F. Scott Fitzgerald's Life In Letters
The Correspondence of F. Scott Fitzgerald

Chapter 1: 1907–1919

Chapter 2: 1919–1924

Chapter 3: 1924–1930

Chapter 4: 1930–1937

Chapter 5: 1937–1940

Chapter 2: September 1919–April 1924

xxx. TO: Alida Bigelow

Postmarked September 23, 1919

ALS, 4 pp. Princeton University

1st Epistle of St. Scott to the Smithsonian

Chapter the I

Verses the I to the last—

(599 Summit Ave.)

In a house below the average
  Of a street above the average
    In a room below the roof
      With a lot above the ears

I shall write Alida Bigelow
  Shall indite Alida Bigelow
    As the worlds most famous gooph
      (This line don’t rhyme)

(September 22, 1919)

What's a date!                                              Stop this rot.
  Mr. Fate                                          Keep a date,    What's a date,
    Can't berate                                Father time,              Mr. Fate?
      Mr. Scott.                           Such a lot                          S'ever
        He is not                     To berate;                                Scott
          Marking time:        Tho I hate
            It's too late    To the dot!
                  So, in rhyme,

Most beautiful, rather-too-virtuous-but-entirely-enchanting Alida:

Scribner has accepted my book. Ain’t I Smart!

But hic jublilatio erat totam spoiled for meum par lisant une livre, une novellum (novum) nomine “Salt” par Herr C. G. Morris—a most astounding piece of realism, it makes Fortitude look like an antique mental ash-can and is quite as good as “The Old Wives Tale.”

Of course I think Walpole is a weak-wad anyhow.

Read Salt young girl so that you may know what life B.

In a few days I’ll have lived one score and three days in this vale of tears. On I plod—always bored, often drunk, doing no penance for my faults—rather do I become more tolerant of myself from day to day, hardening my chrystal heart with blasphemous humor and shunning only toothpicks, pathos, and poverty as being the three unforgivable things in life.

Before we meet again I hope you will have tasted strong liquor to excess and kissed many emotional young men in red and yellow moonlights—these things being chasterners of those prejudices which are as gutta percha to the niblicks of the century.

I am frightfully unhappy, look like the devil, will be famous within 1 12 month and, I hope, dead within 2.

Hoping you are the same

I am
With Excruciating respect
F. Scott Fitzgerald

P.S. If you wish, you may auction off this letter to the gurls of your collidge—on condition that the proceeds go to the Society for the drownding of Armenian Airedales.
Bla!
F.S.F.

Notes:

Alida Bigelow was at Smith College, so the Smithsonian.

Charles G. Norris; Salt appeared in 1918.

1913 novel by Hugh Walpole.

1908 novel by Arnold Bennett.

xxx. TO: Ludlow Fowler

October 1919

599 Summit Ave St. Paul, Minn

ALS, 2 pp. Princeton University

Dear Lud:

Thot you might be int'rested to know that
SCRIBNER
has accepted my new novel
“This Side of Paradise”

Pretty swell? Eh!

Am coming East in November + will call you up and we'll have a supper or two together, wet or dry.

Hope you've guarded well the great secret.² God! Lud I'll never get over it as long as I live. There's still a faint chance. Thank fortune. Hope you've had better luck.

Yrs Scott Fitz.

Notes:

² On the strength of the acceptance of his novel Fitzgerald was planning a trip to Montgomery in the hope of resuming his engagement, which Zelda had broken in June.

xxx. TO: Robert Bridges

Oct 20th, 1919

St. Paul, Minn 599 Summit Ave.

ALS, 1 p. Princeton University

Dear Mr. Bridges:

I was delighted to get your letter and find that you liked The Four Fists.² It has never been published elsewhere in any form. The price is quite satisfactory to me.

As you recommend I am sending Barbara Bobs her Hair to the Women's Home Companion? Benediction sounds too much like Catholic propaganda so I guess I'll have to let it go by the boards. Dalyrimple goes to the Smart Set tho I think their stuff is rather punk as a rule and never send them anything until some better magazine has passed it up.⁴

Thanks especially for your letter. I am sending you a story next week that I think you'll like.

Sincerely F. Scott Fitzgerald.

² Scribner's Magazine (June 1920).

³ Published as “Bernice Bobs Her Hair” in The Saturday Evening Post (1 May 1920).

⁴ “Benediction” and “Dalyrimple Goes Wrong” were both published in The Smart Set (February 1920).

xxx. TO: Robert Bridges

1919

ALS, 2 pp. Princeton University

599 Summit Ave
St. Paul, Minn

Oct. twenty-5th

Dear Mr. Bridges:

This is a query. I have a project. It is a work of about 20,000 words and more on the order of my novel than like these stories I’ve been doing. But its the sort of thing that will require a full months work and as The New Republic, Scribners + possibly the Atlantic Monthly are the only magazines that would publish it I don’t want to start until you assure me that there’s nothing in the project which seems to bar it from Scribner’s if it be suffiently interesting and well done.

It is a literary forgery purporting to be selections from the note-books of a man who is a complete literary radical from the time he’s in college thru two years in New York—finally he goes to training camp, gets bored and enlists as a pvt. This is the end of the book—a note by me will say that he served in Companies E and G of the twenty-eighth Infantry and died of appenditis in Paris in 1918.

It will be in turns cynical, ingenious, life saturated, critical and bitter. It will be racy and startling with opinions and personalities. I have a journal I have kept for 3 / yrs. which my book didn’t begin to exhaust, which I don’t seem to be able to draw on for stories but which certainly is, I think, highly amusing. This thoroughly edited and revised, plus some imagination + / doz ingredients I have in mind will be the bulk of it. It would take 2 or possibly 3 parts to publish it.

The tremendous sucess of Butler’s note books and of Barbellions (Wells?) Disappointed Man makes me think that the public loves to find out the workings of active minds in their personal problems. It will be bound to have that streak of coarseness that both Wells + Butler have but there won’t be any James Joyce flavor to it.

Of course you can’t possibly commit yourself until you’ve seen it but as I say I’d want to know before I start if a work of that nature would be intrinsicly hostile to the policy of Scribner’s Magazine. With apologies for intruding apon your patience once again I am

Sincerely
F. Scott Fitzgerald

Notes:

The Journal of a Disappointed Man (1919), by W. N. P. Barbellion.

xxx. TO: Robert Bridges

Before 1 November 1919

599 Summit Ave St. Paul, Minn:

ALS, 1 p. Princeton University

Dear Mr. Bridges:

I am sending you a new version of the Cut Glass Bowl¹ which I sent you on the 20th. The version you have is 9000 words and draggy in places. The new version is about seven thousand and makes a much more compact and readable thing. I also sent you a little story called A Smile for Sylvo.²

I am doing no more short stories at present but devoting a month to my “Dairy of a Literary Failure.”

So please throw the long version of the Cut Glass Bowl away and if you can't use the short one I'm going to ask you to mail it to Mr. Reynolds³ in the enclosed envelope—I am trying to get him to dispose of my stuff for me.

Sincerely F Scott Fitzgerald

Notes:

¹ Scribner's Magazine (May 1920).

² Published as “The Smilers,” The Smart Set (June 1920).

³ Literary agent Paul Revere Reynolds.

xxx. TO: Robert Bridges

November 1st, 1919

599 Summit Ave. St. Paul.

ALS, 2 pp. Princeton University

Dear Mr. Bridges:

I was delighted that you liked the Cut Glass Bowl. Now between the two versions: undoubtedly when I cut the first version I sacrificed some wheat with the tares; still I think version II is more compact and continuous reading and on the whole I prefer it. Still I leave the descision entirely in your hands.

Do I understand from your letter that you pay on publication, on setting up or what? and that I am to correct my own proofs?

Your serial list seems pretty full all right but this Dairy of a Literary Failure is churning in my head and seems of itself to boil over occasionally in to ink so don't be surprised if it hops onto your desk some morning.

You might enclose that envelope adressed the Paul Revere Reynolds in your next.

Anyways Mr Bridges I certainly feel that I've gotten the best consideration from both the publishing and magazine side of Scribner's that I can possibly expect and be sure that whenever I write anything that seems to me first class I'll give you first whack at it.

Faithfully Scott Fitzgerald

xxx. FROM: George Jean Nathan

Before 15 November 1919

F. Scott Fitzgerald, Esq., 599 Summit Avenue, St. Paul, Minn.

TLS, 1 p. Scrapbook. Princeton University

Dear Mr. Fitzgerald:

Both your short story and your one-act play please us—the play particularly.² We are accepting both manuscripts. The office sends you its cheques on Thursday morning.

I wish, in my office of dramatic critic, personally to congratulate you on the play. You have a decidedly uncommon gift for light dialogue. Keep at the dramatic form. You will do things. I believe that your talent is superior to Clare Kummer's.³

Our best thanks to you for the credos.⁴ Three of them are excellent. We shall use them.

