Abstract This article reassesses the sources used for an initial investigation into received accounts of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s ancestry in Burke’s 2023 study, Race, Politics, and Irish America: A Gothic History. Fitzgerald traced the Maryland lineage of his father Edward (1853–1931) no further back than the 1850 marriage of his grandfather, Michael Fitzgerald (1805–1855), into the Scott family. This union allowed Fitzgerald to claim affiliation with colonial America’s elite, in particular by overemphasizing his connection to distant cousin Francis Scott Key, author of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” By contrast, Fitzgerald expressed embarrassment regarding the arriviste mercantile background of his maternal grandfather, who emigrated from Ireland in the 1840s when the Irish were considered “off-white.” However, Michael Fitzgerald’s ancestry has been ignored, though his father—F. Scott Fitzgerald’s paternal great-grandfather—was almost certainly born in Ireland and resident in America by the late eighteenth century. These roots complicate F. Scott Fitzgerald’s inference that his maternal line alone came from Ireland and that the Keys were his sole eighteenth-century American ancestors. This article links Fitzgerald’s obfuscated Irish ancestry to racial and social anxieties in “The Camel’s Back,” “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” The Beautiful and Damned, and Tender Is the Night.

Abstract The English and French aestheticists of the 1880s and 1890s appealed immensely to F. Scott Fitzgerald in his youth. They offered a reaction against the earnest optimism, faith in progress, and clear moral divisions that he regarded as Victorian and obsolete. With its dreamlike mystery and exotic indulgence and dandyish sophistication, aestheticism offered Fitzgerald a haven from a disoriented and materialistic society. Fitzgerald later discarded aestheticism as he matured, and this article discusses how his first two novels, This Side of Paradise and The Beautiful and Damned, demonstrate why he eventually considered aestheticism self-absorbed and defeatist. Withdrawing scornfully from a fractious society into isolated, languid hypersophistication was for Fitzgerald a trap that only heightened individual malaise. This Side of Paradise charts an escape from the false promises of aestheticism, while The Beautiful and Damned depicts the damage caused by aestheticist indulgence, but both depict aestheticism as a hollow response to a convoluted, overstimulated modern world. Relying on aestheticist platitudes distracts from the responsibility of developing a personal response to an unmoored, directionless age, and it also constitutes a solipsistic and fatalistic rejection of the world, instead of attempting to confront that world more honestly and incisively.

Abstract This article examines previously unknown official reports from Italian police and diplomats of the U.S. Consulate in Rome and Copenhagen concerning the arrest and beating that F. Scott Fitzgerald fictionalized in his posthumously published essay “The High Cost of Macaroni” (written in 1925) and most famously in Tender Is the Night. Starting from Arthur Mizener’s 1951 biography, scholars have tended to read the story told in Tender Is the Night as a straight transcription of the incident. While the documents this article uncovers allow us to date definitively when the arrest occurred (the evening of 30 November–1 December 1924) and where—outside a different jazz club from the one mentioned in Tender—they also raise numerous complicating questions about the incident, many of which reflect the diplomatic dance between American and Italian officials. Uncovering eyewitness accounts, the article implicitly cautions against relying on fiction to re-create biographical scenes and against drawing conclusions based on cultural stereotypes. The details of this incident also cast significant new light on Fitzgerald’s strategies of composition and illuminate a reference to a pedophiliac murder mentioned in the text of Tender Is the Night that has been previously ignored. By putting Fitzgerald at the center of a busy urban world of political complexities, the article shows how aware Fitzgerald was of this milieu.

Abstract This article theorizes that the character of Alix in Fitzgerald’s “Babylon Revisited” has long been misinterpreted as a bartender at the Ritz when he is in fact a fellow patron of Charlie’s. Close reading of various versions and drafts of the story reveal, at best, contradictory intentions for the character on Fitzgerald’s behalf. Some potential thematic ramifications of this theory are touched upon in the article’s conclusion.

Abstract This personal reminiscence by journalist Finlay Lewis—the author of a 1980 biography of then U.S. vice president Walter Mondale—explores his mother’s and aunt’s early lives as friends of F. Scott Fitzgerald in St. Paul, Minnesota. Sisters Georgie and Jean Ingersoll inspired a pair of characters in Fitzgerald’s 1928 short story “A Short Trip Home,” and while Lewis’s mother passed away before he was able to glean details about her childhood friendship with the writer, he was able to discuss Fitzgerald’s youth with his aunt. Lewis then places the dark undertones of “A Short Trip Home”—often credited as Fitzgerald’s most successful foray into the supernatural—in the context of St. Paul’s history of crime. A slightly different version of this talk was originally presented in March 2024 at a meeting of the Literary Society of Washington (founded in 1874) at the Cosmos Club in Washington, D.C.

Abstract F. Scott Fitzgerald is seldom seen as an author of gothic works. Nor is Minnesota, his home state and the setting of some of his works, typically seen as gothic. Yet, as this article shows, Fitzgerald’s Minnesota story “The Ice Palace” (1920) is an example of a provincial gothic tale, where gothic conventions are employed to reveal regional pathology. The story examines the culture, the history—particularly, the fraught relationships between “white” explorers and settlers and Indigenous (more specifically, Dakota) people and immigrants—and the legendary frigid climate of Minnesota, revealing this place as haunted, repressing uncomfortable truths about itself, and thus just as gothic as the more obviously gothic South. In particular, the labyrinth in the titular ice palace, based on an edifice at St. Paul’s Winter Carnival, is pictured in the story as a repository of repressed elements of the culture. Historical research and textual analysis are used in this article to examine Fitzgerald’s use of conventions such as ghosts and zombies, haunted houses, damsels in distress and evil villains, labyrinths, and the unheimlich (“unhomelike”), along with elements from frontier, imperial, and carnival gothics, to comment subtly on such matters as racism, attitudes toward immigrants, and colonial conquest.

Abstract This personal essay, first presented at the Sixteenth International F. Scott Fitzgerald Society on 27 June 2023 in Växjö, Sweden, reflects upon the experience of listening to the Audible audiobook version of The Great Gatsby narrated by actor Jake Gyllenhaal. Audiobooks began in 1931 with the Pratt-Smoot Act, which authorized the U.S. Library of Congress to record readings of books for the vision impaired. Ninety years later, the medium has grown into a popular alternative to reading that generates some $1.8 billion per year and that 53 percent of the U.S. population has tried at least once. The differences between reading and listening begin with the dreamlike immersion into language the latter affords, wherein we relinquish the narrative momentum of the eye scanning printed lines to the immanence of the spoken word. As this article argues, readers can discover new thematic connections by hearing Fitzgerald’s sonorous prose.