post, Liberty, Metropolitan, Redbook, et al.—for which he had learned to manufacture top-drawer short stories. And he met with only limited success when he tried to write for the movies near the end of his career. What [End Page xxxvii] Irwin discerns, however, is that a marked theatricality shows itself in the fiction from beginning to end, in the portrayal of personality and above all in the handling of dialogue. Irwin’s analysis of these elements in The Great Gatsby and Tender Is the Night is fresh and engaging; his interpretation of The Last Tycoon, the Hollywood novel that Fitzgerald left unfinished at his death, is as good as any I have read. By taking an approach other than the chronological, by organizing his analysis around themes and narrative approaches, Irwin fleshes out some new insights. I was taken by his identification of contrasts between the South and the North, not only in the three stories that Fitzgerald sets in the fictional town of Tarleton, Georgia, but also in “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz” and “The Swimmers,” two works of short fiction in which I had never thought to look for a southern element. Fitzgerald romanticizes the South in all of these stories, playing its slow eroticism against the frigidity of the North, showing his sympathy for the southern concern for manners, family, and the past. Almost the only thing I would disagree about...

F SCOTT FITZGERALD S favorite author was John Keats. Of Ode on a Grecian Urn Fitzgerald wrote, suppose I've read it a hundred times. About tenth time I began to know what it was about, and caught chime in it and exquisite inner mechanics. Likewise with 'Nightingale' which I can never read without tears in my eyes. And Eve of St. Agnes has the richest, most sensuous imagery in English, not excepting Shakespeare. 1 Even without such an explicit statement from Fitzgerald, we might assume Keats meant something like that to him. In This Side of Paradise (II, ii), Amory Blaine declaims the 'Ode to a Nightingale' to bushes and then talks about poetry, distinguishing between Keats and himself on what each finds primarily beautiful. In opening chapter of The Great Gatsby is a nightingale singing in Buchanan yard, very romantic outdoors. Several scenes in Gatsby take place in starlit nights; it is that we so often see title figure in his most characteristic pose, and it is pose of speaker in Keats lyric: man under wandering stars who wants to comprehend and join his life to a precious being of eternal beauty. Fitzgerald quite consciously draws upon Keats's language; near end of fifth chapter, there was no light save what gleaming floor bounced in from hall is clearly an echo of Keats's phrase in Nightingale: there is no light, / Save what from heaven is with breezes blown. . And another line from that poem will provide title for Fitzgerald's most ambitious work, Tender Is Night. Keats's influence on The Great Gatsby should not be under-

The Ghosts of Eden Park: The Bootleg King, the Women Who Pursued Him, and the Murder That Shocked Jazz-Age America

As America becomes a dynamic new world power after World War I, the fallout of the war lingers in the hope and promise of the economically successful Roaring Twenties. The Great War shadows many of F. Scott Fitzgerald's protagonists, including Amory Blaine (This Side of Paradise), Jay Gatsby (The Great Gatsby), Anthony Patch (The Beautiful and Damned) and Dick Diver (Tender is the Night); all are World War I veterans, and each is haunted by his experience at war. This specter looms over their varied career, marital, and societal successes, condemning each to a shallow existence stripped of any true meaning. Focusing specifically on his first and last published works, This Side of Paradise (1920) and Tender is the Night (1934), I explore how Fitzgerald utilizes the Gothic to represent the haunting of characters who served in the Great War. Through using antiquated Gothic elements, Fitzgerald is able to blend Romanticism and Realism into an American Modernist voice that traverses the cultural trauma experienced by Americans at home and abroad. v

A Sense of The Past:Editing In America I Jeffrey R. Di Leo (bio) Editing, like baseball, has its mythical past. But unlike the national pastime, whose myths have been widely circulated and have inspired generations to emulate The Babe or Joltin’ Joe DiMaggio, few recognize the figures that appear to transcend the editorial profession. In 1910, Maxwell Perkins took a job in the advertising department at Charles Scribner’s Sons after working as a reporter for The New York Times. He rose to prominence by taking on a manuscript that the press’s literary advisor, William Crary Brownell, rejected. Brownell, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, objected to Perkins’s acquisition of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s manuscript, The Romantic Egotist. However, after working closely with Fitzgerald—and lobbying his colleagues at Scribner’s—Perkins saw the work published as This Side of Paradise in 1920. The book marked a change in direction for Scribner’s, which had been known primarily for publishing eminent writers like John Galsworthy, Henry James, and Edith Wharton. Scribner’s would come to be known for ushering in a new generation of writers largely through Perkins’s efforts. Perkins would work on more novels with Fitzgerald, and go on to publish authors including Ernest Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe. He struggled to convince Charles Scribner of the value of Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926), particularly due to its profanity. However, Perkins rested all doubts concerning his editorial judgment when Hemingway’s next novel, A Farewell to Arms (1929), became a number-one best seller. Nonetheless, it was with Wolfe that Perkins found his greatest professional challenge—and established a mythical status for editors. Wolfe was a prolix writer. His first novel, Look Homeward, Angel (1929), was shaped by Perkins, who excised 90,000 words from the text (for perspective, consider that The Great Gatsby is only 47,094 words long). With Wolfe’s next novel, Of Time and the River (1935), Perkins blurred the line between editor and author, turning the three cartons of unnumbered pages and 400,000 words that Wolfe submitted into a novel. In turn, Wolfe explicitly acknowledged Perkins in the book’s dedication, calling him “a great editor and a brave and honest man, who stuck to the writer of this book through times of bitter hopelessness and doubt and would not let him give in to his own despair.” One of the results of Perkins-style editing is that the work of the editor in the United States from the ’20s to the ’40s came to be, in its most distinguished and elite forms, an art in itself. Perkins-style editing involved doing whatever was necessary to support the talents of the author—including taking boxes of raw material and transforming (or translating) them into a finished form. In its most extreme form, editing is seen to be an epic task wherein the editor tirelessly devotes himself or herself to the author. Some see this dedicated, intensive work as admirable; but for others, this type of editing raises serious concerns. For one, it begs the question as of the novel’s authorship. In the case of Of Time and the River, the acknowledged role of Perkins led some critics to question how much Wolfe had actually written. Wolfe himself came to resent the suggestion that he owed his success to Perkins—and Perkins allegedly did not seek or want the publicity that resulted from his “brave” new form of editing. When a work is created under these conditions, does there arise a sense of shared authorship? Is “authorship” reserved for the writer of the original material? How much of the process from blank page to published volume should be the work of the author? Until the turn of the nineteenth-century, editors spent more time promoting and advocating texts than shaping them. Part of this was due to the fact that up until 1891, British imports had no copyright protection. This meant that the works of say Charles Dickens and William Thackeray could be published in the United States with no developmental-, line-, or copy-editing. Furthermore, while “the courtesy of the trade” enabled some...