With best wishes, George Jean Nathan

Notes:

² “Dalyrimple Goes Wrong” and “Porcelain and Pink (A One-Act Play),” The Smart Set (January 1920).

³ Prolific playwright, author of popular light comedies.

⁴ Fitzgerald submitted items for “The American Credo” department of The Smart Set; he claimed twelve of the items in his copy of The American Credo (1920), edited by Nathan and Mencken.

xxx. TO: Robert Bridges

November 1919

599 Summit Ave. St. Paul, Minn.

ALS, 1 p. Princeton University

Dear Mr. Bridges:

You ask me to send you everything first direct so I'm enclosing a story which is hands-down the best piece of light writing I've ever done.¹ However it just naturally would curl itself up into a little sneer at the end so I was going to send it to Reynolds, especially as I'm uncomfortably in need of ready money. In case its a little too vinegary I'm going to ask you to save me time by putting it in the enclosed envelope adressed to Reynolds.

The Dairy of a Literary Failure progresses haltingly and is becoming rather more poignant than I had at first intended. You shall certainly see it first.

Faithfully F Scott Fitzgerald

Notes:

¹ Possibly “Head and Shoulders,” The Saturday Evening Post (21 February 1920).

xxx. TO: Ludlow Fowler

November 1919

599 Summit Ave St. Paul

ALS, 1 p. Princeton University

Dear Ludow:

Im leaving here Saturday + going first to Montgomery then to New York. However not even the family know I'm going to Montgomery so keep it dark. I'll be in New York the 22nd to the 26th and I'll call you up so we can have dinner together or something.

Feeling pretty high. Selling short stories right and left. Novel wont be out until Feb.

God knows tho, Lud, I may be a wreck by the time I see you. I'm going to try to settle it definately one way or the other.

Scott Fitz.

xxx. TO: Robert Bridges

ALS, 1 p. Princeton University

Dear Mr. Bridges:

I'm in the most frightful literary slump—and I'm writing movies¹ to see if I can rest up my brain enough to start a new novel + also get the wherewithal to live until I finish it. “The Diary of a Literary Failure” was a literary failure. In the middle of its revision I gave out + consigned it to the drawer of unfinished manuscripts. As for short stories I've only done one since I left New York and its pitifully pathetic. So expect to see huge bill-boards announcing CHARLEY CHAPLIN in Scott Fitzgeralds new comedy “Slapstick Sam.” As soon as I turn out anything repectable I'll send it on to you.

With Best Wishes F. Scott Fitzgerald.

599 Summit Ave. St. Paul, Minn December 26th—1919

Notes:

¹ Fitzgerald was trying to write scenarios for silent movies but did not sell any.

1920

xxx. To Unknown

Inscription in album, 6.25 x 4 album page, by St. John Ervine and Fitzgerald

Auction

After January 30, 1920

St. John Ervine
30.1.20

and his admirer, F. Scott Fitzgerald

Notes:

St. John Ervine was Irish author.

xxx. TO Ruth Sturtevant

From Turnbull.

The Allerton East 39th Street New York City

[February, 1920]

Dear Ruth:

I should have written you many moons ago to congratulate you but life sort of picked me up and whirled me along beginning last June and it's only recently that I'm on my feet—so I'm hoping you'll forgive me and sending you a belated wedding present. I have a vague memory of writing you a wild letter when my world collapsed last June—I wonder if you ever got it.

I seem, at present, to be a fairly well established author, with six stories appearing in The Saturday Evening Post beginning with the issue of February 21st, stories regularly in Smart Set and some in Scribner's, and a novel coming out in April, published by Scribners. I'm probably going to get married in March—the same girl, of course—but we haven't any idea where we're going to live. I am immeasurably older, Ruth; I rather want to talk to you sometime—maybe we'll be able to have an eventual bicker while our respective husband and wife chatter of the weather in the corner.

I told you an astounding thing last April—I shouldn't have told you but at the time I simply had to tell someone. Life is so damn odd!

Faithfully,
F. Scott Fitz——-

P.S. Is that your right name—“Curt”—or is it “Curtis?” Or maybe it's Kirt, Kurt or Kirk.

xxx. TO: Isabelle Amorous

26 February 1920

Cottage Club Princeton, N.J.

ALS, 2 pp. Bruccoli

Feb 26th

Dear Isabelle:

Excuse this wretched paper but being a hard working literary man its all I ever use. I hope you're a reader of the Saturday Evening Post, Smart Set, Scribners ect in which my immortal writings appear from time to time.

—And I read your letter with a mixture of impressions, the situation being some what complicated by the fact that Zelda and I have had a reconciliation. And Isabelle, much as I like being a “strong character,” candor compells me to admit that it was she and not me who did the throwing over last June.

No personality as strong as Zelda's could go without getting critisisms and as you say she is not above reproach. I've always known that. Any girl who gets stewed in public, who frankly enjoys and tells shocking stories, who smokes constantly and makes the remark that she has “kissed thousands of men and intends to kiss thousands more,” cannot be considered beyond reproach even if above it. But Isabelle I fell in love with her courage, her sincerity and her flaming self respect and its these things I'd believe in even if the whole world indulged in wild suspicions that she wasn't all that she should be.

But of course the real reason, Isabelle, is that I love her and that's the beginning and end of everything. You're still a catholic but Zelda's the only God I have left now.

But I want to thank you for your letter and the thought of it. You're a strange + rare combination, Isabelle: a woman who is at once very beautiful + very good and I hope your destiny won't lead you into the same devious paths that mine has. And don't reproach yourself for your letter. My friends are unanimous in frankly advising me not to marry a wild, pleasure loving girl like Zelda so I'm quite used to it. I wrote Martin but havn't heard from him. Tell him to write.

Faithfully
Scott Fitzgerald

xxx. Inscription To H. L. Mencken

Inscription on This Side Of Paradise (1920)

Enoch Pratt Free Library, New York City

As a matter of fact, Mr. Mencken ...

F. Scott Fitzgerald, March 20th, 1920

Notes:

Irvin S. Cobb was a Kentucky humorist on whom Fitzgerald commented in This Side of Paradise: "This manCobb -- I don't think he's either clever or amusing--and what's more, I don't think very many people do, except the editors."

xxx. TO Ruth Sturtevant

From Turnbull.

University Cottage Club Princeton, New Jersey

March 26, 1920

Dear Ruth:

I certainly was glad to get your letter because you are a good egg, Ruth, and Sam Kauffman who is at my elbow agrees with me. You may laugh when I tell you I am getting married April Fools' Day but as a matter of fact I think I am. I have no idea where we'll live—we're going to the Biltmore for a week or so but my pocketbook wouldn't stand that long, so we may take a cottage at Rye or somewhere like that. My book came out today and of course I'm frightfully excited. I am quite jubilant because I sold the movie rights of my first Post story, “Head and Shoulders” for $2500 to the Metro people. Doesn't that sound good? It was in the February 21st issue and was much better than the one last week.

Next time you're in New York I want you to meet Zelda because she's very beautiful and very wise and very brave as you can imagine—but she's a perfect baby and a more irresponsible pair than we'll be will be hard to imagine. My address for the next ten years will probably be % Charles Scribner's Sons and be sure and let me know next time you come or sometime and we can have luncheon or dinner or some darn thing—(You can see from this how out of my depths, I am.)

Well, Ruth, read my book.

As ever, Scott Fitz——-

xxx. Inscription To Aiken Reichner

Inscription on This Side Of Paradise (1920), Auction

For Aiken Reichner
Hoping that you'll find your
literary stride within the next
year-and with a great deal
of confidence that you will-
F. Scott Fitzgerald
March 28, 1920
Princeton, NJ

xxx. Inscription To W. R. K Taylor, Jr.

Inscription on This Side Of Paradise (1920)

University of Virginia

To W. R. K. Taylor, Jr. Cottage Club from the W. K. <well-known> Author F. Scott Fitzgerald Princeton, NJ
March 29th, 1920 Cottage Club

xxx. To: Charles G. Norris

Inscription in This Side of Paradise.

Stanford University, New York City

For Charles G. Norris who in Salt ...

F. Scott Fitzgerald
April 28th, 1920

xxx. To: Margaret Orr Green

Inscription in This Side of Paradise.

University of Tulsa

c. April 1920

This book is a history of mistakes ...

Notes:

On the bookplate, which shows bookshelves and a fireplace, Fitzgerald wrote: "F Scott Fitzgerald crowds to the nice fire-place".

xxx. Inscription to Elizabeth King

The Princeton University Library Chronicle, Volume XL, Number 3, Spring 1979 (New and Notable)

For Elizabeth King—With entire confidence that anyone who can be so glib and charming with the English language does not wear rubbers when it looks like rain.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
May 4th 1920.

