From F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby, All the Sad Young Men & Other Writings 1920–1926
Interesting Links
“Behind the Myths of Scott and Zelda’s Epic Romance: Eleanor Lanahan on Her Grandparents’ Love Letters” (LitHub)
“Zelda Fitzgerald’s Little-Known Art” (Maria Popova, The Marginalian)
Previous Story of the Week selections
• “Winter Dreams,” F. Scott Fitzgerald
• “Out of Season,” Ernest Hemingway
• “Old Flaming Youth,” Jean Stafford
• “A Southern Landscape,” Elizabeth Spencer
Buy the book
F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby, All the Sad Young Men & Other Writings 1920–1926
Includes 25 short stories and 9 essays | 756 pages
List price: $35.00
Web store price: $28.00
“Behind the Myths of Scott and Zelda’s Epic Romance: Eleanor Lanahan on Her Grandparents’ Love Letters” (LitHub)
“Zelda Fitzgerald’s Little-Known Art” (Maria Popova, The Marginalian)
Previous Story of the Week selections
• “Winter Dreams,” F. Scott Fitzgerald
• “Out of Season,” Ernest Hemingway
• “Old Flaming Youth,” Jean Stafford
• “A Southern Landscape,” Elizabeth Spencer
Buy the book
F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby, All the Sad Young Men & Other Writings 1920–1926Includes 25 short stories and 9 essays | 756 pages
List price: $35.00
Web store price: $28.00
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| “In Suspense,” illustration by American artist Harrison Fisher (1875–1934) for the cover of the July 17, 1909, issue of The Saturday Evening Post. Reprinted in the volume Pictures in Color (1910), a collection of Fisher’s work. |
We will have to make a mass pilgrimage to her graduation this June. I am hoping her mother* can come, too, and we will watch all the other little girls get diamond bracelets and Cord roadsters. I am going to a costumer’s in New York and buy Scotty some phoney jewelry so she can pretend they are graduation presents. Otherwise, she will have to suffer the shame of being a poor girl in a rich girl’s school. That was always my experience — a poor boy in a rich town; a poor boy in a rich boy’s school; a poor boy in a rich man’s club at Princeton. So I guess she can stand it. However, I have never been able to forgive the rich for being rich, and it has colored my entire life and works.Fitzgerald’s family was not, in fact, what most Americans, then or now, would consider “poor”; while his father was a twice-failed businessman, his mother was a heiress to a substantial fortune. Instead, they were simply much less well-off than their extravagantly wealthy neighbors and friends in St. Paul, Minnesota—and Scott was often much “poorer” than the women he dated. In an unidentified letter or interview quoted in Andrew Turnbull’s 1962 biography, Fitzgerald discussed his novels and stories and asserted that “the whole idea of Gatsby is the unfairness of a poor young man not being able to marry a girl with money. This theme comes up again and again because I lived it.”
In the fall of 1917, Fitzgerald was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the infantry. That November he left Princeton University and reported for training to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, and by the following June he was stationed in Camp Sheridan, outside of Montgomery, Alabama, waiting to embark for the war in France. At a country club dance a month later, he met Zelda Sayre, the well-to-do seventeen-year-old daughter of a justice of the state’s Supreme Court. The war ended on November 11, and at the beginning of 1919, Fitzgerald was discharged from the army. He moved to New York in February; a month later he and Zelda became engaged, and he sent her his mother’s engagement ring. Nevertheless, she remained reluctant to commit to marriage until he was financially secure enough to support them.
Years later, he would recall his first New York residence in an article written for Cosmopolitan in 1935 but not published until after his death:
The thing was to make enough money in the advertising business to rent a stuffy apartment for two in the Bronx. The girl concerned had never seen New York but she was wise enough to be rather reluctant. And in a haze of anxiety and unhappiness I passed the four most impressionable months of my life.For her part, Zelda insisted she was waiting not until he became wealthy but rather until he was able to make their lives together comfortable. As she assured him in March:
. . . As I hovered ghost-like in the Plaza Rose Room of a Saturday afternoon, or went to lush and liquid garden parties in the East Sixties or tippled with Princetonians in the Biltmore Bar, I was haunted always by my other life — my drab room in the Bronx [actually, in Morningside Heights in Manhattan], my square foot of the subway, my fixation upon the day’s letter from Alabama — would it come and what would it say? — my shabby suits, my poverty, and love. . . . The most hilarious luncheon table or the most moony cabaret — it was all the same; from them I returned eagerly to my home on Claremont Avenue — home because there might be a letter waiting outside the door. . . . I was a failure — mediocre at advertising work and unable to get started as a writer. . . .
