Illustrating “Winter Dreams” in Context

Abstract

Abstract Almost universally, scholarly considerations of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Winter Dreams” treat the fact that the story was initially published in an illustrated magazine as incidental. By focusing on the three almost simultaneous publications of “Winter Dreams” in illustrated magazines—the American Metropolitan (December 1922), the overlooked first publication in the Canadian MacLean’s (15 November 1922), and the British Royal Magazine (February 1923)—and Arthur William Brown, who provided all six of the North American illustrations, this article begins to offer a corrective to this oversight and argues for reading Fitzgerald’s story not simply as an evolving text but as an evolving cultural artifact framed by the means of cultural production within a specific place and time—that is, the popular magazine world during the golden age of illustration. Far from being dismissive of this context, Fitzgerald was sensitive to the ways that illustrations worked in tandem with his stories to create, in the words of Jerome McGann, “works of composite art,” and early in his career he appreciated and valued illustrators’ contributions, including Brown’s. Using correspondence from authors to illustrators, Brown’s unpublished memoirs, contemporary accounts of illustrators’ processes, and textual and visual details from the three illustrated magazines where “Winter Dreams” appeared, this article argues that our understanding of the story and of Fitzgerald’s career more broadly require consideration of the visual, cultural, and material contexts that surrounded his work.