Notes:

From Mr. Harry Kahn of New York has come an intriguing presentation copy of Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise (New York, 1920). It is inscribed on the front flyleaf. At present, little is known about Elizabeth King. Professor Alan Margolies, however, has drawn to our attention this note pasted onto page 23 of Scrapbook 1 of the Fitzgerald scrapbooks:

for Elizabeth King—
An autograph is requested by a timorous young lady of the variety that wears rubbers when it looks like rain.

As a mild form of justification she mentions the fact that the 5.15 train to the meadows of Connecticut was often missed because of detours via the Murray Hill or the Allerton.

In other words, the delivery girl craves the honor of an autograph.

xxx. Inscription To Spencer Jones

Inscription on This Side Of Paradise (Later printing. NY: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1920)

Auction

To Spencer Jones ’14, from F. Scott Fitzgerald ’17

xxx. Inscription To W.E. Hill

Inscription on This Side Of Paradise

Auction

Dear Mr Hill—
If my book was half as good as you're [sic] cover I'd sell a million copies ...

Notes:

ALS, 1 p., tipped in at front of the book.

FROM: Charles G. Norris

5 MAY [1920]

Wire. Scrapbook. Princeton University

SCOTT FITZGERALD
HOTEL COMMODORE NEWYORK NY
YOU WILL BE APPROACHED BY JAY PACKARD LITERARY AGENT FOR FILM RIGHTS TO THIS SIDE OF PARADISE¹ DONT TAKE A CENT LESS THAN FIVE THOUSAND REFUSE ANY ROYALTY ARRANGEMENT INSIST ON CASH PAYMENT ON SIGNING CONTRACT DONT LET REYNOLDS PERSUADE YOU TO ASK MORE OR TAKE LESS GOOD LUCK
CHARLES G NORRIS

Notes:

¹ Movie rights to This Side of Paradise were not sold until 1923, when Famous Players-Lasky paid $10,000. The movie was never made.

xxx. TO Marie Hersey

From Turnbull.

The Commodore Hotel New York City

[May, 1920]

Dear Bug:

Well, you may go to Princeton but we never will again. We were there three days, Zelda and five men in Harvey Firestone's car, and not one of us drew a sober breath. Just ask anybody about it when you go down there—ask your friend Ollie Rogers—he was on the party. It was the damnedest party ever held in Princeton and everybody in the University will agree.

We are going around in a circle but at last seem to have a plan. We have purchased an ancient Marmon—not very ancient, 1917—and we're going to tour north to Lake Champlain and see if we can get a cottage there for the summer. We didn't like Rye at all and we can't live in Princeton after our celebration.

So you are going to see Bet. My Gawd! I can imagine anyone married but not she.

I'm glad you and Jim are going to have another chance to cause each other's doom and I certainly hope that if you decide you do want him you won't change your mind again. I'm still mad about marriage—if we could only find a place to live.

Zelda sends her best and says to come back to New York and help her buy some more clothes.

Best to Bet and Heine.

Love,
F. Scott F——-

xxx. TO Ruth Sturtevant

From Turnbull.

c/o Mrs. Wakeman Westport, Connecticut

[May 14, 1920]

Dear Ruth:

In acute agony and despair we at last forcibly left the Commodore, bought a car, threw our bags in the back seat and set out. We discovered the alarming fact our first day on the road from the people we had lunch with that there's no swimming in Lake Champlain because it's too cold. That was the shock of our lives, Ruth, because if Zelda can't swim she's miserable. I feel I'm a terrible piker to have put you to all that trouble but honestly it never occurred to me that there was no swimming there. We turned down a slick cottage on the coast of Maine last month for that very reason.

So we bore East, arrived here at nine o'clock this morning and immediately found the slickest little cottage on the Sound. We signed the lease on it at noon. There's a beach here and loads of seclusion and just about what we're looking for. We'd just about given up hope so now we're in the most jovial mood imaginable.

Thank Curt for me, Ruth, and tell him I'm mighty indebted and awfully sorry we were so stupid in our geography. He wrote that you weren't well. I hope you're lots better now.

As ever,
F. Scott Fitzgerald

xxx. FROM: John Grier Hibben

May 27th, 1920.

TLS, 2 pp. Scrapbook. Princeton University

My dear Mr. Fitzgerald:—

It has been in my mind for some time to write to you. Last evening I read your story in the current number of “Scribners” magazine, entitled “The Four Fists.”² It is so admirably written and I finished it with a feeling of such deep satisfaction, that the long delayed purpose of writing you takes shape again today.

Let me first say that I feel that in this last story of yours you have shown not only your rare ability as an artist, but also your power to present a philosophy of life which I wish every young man of our country would feel and appreciate. Your description of “Samuel,” attributing to him “some instinct stronger than will, deeper than training,” presents a picture of human nature at its best. This philosophy of the instinctive nobility of man I hope may be further developed in your writings and prove a help and inspiration to many who may not be aware of the real power concealed within them.

Now I hope that you will allow me to add a word also in reference to your Princeton book, “This Side of Paradise.” It is because I appreciate so much all that is in you of artistic skill and certain elemental power that I am taking the liberty of telling you very frankly that your characterization of Princeton has grieved me. I cannot bear to think that our young men are merely living for four years in a country club and spending their lives wholly in a spirit of calculation and snobbishness.

Your descriptions of the beauty and charm of Princeton are the most admirable that I have ever read and yet, I miss something in the book which I am sure you, yourself, could not wholly have missed in your college course.

You must not think that my point of view is merely that of an older man and that that accounts for my differing with you in reference to the Princeton life. From my undergraduate days I have always had a belief in Princeton and in what the place could do in the making of a strong vigorous manhood. It would be an overwhelming grief to me, in the midst of my work here and my love for Princeton's young men, should I feel that we have nothing to offer but the outgrown symbols and shells of a past whose reality has long since disappeared.

It would be a great satisfaction to me to have the opportunity of talking with you some time when you are in Princeton and I should appreciate your calling to see me.

I have written these words not in any spirit of carping criticism, but to let you know my full mind concerning you, and my pride in your power, already demonstrated in the world of letters and promise of a still richer fulfillment. I should like to learn from your own lips, in what you feel the Princeton of the present fails.³

With warm regards,
Faithfully yours, John Grier Hibben

Mr. F. Scott Fitzgerald, C/o Messrs Charles Scribner Sons, 48th and Fifth Avenue, New York City.

Notes:

² Fitzgerald was embarrassed by this story, which he regarded as obvious and didactic.

³ See Fitzgerald's 3 June reply to Hibben in Letters, in which he characterizes This Side of Paradise as “a book written with the bitterness of my discovery that I had spent several years trying to fit in with a curriculum that is afterall made for the average student” but insists that he loves Princeton “now better than any place on earth.”

xxx. TO: John Grier Hibben

ALS, 3 pp. Princeton University

Wakeman’s, Westport, Conn, June 3d, 1920

My Dear President Hibben:

I want to thank you very much for your letter and to confess that the honor of a letter from you outweighed my real regret that my book gave you concern. It was a book written with the bitterness of my discovery that I had spent several years trying to fit in with a curriculum that is after all made for the average student. After the curriculum had tied me up, taken away the honors I’d wanted, bent my nose over a chemistry book and said “No fun, no activities, no offices, no Triangle trips—no, not even a diploma” if you can’t do chemistry”—after that I retired. It is easy for the successful man in college, the man who has gotten what he wanted to say

“It’s all fine. It makes men. It made me, see”—

—but it seems to me its like the Captain of a Company when he has his men lined up at attention for inspection. He sees only the tightly buttoned coat and the shaved faces. He doesn’t know that perhaps a private in the rear rank is half crazy because a pin is sticking in his back and he can’t move, or another private is thinking that his wife is dying and he can’t get leave because too many men in the company are gone already.

I don’t mean at all that Princeton is not the happiest time in most boys lives. It is of course—I simply say it wasn’t the happiest time in mine. I love it now better than any place on earth. The men—the undergraduates of Yale + Princeton are cleaner, healthier, better looking, better dressed, wealthier and more attractive than any undergraduate body in the country. I have no fault to find with Princeton that I can’t find with Oxford and Cambridge. I simply wrote out of my own impressions, wrote as honestly as I could a picture of its beauty. That the picture is cynical is the fault of my temperment.

My view of life, President Hibben, is the view of Theodore Driesers and Joseph Conrads—that life is too strong and remorseless for the sons of men. My idealism flickered out with Henry Strater’s anticlub movement at Princeton. “The Four Fists” latest of my stories to be published was the first to be written. I wrote it in desperation one evening because I had a three inch pile of rejection slips and it was financially nessesary for me to give the magazines what they wanted. The appreciation it has recieved has amazed me.