All the material things are nothing. I’d just hate to live a sordid, colorless existence — because you’d soon love me less — and less — and I’d do anything — anything — to keep your heart for my own — I don’t want to live — I want to love first, and live incidentally — Why don’t you feel that I’m waiting — I’ll come to you, Lover, when you’re ready — Don’t — don’t ever think of the things you can’t give me.Yet she sometimes lost patience with his insecurities and petty jealousies. Each month, some perceived hesitant tone in her letters would prompt him to catch a train to Alabama (losing his job as a result). His insistence that they write to each other every day was also a source of frustration. In April she wrote:
Scott, you’ve been so sweet about writing — but I’m so damned tired of being told that you “used to wonder why they kept princesses in towers” — You’ve written that verbatim in your last six letters! It’s dreadfully hard to write so very much — and so many of your letters sound forced — I know you love me, Darling, and I love you more than anything in the world, but if it’s going to be so much longer we just can’t keep up this frantic writing.“I’d probably aggravate you to death today,” she added. “I have relapsed into a nervous stupor.” He took a train to Montgomery the day after receiving this letter.
Things came to a head in June, and it was precipitated by a misunderstanding. While she was visiting Georgia Tech, the golfer Perry Adair gave her his fraternity pin, but she immediately regretted accepting it and returned it by mail. She mistakenly sent the pin and its accompanying note to Fitzgerald, however, and Adair received her latest letter to Scott. Fitzgerald’s furious response apparently told her to never write to him again, but she sent an explanation and apology—along with the letter to Scott that Adair had politely returned to her. Fitzgerald rushed to Montgomery once again, with the hope of patching things up, and pleaded for the two of them to get married immediately. Instead, she broke off the engagement.
When Fitzgerald learned in September that Scribner’s had accepted his first novel, This Side of Paradise, he responded to his editor, Maxwell Perkins, with a special request:
Terms etc I leave to you but one thing I can’t relinquish without at least a slight struggle. Would it be utterly impossible for you to publish the book Xmas — or say by February? I have so many things dependent on its success — including of course a girl — not that I expect it to make me a fortune but it will have a psychological effect on me and all my surroundings and besides open up new fields. I’m in that stage where every month counts frantically and seems a cudgel in a fight for happiness against time.Scott wrote to Zelda with the news, and they resumed their correspondence. Suddenly, everything began to click into place. That fall, Harold Ober, not yet his agent, sold one of Fitzgerald’s stories, “Head and Shoulders,” for $400 to The Saturday Evening Post; by February, the magazine bought a total of six stories, each for the same amount. In January, while living in New Orleans to write more stories and to read proofs of his novel, Fitzgerald went to Montgomery twice to see Zelda and rekindle their relationship; an understanding developed between them that the engagement was back on. Then the movie rights to “Head and Shoulders” were sold to Metro Pictures for $2,500. This Side of Paradise was published to acclaim on March 26, and its first printing of 3,000 copies unexpectedly sold out within a week. And, finally, he and Zelda were married in the vestry of New York’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral on April 3, 1920. He ultimately “got the girl,” but the humiliation of the previous year never faded.
Three years later, at the end of 1923, the Fitzgeralds were strapped for cash again. His would-be Broadway debut, The Vegetable, flopped before even making it to New York and left him in debt for almost ten thousand dollars. During the next four months, he wrote ten stories. By this time, was getting more than $1,500 per story; the windfall allowed the Fitzgeralds to pay off their debts and travel to Europe, where he finished the manuscript for The Great Gatsby. One of the stories, “‘The Sensible Thing,’” was sent to Hearst publications to fulfill a contractual obligation; the editors initially accepted it but ended up trading it for a different Fitzgerald story, so Ober sold it instead to a new weekly magazine, Liberty. When Fitzgerald included “‘The Sensible Thing’” in his next story collection, All the Sad Young Men, he summarized it to Perkins with the cryptic note: “Story about Zelda & me. All true.”
* During Scottie's last year of high school, her mother, Zelda Fitzgerald, was a resident at Highland Hospital in Asheville, having been diagnosed with schizophrenia. She was in and out of the institution from 1936 until her death in 1948, when she died in the fire that destroyed the main building.
Notes: In the magazine version of “‘The Sensible Thing,’” the protagonist is named George Rollins. When the story was reprinted in All the Sad Young Men, Fitzgerald changed the last name to O’Kelly but the editors neglected to alter one occurrence of the name (“This is George Rollins. Did you get my letter?”); that error has been corrected in most recent editions.
A car-card is an advertisement posted above the side window inside buses and subway cars.
Notes: In the magazine version of “‘The Sensible Thing,’” the protagonist is named George Rollins. When the story was reprinted in All the Sad Young Men, Fitzgerald changed the last name to O’Kelly but the editors neglected to alter one occurrence of the name (“This is George Rollins. Did you get my letter?”); that error has been corrected in most recent editions.
A car-card is an advertisement posted above the side window inside buses and subway cars.
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At the Great American Lunch Hour young George O’Kelly straightened his desk deliberately and with an assumed air of interest. . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!This selection may be photocopied and distributed for classroom or educational use.