I must admit however that This Side of Paradise does over accentuate the gayiety + country club atmosphere of Princeton. For the sake of the readers interest that part was much over stressed, and of course the hero not being average reacted rather unhealthily I suppose to many perfectly normal phenomena. To that extent the book is inaccurate. It is the Princeton of Saturday night in May. Too many intelligent class mates of mine have failed to agree with it for me to consider it really photgraphic any more, as of course I did when I wrote it.

Next time I am in Princeton I will take the priveledge of coming to see you.

I am, sir,
Very Respectfully Yours
F Scott Fitzgerald

Notes:

Strater had been one of the leaders of a movement during the spring 1917 term to abolish eating clubs at Princeton on the grounds that they were undemocratic.

xxx. TO: David Balch

ALS, 2 pp. Collection of Marcia and Maurice Neville; Text published in "Two New Scott Fitzgerald Letters," Modern Fiction Studies, 11 (Summer 1965), 190-91. This letter was cataloged for sale by Sotheby Parke Bernet, Sale No. 3708, Item #577.

Westport, Conn

June 19th, 1920

Dear Mr. Balch:

I have unearthed so many esoteric facts about myself lately for magazines ect. that I blush to continue to send out colorful sentences about a rather colorless life. However here are some “human interest points”.

(1.) I was always interested in prodigies because I almost became one—that is in the technical sense of going to college young. I finally decided to enter at the conventional age of 17. I went in on my 17th birthday and, I think, was one of the ten youngest in my class at Princeton. Prodigies always interested me + it seemed to me that the Harvard prodigy, Boris Siddis, offerred grounds for a story. The original title of Head + Shoulders was “The prodigy” + I just brought in the chorus girl by way of a radical contrast. Before I’d finished she almost stole the story.

(2) I got four dozen letters from readers when it first appeared in the Post.

(3) It will be republished in my collection of short stories “Flappers + Philosophers” which The Scribners are publishing this fall.

(4) I’d rather watch a good shimmee dance than Ruth St. Dennis + Pavalowa combined. I see nothing at all disgusting in it.

(5) My story “The Camel’s Back” in The S.E.P. (which you may be buying) was the fastest piece of writing I’ve ever heard of. It is twelve thousand words long and it was written in fourteen hours straight writing and sent to the S.E.P. in its original form.

I can’t think of any thing else just now that hasn’t been used before. And I have no good picture. I expect to have some soon though + will send you one

Sincerely
F Scott Fitzgerald

xxx. TO: David Arnold Balch

June 24th [1920]

Westport Conn,

ALS, 2 pp. University of Virginia

Dear Mr. Balch:

Here are some “facts”

Born St. Paul, Minnesota, Sept 24th, 1896

Educated at The Saint Paul Academy in St. Paul, Minn and at Newman School, Hackensack, NJ and at Princeton.

Married on April 3d 1920 to Miss Zelda Sayre of Montgomery, Ala.

Served in war as 1st Lieut in the 45th + 67th Inf. and as Aide-de-Camp to Gen. J. A. Ryan.

Am a decendent of Francis Scott Key + my whole name is Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald.

Stared writing when I was 10 yrs old + have been hard at it ever since I wear brown soft hats in winter, panamas in summer, loathe dress suits and never wear one and prefer people with greenish-grey eyes.

I certainly would like to have lunch with you + will call you up soon. I don't think the new title is any good but you know best.

Sincerely F Scott Fitzgerald.

xxx. To Shane Leslie

From Turnbull.

Westport, Connecticut

August 6, 1920

Dear Mr. Leslie:

Your letter came today and I hasten to assure you that you were one of the half dozen chosen to whom I sent autographed first editions. I am sorry as the deuce, not to say humiliated, that it never reached you as you were my first literary sponsor, godfather to this book, and my original intention was to dedicate it to both of you.¹ I sent it to your New York address as I'd lost your letter from Ireland.

I am married and living rustically in Connecticut—working on a second novel. I married the Rosalind of the novel, the southern girl I was so attached to, after a grand reconciliation.

The book has sold 30,000 copies here and will be published immediately in England and Australia.

I apologize for the spelling of Dr. Fay's name; also—did you notice—for an almost excerpt from one of your letters with an account of the funeral. I didn't see it myself and had to describe it. I credited you with it in the copy I sent you.

I have written numerous short stories to be published by Scribners this fall, under the title of Flappers and Philosophers. I am living royally off the moving picture rights of these same stories.

I will certainly send you a first edition of my new book which includes that story “Benediction,” since published in the Smart Set—and next time I'm in New York I'll send you the 7th edition of This Side of Paradise just to show you I'm not like republics ungrateful, and that the correction in Dr. Fay's name has been corrected.

Stephen Parrott was staying with us last week and we talked much of both you and Dr. Fay. I certainly made use of his letters and the poem in the book but I'm sure he would fully approve, don't you?

When are [you] coming to America?

Sincerely,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

P.S. My best regards to Mrs. Leslie.

The Catholic papers here seem to think my book was a subtle attack on the American clergy. I can't think why! I'm sure the most sympathetic character in it was Monsignor Darcy.

Notes:

¹ This Side of Paradise was dedicated to Monsignor Fay.

xxx. TO: Burton Rascoe

Aug 6th 1920—

Westport, Conneticut

ALS, 1 p. University of Pennsylvania

Mr. Burton Rascoe The Chicago Tribune.

Dear Mr. Rascoe:

Just a line to ask you if you liked the story “The Lees of Happiness” which I wrote on order for your Sunday Magazine.² It's perhaps a little gloomy.

You were kind enough to praise my first novel—I am now in the midst of a second—and its very much harder sledding. Hope it won't dissapoint you and the other critics who were disposed to like “This Side of Paradise.”

Sincerely F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Notes:

² Chicago Sunday Tribune (12 December 1920).

xxx. TO: Charles Scribner II

ALS, 1 p. Princeton University

Westport, Conn.

Aug. 12th 1920

Dear Mr. Scribner:

Again I am immensely obiged to you. I should certainly feel much more business-like and less profligate if you would tell your book-keeper when our reckoning comes this autumn to charge me full interest on the advances you’ve made me.

My new novel, called “The Flight of the Rocket,” concerns the life of one Anthony Patch between his 25th and 33d years (1913–1921). He is one of those many with the tastes and weaknesses of an artist but with no actual creative inspiration. How he and his beautiful young wife are wrecked on the shoals of dissipation is told in the story. This sounds sordid but it’s really a most sensational book + I hope won’t dissapoint the critics who liked my first one. I hope it’ll be in your hands by November 1st

Sincerely
F Scott Fitzgerald

Notes:

The Beautiful and Damned.

xxx. To Carl Hovey

[from Fitzgerald/Hemingway Annual, 1978]

Westport, Conn.

Aug 12th 1920

Dear Mr. Hovey:

I want to ask you a question. How long would it take to seriazize a 120,000 word novel? My plans have changed, I think. Here is new project.

(1) “Flappers + Philosophers” my 1st collection of short stories to appear in Oct.

(2) A second collection of short stories to appear next Spring + to include the Jellybean, three little plays and also four stories not yet written.

(3) My new novel in which I am deeply absorbed “The Flight of the Rocket” to appear next autumn.

Let us suppose you get the novel in Nov., like it + begin to serialze it in January or February. Then how about these three or four stories I intend to write when I finish the novel + which should be published before spring to be eligible for the collection. Could you publish them simultaeneously? Would you prefer only the novel? Would you prefer only the short stories?

Of course the easiest way would be for me to do the short stories 1st but its utterly impossible as I’m plunged in the middle of the novel + wouldn’t leave it for $10,000.

The only solution it seems to me is for me to rewrite a fairly good novelette which appeared in the June Smart Set instead of the new short stories + publish it in the spring collection. Then I would devote the time between finishing my novel in Nov. and going abroad in Jan. to this revising and to writing a play which I’ve always wanted to do.

Let me hear from you. Went over to Miss Rita Willmans + I think she’s a very striking personality + most attractive

Sincerely
F Scott Fitzgerald

Notes:

1st collection of short stories Published 10 September 1920.

The Flight of the Rocket = The Beautiful and Damned

not yet written - See As Ever, Scott Fitz-, ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli and Jennifer Atkinson (Philadelphia&New York: Lippincott, 1972), p. 14. The Metropolitan published two Fitzgerald stories in 1920-21: "The Jelly-Bean" and "His Russet Witch."

the spring collection - 'The Smilers' appeared in The Smart Set for June 1920. It is more likely that Fitzgerald was referring to 'May Day,' which appeared in the July issue.

xxx. To H. L. Mencken

Inscription in Flappers and Philosophers

Enoch Pratt Free Library, New York City

Before September 4, 1920

Dear Mr. Mencken:
Worth reading
...

With profound bows
F. Scott Fitzgerald

xxx. FROM: Shane Leslie

Sept 3 1920

London Eng

ALS, 4 pp. Princeton University

My dear Fitz

I have been reading your book very carefully and I am suprised at the literary touch in places—the suprise that would be real pleasure if one had happed on a forgotten book of one's own. Your spelling is bad and you refer in your letter to “Austrailia”! The book was much improved on the MSS I persuaded Scribner to take and publish should you die like R. Brooke on the front. I should still like to have my autoautographed first edition if you can recover it from my New York address. Father Hemmick is here and we are both reviewing the book for the Dublin.¹ There will be more about Fay than you chiefly the mystical and devotional side. You only traced his political and international aspect. You did it very cleverly but I think the mystical note escaped you. You must not mind Catholic criticism for I think it is a Catholic minded book at heart and that you like Fay and myself can never be anything but Catholics however much we write and pose to make the bourgeois stare! I am glad you are married I hope liturgically or at least canonically—you know the subtle difference. My paternal love to Rosalind² for though my consent was not asked I feel I should have been consulted. The Mgr left you to me in his spiritual testament and I am responsible for seeing that your talent harms nobody including yourself. Why do you not bring Rosalind over here for a month say Nov. and we will go over to visit Fr Hemmick in Paris. I could give you enough literary material from my old Paris life to furnish you with a novel which you will kindly not dedicate to me! That is a literary give-away which is not generally practiced and if you published Fay's letters you ought not to have put his name in the frontispiece.³ However you have a great deal like all clever men to learn. I am stupid-getting with learning. Men are only clever when they are on the pry for forbidden fruit of mind and body and better still for mystical or even non-existent fruitage. I shall be always glad to teach you a little literature or spelling though in the handling of the American language I shall always be your admiring inferior

Shane Leslie

You may write to me under the seal as a confessor and I shall respect the seal—on anything

Notes:

¹ Dublin Review (October, November, December 1920).

² Rosalind Connage in This Side of Paradise was largely based on Zelda.

³ Leslie is referring to the dedication of This Side of Paradise to Fay.

xxx. TO: H. L. Mencken

Sept 6th 1920

Westport, Conn

ALS, l p. New York Public Library

Dear Mr Menken:

Thank you for The “Symposium on H.L.M.” ¹ I read it with the greatest interest for I am a member of the rapidly increasing crew who consider you and Cabell at the head and front of American letters.

If you ever get tired of using the title “Prejudices” I discovered a good one for you out of your own manner—to wit: Complexes.

I am having the little red book bound up with Pistols for Two² as a permanency. (| I am writing a brilliant novel called “Circumspecto, the Indian Chief.” Nathan is a character in it.

Sincerely F Scott Fitzgerald

P.S. Excuse pencil. No ink in house.

Notes:

¹ H. L. Mencken (1920).

² A collaboration by Mencken and Nathan under the pseudonym Owen Arthur James Hatteras (1917).

xxx. From H. L. Mencken To F. Scott Fitzgerald

[PU] Letters of H. L. Mencken, ed. Guy J. Forgue (New York: Knopf, 1961)

The Smart Set
25 West 45th Street New York

September 9, 1920

Dear Mr. Fitzgerald:

Your suggestion is admirable. And if the Department of Justice ever forces me to abandon the title of “Prejudices”, I shall adopt it.

Before you finish the novel we should have a secret conference.⁵ There are certain episodes in Nathan’s life that, while extremely discreditable, are very effective dramatically and I’d like to impart them to you. There was, for example, the Schapiro case in 1904. I am surely not one to credit the Schapiro girl with anything approaching innocence, but, nevertheless, Nathan’s treatment of her could not and cannot be defended. And no one sympathized with him very much when he was forced to leave town for two months and hide in Union Hill, New Jersey. La Schapiro was a typical Grand Street flapper. She has since married Irving Blumblatt, the lawyer.*

As soon as the hay-fever gets out of my eves I am going to give “Flappers and Philosophers” a thorough reading. I suspect that it is a great deal better than you think it is.

The other day I had a letter from William Lyon Phelps referring to Scribner’s use of his name and mine in their announcements of “This Side of Paradise” on the ash-cans. Phelps said that he was willing to refrain from legal proceedings if I was.

Sincerely yours,
Mencken

P.S. The pink pamphlet was actually written by Dr. Berthold Baer—a nom de plume for Huneker.

* The child was still-born. Sophia took Chichester's Family Pills.

Notes:

⁵ This letter seems to confirm that Fitzgerald took George J. Nathan as his model for the character of Maury Noble. The story about Nathan and the “Schapiro girl” is, of course, pure invention and should be taken as a joke.

xxx. To Shane Leslie

From Turnbull.

Westport, Connecticut

September 17, 1920

Dear Mr. Leslie:

The book is appearing in England next spring. William Collins Sons & Co. are bringing it out. Did I tell you? I sent a tracer after the book I sent you last spring and today I forwarded an 8th edition of Paradise and a first of my new one, Flappers and Philosophers, a collection of short stories. I am now working on my second novel—much more objective this time and hence much harder sledding. But the bourgeoisie are going to stare!

The three letters and the poem of Dr. Fay's possibly should not have followed the dedication but I really don't think he'd have minded. I was married quite liturgically and canonically—I mean only the latter, tho, for it took place in the rectory of St. Patrick's Cathedral.

We are coming abroad in January and will certainly come and have a long talk with you. “Rosalind” was tremendously impressed with “10, Talbot Square, Hyde Park, London, England.” And I would like to see Fr. Hemmick again. How I'll watch for that review in the Dublin Review!

I liked Tom Kettle's poem but I really don't think it's extraordinary. I'm trying to get hold of his book.

I'm taking your advice and writing very slowly and paying much attention to form. Sometimes I think that this new novel has nothing much else but form.

There's no use concealing the fact that my reaction a year ago last June to apparent failure in every direction did carry me rather away from the church. My ideas now are in such wild riot that I would flatter myself did I claim even the clarity of agnosticism. If you knew the absolute dirth of Catholic intelligentsia in this country! One Catholic magazine, America, had only one prim comment on my book—“a fair example of our non-Catholic college's output.” My Lord! Compared to the average Georgetown alumnus Amory is an uncanonized saint. I think I laundered myself shiny in the book!

Faithfully,
F. Scott Fitzgerald

xxx. TO: H. L. Mencken

Before 7 October 1920

38 W. 59th St. New York City

ALS, 2 pp. New York Public Library

Dear Mr. Mencken:

I'm going to take up a few minutes of your time to propound a sceme, which may bore you to death. Here it is. You know what Dutton did with those rather medeochre novels of Leanard Merrick—prefixed them with prefaces by W.K.¹ authors? and I believe they sold. Now I am a great admirer of Frank Norris's. I've had an awful time getting hold of Blix and Vandover + tho Mcteague is now accessible the others are buried full fathom fifty + about to be forgotten. Do you think it would be amusing for me to try and interest some publisher in this: Say a new edition, uniform—with short introductions by Americans after this fashion:

Vandover + the Brute with an introduction by H. L. Mencken

Mcteague “ “ “ “ Theodore Drieser

The Pit” “ “ “ Joseph Hergeshimer

The Octupus” “ “ “ Booth Tarkington

Moran of the Lady Letty” “ “ “ Burton Rascoe

Blix “ “ “ “ Francis Hacket.

A Man's Woman (you say its no good! I've never read it)

If it'd do any good I'd do one that nobody else wanted -+- would be glad to do the organizing. I simply want to ask your advice. Do you think it would be worthwhile? If you do I'll write Charles Norris for data + commence planning it.²

I'm deep in a new novel at present. Edmund Wilson John Bishop + all my friends and I are eagerly awaiting Predjudices 2nd Series, even tho we've read most of the essays Wilson, by the way, is doing an essay on you—not a mere blurb or puff but an analysis of your methods for the January or February Vanity Fair We were both talking the other night about how hard it is not to imitate your style at times. Both of us are so saturated with Menckenia that we burst out with such phrases as “Baptist Bishop of Atlanta” ect. ect. when we want a simile for feeble mindedness. They, Bishop + Wilson, are finishing a really amazing book—32 ironic poems on death called “The Undertakers Garland.”

John Williams³ drove Zelda + I wild with laughter last night with the anecdote of how he + Nathan took you to remnants.⁴

Faithfully Yours F. Scott Fitzgerald

Notes:

¹ Well-known.

² Mencken responded on 7 October, offering to help, but Fitzgerald's plan for the Norris edition never developed further. A ten-volume edition was published by Double-day in 1928.

³ Editor at Appleton.

⁴ Williams and Nathan had taken Mencken to a bad play, having assured him it was a masterpiece.

xxx. To Carl Hovey

[from Fitzgerald/Hemingway Annual, 1978]

38 W. 59th St. New York City

[October 1920]

Dear Mr. Hovey:

Am about half thru my novel but went down to the bank last week + found my account so distressingly not to say so alarmingly low that I had to do a short story at once.

I hope you’ll like it. I think its the best thing I’ve ever done.

Sincerely
F Scott Fitzgerald

Notes:

In October 1920 the Fitzgeralds moved into New York City, where they remained through the winter.

I think its the best thing - As Ever, Scott Fitz-, p. 19, identifies a story, which Fitzgerald sent to Hovey by way of Harold Ober and which Fitzgerald called 'the best thing I ever wrote,' as 'His Russet Witch,' published in Metropolitan Magazine, February 1921.

xxx. To Carl Hovey

ALS, 1 p. Huntington Library, [from Fitzgerald/Hemingway Annual, 1978]

Oct 27th, 1920

38 W. 59th St.

Dear Mr. Hovey:

About the story. Glad you like it + I’ll admit it’ll be over the heads of a few people. I solemnly promise that the next one I send will be as jazzy + popular as The Offshore Pirate to make up for it.

As you can see the girl, of course, represents that inhibited attraction that all men show to a “wild + beautiful woman". The greyer a mans life is the more it comes out. But if I’d have explained the story in anyway but a dream it would have been a regular Max Beerbohm extravaganza + hence furthur over people’s heads that it is now. But I do think to come out + say “it was all a dream” in so many words would cheapen + rather spoil the story.

Sincerely
F Scott Fitzgerald

xxx. TO: Phyllis Duganne Parker

Fall 1920

38 W. 59th St. New York City

ALS, 1 p. Princeton University

Dear Miss Parker:

I havn't read Prologue² yet but I've noticed that many reviewers have connected it with This Side Of Paradise and I've been intending to get it for weeks. I shall, within the day. “Rosalind” is really flesh and blood—I married her eventually and am now writing a very much better + more “honest” book about her.

I'm sorry to say that I like “Four Fists” less than any story I've written save one. It's so priggish + righteous. But many people think its the best.

I can tell much more if our ides of youth are in accord after reading your book.

Thanks for your note

Sincerely F Scott Fitzgerald.

Miss Phyllis Duganne Parker Scituate, Mass. Second Cliff

Notes:

² Parker's 1920 novel about a New York girl during World War I.

xxx. To Shane Leslie

From Turnbull.

38 West 59th Street New York City

November 16, 1920

Dear Mr. Leslie:

Thanks for the article. It seems a pity that something even more exhaustive can't be written about Dr. Fay. He always told me to save his letters and some day we'd all publish them anonymously in some form. I found, however, that he'd written me less than he thought so the three letters that occur in the book are largely pieced together and even considerably added to from memories of remarks he'd made to me plus even a few things I thought he might have said.

The entire funeral description you quoted was culled from your letter except that “he would have enjoyed his own funeral” and “making all religion a thing of lights and shadows, etc.” I apologize most humbly. I think the influences of your style on me are traceable in various other portions of the book.

I met Fr. Hemmick in the Biltmore and he looked at me as tho he saw the horns already sprouting. Do you know that the story “Benediction” that I sent you and that also received the imprimatur of the most intelligent priest I know has come in for the most terrible lashing from the American Catholic intelligentsia? It's too much for me. It seems that an Englishman like Benson can write anything but an American had better have his works either pious tracts for nuns or else disassociate them from the church as a living issue.

I am coming to see you when we cross this winter.

Yours ever, F. Scott Fitzgerald

xxx. TO: Burton Rascoe

Nov 17th 1920

38 W. 59th St. New York City

ALS, 1 p. University of Pennsylvania

Dear Mr. Rascoe:

Thanks for the pamphlet.¹ I enjoyed your essay on Mencken—I think its a clever touch: his “being the only true American,” just as Anatole France “is the only living Catholic.” Also I agree with you that he is a greatman and bum critic of poetry. Why has no one mentioned to him or of him that he is in an intolerably muddled syllogism with several excluded middles on the question of Aristocracy. What on earth does he mean by it. Every Aristocrat of every race has come in for scathing comment yet he holds out the word as a universal panacea for art.

He + Nathan were up in the apartment drinking with us the other night + he was quite entheusiastic about Main Street.

This “Moon Calf”² is a wretched thing without a hint of glamor, utterly undistinguished, childhood impressions dumped into the reader's lap with a profound air of importance + the sort of thing that Walpole + Beresford³ (whom I abominate) turn out twice a year with great bawl-ings about their Art. I'd rather be Tarkington or David Graham Phillips⁴ and cast at least some color and radiance into my work! Wouldn't you?

Thanks again.

Yours F Scott Fitzgerald

Notes:

¹ H. L. Mencken.

² Novel by Floyd Dell that was favorably compared to This Side of Paradise.

³ English novelists Hugh Walpole and John Davys Beresford.

⁴ Prolific social novelist; author of Susan Lenox: Her Rise and Fall (1917).

xxx. From Burton Rascoe TO James Branch Cabell

Seminole, Okla.

November 20, 1920

Dear Cabell:

<…>

I have not yet seen Main Street, but from all the tidings I have had of it, a very great pleasure is in store for me. Lewis has the stuff in him and he needed only to be deflected from his fancy that it were “better to please humble Minnesota farmers than a handful of literary posers.” They tell me, too, that Floyd Dell’s Moon-Calf is a good piece of work, despite the letter I have today from F. Scott Fitzgerald denouncing it a shade too fervently to be disinterest[ed]ly as “a wretched thing, without a hint of glamour, utterly undistinguished.” (From what I have been able to gather the themes of Moon-Calf and of This Side of Paradise are parallel, Dell’s being only, as Fitzgerald puts it, without glamour.)

Mencken is to send me his second Prejudices. I have not yet read it. “The National Letters” is a revision, is it not, of the article which appeared in the Yale Review? A very fine, meaty essay, which I hope he has pruned of its defacing vulgarities and extravagances—— While we are on the subject of Mencken, can you help me in resounding this only idea of his which has ever stumped me? Wherein does his oft-repeated code of honor, as he explains it, differ essentially from the fundamentals of Christian ethic? I have studied his enunciation of it very closely and I can find no amazing disparity between his code and the code he so vehemently decries. One should expect in it some definite iconoclasm, some radical precept, some diverting variation. But, no, it becomes, as he states it, merely a code whereby a man of honor will not make sentimental overtures to a friend’s wife or sister in that friend’s absence and whereby a man violates his sacred honor if he shows up ten minutes late at an appointment.

I am acquainted with Walpole’s Green Mirror, but not with Mr. Perrin, and, of course, I have not seen his Captives. Holt has told me nothing about Robert Nathan and his new book; this is, I suppose, the same man who wrote the rather enthusiastically noticed book about Andover or Exeter and Harvard last year [Peter Kindred]. I dipped into it, found the style tedious, and turned it over to a reviewer. At the same time I was highly pleased with another book in kind, This Side of Paradise, which reminded me in some respects of the earlier Cords of Vanity. Fitzgerald is, I think, worth keeping an eye on; he is only 24 or 25 and his first book, as well as some of his stories in the Smart Set are very well done.

The printing of Cords is, as you say, abominable. The book looks like a Home Library reprint from very damaged plates; but Guy’s troubles appear to be too depressing already for me to increase them by strictures on a situation which, doubtless, he would help if he could. You are wrong, though, about his being disappointed in Figures of Earth. He tells me he has read it four times and that it is “heart-breakingly beautiful.” And my reading of the fragments confirms that judgment. Here is an ineffable beauty, and the magic of your touch transcends anything I know of in literature.

<…>

xxx. TO: George Stair

Inscription in The Flappers and Philosophers.

c. November 1920

For George W
with many Congratulations and good wishes
F. Scott Fitzgerald

xxx. TO: Unknown

Inscription in The Flappers and Philosophers.

1920

Sincerely yours,
F. Scott Fitzgerald

xxx. TO: Burton Rascoe

Dec 7th 1920

38 W. 59th St. New York

ALS, 1 p. University of Pennsylvania

Dear Mr. Rascoe:

Mencken's code of honor springs from Nietche doesn't it?—the agreement among the powerful to exploit the less powerful + respect each other. To me it has no connection with Christian ethics because there is no provision for any justice to “the boobery.”

Sorry I misquoted you. It was a slip of the pen. I still think Mooncalf is punk, Poor White¹ is fair, + Main Street is rotten. Everyone here is reading Well's History.² Most absorbing!

Faithfully

F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Notes:

¹ A 1920 novel by Sherwood Anderson.

2 Outline of History (1920) by H. G. Wells.

xxx. TO: John J. Fitzgerald (Paterson, N.J)

ALS, 3 pp., accompanied by a carbon copy of John J. Fitzgerald's two-page letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald and an envelope marked "Fitzgerald Correspondence" in an unknown hand [sold at online auction]

c. December 15th 1920

38 W. 59th St. New York City

Dear Mr. Fitzgerald:
Thanks for your letter. It’ll probably amuse you to know that “Amory” married “Rosalind,” two days before the publication of the novel. Their life in resumй and in rather lurid prospective is set down in my new novel which I’m just finishing + which I think will be serialized in the Metropolitan. However the characters have different names + pasts as I detest serials.

“Clara” is a cousin of mine who lives in Norfolk—however she's about 12 years older than me (I?) in real life.

Of course Amory’s “I know myself” is immature + entirely false. I finished the book when I was 22 + my point of view was much more ignorantly omniscient than it is now, when I should hesitate to proclaim anything except a pessimistic optimism. Don’t you think your “socialism won’t do” is a bit too certain. Seems to me it contains an echo of the “Democracy won’t do” + “Suffrage won’t do” in other ages.

Of course commercially I am at present a success—probably making as much as any three men in my class at Princeton all together yet in my dealings with either the magazines or the movies or the publishers I have found them, as a class, dull, unimaginative, with a vague philosophy compounded of a dozen or so popular phrases. I have worked when I first left the army, as an advertising man at $90 a month and a car repairer and was extremely disgusted at being one of the exploited hogs in either hog-pen.

I can see from your letter that you are a Catholic. I was a very strong one, very nearly a priest, and then when adversity really came + I struggled out of it it seemed that it was at first myself I must look to. My favorite writers are now Conrad, Haeckel + Nietche + Anatole France—of Americans H. L. Mencken.

Except for Benediction, The Ice Palace, + The Cut Glass Bowl my collection of stories is trash—to tickle the yokelry of Kansas and get enough money to live well. I doubt if I shall ever do such stuff again. “Darcy” was Sigourney Fay, a monsignori + my best friend. When he died the church became an utterly unreal but beautiful story to me.

I am utterly cynical about any moral law or the need of any. The one thing I am sure of is my love of beauty + even that fades + passes.

I’ve answered your letter at length because tho I still get two or three a day from readers it’s very seldom that one is any more than a gushing pangyric (sp!).

Sincerely
F. Scott Fitzgerald

This is "Rosalind," don't you prefer her to Clara? F. Scott Fitzgerald [on Zelda's photo]

xxx. From Zelda (Mrs. F. Scott Fitzgerald) TO James Branch Cabell

38 West 59th St. New York

[date?]

This is me—so don’t you think I rate this one colossal favor?

[a snapshot of Mrs. Fitzgerald enclosed]

Dear Mr. Cabell—

For a very young and pretty girl, won’t you please do an amazing favor? I simply have got to have a copy of Jergen, [sic] and don’t you know where I can find one? Its absence is spoiling a perfectly good Cabelliana— and anyway, I want to give it to Mr. F. Scott Fitzgerald for a Christmas present.

I’ve grown weary and musty with ransacking book-stores—and I’ve also tried to steal Mr. George Nathan’s copy: under pretense of intoxication- all I got was a Toledo blade fencing foil. Judging from the kick he’s raised about it, I presume it’s priceless so if you know anybody who doesn’t think your pen is mightier than Nathan’s foil please tell the goofer that I’d like to exchange—

This is very important, so please write me awfully quick—PLEASE

Presumptiously,
Mrs. F. Scott Fitzgerald

Isn’t The Rivet in Grand-Father's Neck the best of all? It makes me so sorry for myself—and you and all the rest—

I’m going to grow this thin [] if you don’t know where I can—

xxx. From James Branch Cabell TO Zelda Fitzgerald

Dumbarton, December 20, 1920

Dear Mrs. Fitzgerald:

It is not possible to resist an appeal so picturesque, and a picture so appealing, so I am seeing that a Jurgen goes forward to you with my compliments. If it can in any way add to the Christmas of the author of This Side of Paradise, who is, between ourselves, the most interesting young man that I know of anywhere, I shall be deeply pleased.

No, I cannot truthfully say that I think The Rivet the best of my books, but in the same breath I must remind you that I am the worst possible judge.

Yours faithfully,
James Branch Cabell

xxx. TO James Branch Cabell

From Turnbull.

38 West 59th Street New York City

Christmas, 1920

Dear Mr. Cabell:

It was the surprise of my life when Zelda handed me an autographed first edition of Jurgen this morning. You can imagine how I felt when I tell you I haven't even been able to borrow it. Whenever I go to George Nathan's I finger it covetously but I could never get farther than the door with it. People have a way of regarding it as infinitely precious. I want to see anyone try to borrow mine!

I once fingered a copy of it in a New Orleans bookstore one year ago and I've been cursing myself ever since for not buying it. I'd seen Mencken's review but was very broke at the time. I read a wretched article on you in The Bookman by someone last month. Mencken and water. It must amuse you to have whole book review sections devoted to you after years of comparative neglect. Do you remember Samuel Butler's

“Oh critics, cultured critics
Who will praise me after I am dead
Who will see in me either more or less
than I intended
How I should have hated you.”

—only you have the ironic good fortune of being alive.

I have just finished an extraordinary novel called The Beautiful Lady Without Mercy ¹ which shows touches of your influence, much of Mencken, and not a little of Frank Norris. Up to now such diverse writers as you, Mencken, Dreiser, and so forth have been held together more or less by the common enemy, philistia, but now that good books are, for the moment, selling almost as well as bad ones I wish Mencken would take a crack at such bogus masterpieces as Mooncalf, a book without glamor, without ideas, with nothing except a timorously uninteresting report of a shoddy and uninteresting life. I'm all for Salt, The Titan and Main Street. At Poor White I grow weary—but at Mooncalf—my God!

The only two books I've ever known my wife to weep over were Ethan Frome and The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck.¹ I appreciated your qualified tribute to Tarkington in Beyond Life. I agree with it perfectly.

I hope we'll meet in the near future and meanwhile I'm looking forward to Jurgen as I have never looked forward to a book before.

Most admiringly and gratefully,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Notes:

¹ Afterward The Beautiful and Damned.

¹ By Cabell.

xxx. TO Mr. And Mrs. Philip Mcquillan

From Turnbull.

38 West 59th Street New York City

December 28, 1920

Dear Aunt Lorena and Uncle Phil:

The steak set is fine! We were in a furnished cottage all summer so we bought no silver so this will come in awfully handy whenever we have dinner in our apartment. We won't have to bring the bread knife on the table any more. We certainly are much obliged.

I am just putting the finishing touches on my novel, The Beautiful Lady Without Mercy, which is the story of a young couple who rapidly go to pieces. It is much more carefully written than the first one and I have a good deal of faith in it tho it's so bitter and pessimistic that I doubt if it'll have the popular success of the first. Still, as you know, I really am in this game seriously and for something besides money and if it's necessary to bootlick the pet delusions of the inhabitants of Main Street (Have you read it? It's fine!) to make money I'd rather live on less and preserve the one duty of a sincere writer—to set down life as he sees it as gracefully as he knows how.

I have a contract you know with the Metropolitan Magazine to serialize my next novel for $7000 but I'm sure if they tried to do this one their circulation would drop. You know the stuff they want! My current idol, H. L. Mencken, says about it:

“If you yearn to uplift and like a happy comfortable sobbing, an upward rolling of eyes and a vast blowing of noses it will please you—on the other hand if you are a carnal fellow as I am, with a stomach ruined by alcohol, it will gag you.”

So within several years you'll probably hear that I've been hung by an earnest delegation of 100% Americans.

I am waiting to hear from a scenario I outlined on Griffith's order for __ __—who is a colorless wench in the life as is her pal, __ __. But I am not averse to taking all the shekels I can garner from the movies. I'll roll them joy pills (the literary habit) till doomsday because you can always say, “Oh, but they put on the movie in a different spirit from the way it was written!”

When I collect from Scribners this winter we expect to go abroad and spend a year or so. Why don't you come East? The best liquor in New York is only $8.00 a quart. I thought of sending you and Uncle Alley and Father a bottle each but I decided it was too risky. I imagine you'd pay about $18.00 for anything drinkable out there. Thanks again and luck to the redoubtable David.

As ever,
Scott

xxx. FROM James Branch Cabell TO Scott Fitzgerald

Dumbarton, December 29, 1920

Dear Mr. Fitzgerald:

When I received your wife’s delightful letter telling of her need of a copy of Jurgen against your Christmasing, I was doubly glad of my forethought in having laid in a small “private stock" between the time of the book’s suppression and the time the news reached the Richmond dealers. It enabled me, you see, to express tangibly the interest and hopes awakened by This Side of Paradise—— Oh, yes, I admired a great deal and quite cordially, but I optimistically insist upon regarding the book as prophecy forerunning even finer books.

I hope—though probably that is asking too much of human nature at your time of life—that you will not be very much spoiled by the book’s, quite merited, success. I can imagine no book which, in view of all the circumstances, could be more interesting reading than your second novel will be perforce. For you seem to have all the gifts—

But I have no desire to preach from my coign upon the gloomier side of forty. It is but that my interest is very lively.

No, I have read neither Moon-Calf nor Poor White. Floyd Dell, in particular, has been at such pains to express his abhorrence of all my ideas that his book hardly allures me with any prospect of congenial reading. But of my half of the dedication page in Main Street I am justly vain. That now is an excellent title, but I believe The Beautiful Lady without Mercy is better... I shall look forward to it, as well as to at least a glimpse of you when I am next in New York.

Yours faithfully,
James Branch Cabell

xxx. TO: H. L. Mencken

Dec 30th 1920

38 W 59th St. New York.

ALS, 1 p. New York Public Library

To the Right Reverend H. L. Mencken

Good Sir: The Bookman asked me to review your latest blasphemy which I have done according to the council of Nicea.¹

I am anxiously awaiting the next Smart Set. If you review the latest spud in the great potato tradition favorably, I refer to Mooncalf (“by Dostoieffski out of the Illinois corn crop”) I shall be vilely dissapointed. I agree on Main Street; I hesitate at Poor White but at this wretched thing in the manner of “The Harbor” by a man who can't stand Cabell but does not hesitate to borrow freely from James Joyce + even F. Scott Fitzg (c.f. the last two pages of Mooncalf) I shall decide that the time to cavil at some of thy rulings has arrived.

You're going to like my new novel. If you object to the title of this review let me know and I'll have it changed.

Salve et Vale et Ora pro Nobis F. Scott Fitzgerald

Notes:

¹ “The Baltimore Anti-Christ,” The Bookman (March 1921), a review of Prejudices: Second Series. Fitzgerald included a carbon copy of his review. The final paragraph in the typescript was not printed: “And to add—what a waste. Think of those dozens who would give everything for a chance to review a Mencken book. It seems cruel that the privilege could not have gone to Thorsten Veblen, to Paul Elmer More, to 'Dr. Wilson' or even to the great scapegoat, Harold B. Wright who would doubtless in his kindness have something to condone, something to cheer, something to joy in.” It is not known who made this deletion.

xxx. From: H. L. Mencken

Late 1920

Inscription in Mencken's Prejudices: Second Series (1920). Bruccoli Collection

xxx. TO James Branch Cabell

From Turnbull.

38 West 59th Street New York City

December 30, 1920

Dear Mr. Cabell:

Can't resist telling you that I have finished Jurgen and think on the whole that it's a finer novel than The Revolt of the Angels—tho at present I'm inclined to rank your work as a whole below both Conrad and Anatole France. However you're a much younger man.

My wife doesn't agree—you are by all odds her favorite novelist.

Please don't bother to answer this but if you'd let us know next time you're in New York we'd both be very flattered.

Yours, F. Scott Fitzgerald

“… Then Joe* read us… his poem at which both David ** … and I laughed appreciatively

“I'm sending a cable to Cabell
To cavil at callow callants
Who callously carped at the rabble
For caring for amours gallantes

For each pious burg out in Bergen
(a county in Jersey) has spoke
For jerking the joy out of Jurgen
And judging The Genius a joke!”
(From Margot Asquith's Diary, Vol. 9, p. 273)

Notes:

* King Joseph III of Patagonia.

** David Balfour, M.D., D.D.

1921

xxx. TO: H. L. Mencken

Jan 5th 1920 [January 1921]

38 W. 59th St. New York City

ALS, 1 p. New York Public Library

Dear Mencken:

I'm sorry you didn't care for the review + I'm also sorry I said that about Dell + my book. Lord knows I've borrowed freely in my time and again its only the people I detest like Frank Harris¹ + F. M. Hueffer² who quibble endlessly about “steals.” It was probably my imagination anyhow.

I am anxious to consult you about something. Could you lunch with me Mon. or Tues. at Delmonicoes or are you all charted up this trip?

Yours F Scott Fitzgerald

Notes:

¹ Novelist and editor.

² Better known as Ford Maddox Ford.

xxx. TO: John Biggs, Jr.

Winter 1921

ALS, 1 p. Bruccoli

38 W. 59th St.

New York City

Dear Jawn:

Wired you today for your adress which I’ve mislaid. The enclosure explains why I want it.

Glad you liked my suggestion. When Perkins comes to see you I shouldn’t tell him your plot but for God’s sake tell him the novel’s damn good! No decent workman belittles his own work unless, and until, its been overpraised.

When you finish it I have a brilliant scene for you. Let me hear from you soon

Scott F.

P.S. Perkins is one hell of a good fellow. He’s the one who stuck out for my 1 novel almost 3 years ago. He’s the editorial brain of The Scribner Co.
S.

P.S.2 Am writing a movie for Dorothy Gish by request of Griffith for which I hope to get ten thousand.

Notes:

Dorothy Gish, sister of Lillian Gish, was a silent-movie actress; D. W. Griffith was a legendary director. Fitzgerald’s scenario for Gish was rejected.

xxx. TO Sinclair Lewis

From Turnbull.

38 West 59th Street New York City

January 26, 1920 [1921]

Dear Mr. Lewis:

I want to tell you that Main Street has displaced Theron Ware in my favor as the best American novel. The amount of sheer data in it is amazing! As a writer and a Minnesotan let me swell the chorus—after a third reading.

With the utmost admiration,
F. Scott Fitzgerald

xxx. TO: Henry Raleigh

Before February 1921

38 W. 59th St. New York City

ALS, l p. Princeton University

Dear Mr. Raliegh:

I want to thank you for the really stunning illustrations you did for my story.² I think the girl dancing is one of the best I've ever seen and the book-throwing scene is a wonder of its kind—you can just see the books flying! Honestly I think they're the best illustrations I've ever seen! and you must have put a lot of work on them.

They inspired me so that I rewrote the whole ending to get rid of the dream idea + I think now that its a really effective story.

Your girl on the table reminds me faintly of Zelda. My best regards to Mrs. Raliegh.

Yours F. Scott Fitzgerald

Notes:

² “His Russet Witch,” Metropolitan Magazine (February 1921).

xxx. TO: Helen Carson

1 February 1921

38 W 59th St. New York City

ALS, 1 p. Princeton University

Feb 1st 1920

My Dear Miss Carson:

The Russet Witch is an awful muddle! I simply didn't consider time at all tho I suppose the “distant future” would do as well as anything. Its not a good story—too obscure.

Thanks for your note
Sincerely F Scott Fitzgerald

xxx. TO: H. L. Mencken

2 February 1921

38 W 59th St New York City

ALS, 1 p. New York Public Library

Feb 2nd 1920

Dear Mencken:

I am not waiting for an answer to this, but taking up your general offer to read exceptional but unfortunate novel mss. This is by a man my own age who is at present studying law at Cambridge.¹ To my mind it has the most beautiful writing—and I don't mean “fine” writing—that I've seen in a 'coon's age. I don't believe anyone in America can write like this—and the novel is also remarkable in the objectivity of its realism, that is, remarkable in so young a man. The man's in despair about it and wanted you to see it.

I took it to Scribners + Putnams who refused it on the grounds of obscurity. Can you give me some sort of opinion on it? The reverse side of the wrapper is readdressed and restamped.

As Ever F. Scott Fitzgerald

Just finished “My Antonia” ²—a great book! Mine is to be called “The Beautiful and Damned.”

On second thought I'm enclosing stamps here as I don't know how many. Wrapper is readdressed

Notes:

¹ John Biggs, Jr., Princeton classmate of Fitzgerald's.

² By Willa Cather (1918).

xxx. TO: Thomas Boyd

9 February 1921

38 W 59th St New York City Feb

ALS, 4 pp.2 Princeton University

9th 1920
Dear Mr Boyd:

It seems to me that the overworked art-form at present in America is this "history of a young man." Frank Norris began it with Vandover + the Brute, then came Stephen French Whitman with Predestined and of late my own book and Floyd Dell's Mooncalf. In addition I understand that Stephen Benet has also delved into his past.3 This writing of a young man's novel consists chiefly in dumping all your youthful adventures into the reader's lap with a profound air of importance, keeping carefully within the formulas of Wells and James Joyce. It seems to me that when accomplished by a man without distinction of style it reaches the depths of banality as in the case of Mooncalf... Up to this year the literary people of any pretensions-Mencken, Cabell, Wharton, Drieser, Hergeshiemer, Cather and Charles Norris have been more or less bonded together in the fight against intolerance and stupidity but I think that a split is due. On the romantic side Cabell, I suppose, would maintain that life has a certain glamor that detailed reporting-especially this reporting of the small mid-western town-can not convey to paper. On the realistic side Drieser would probably maintain that romantiscism tends immediatly to deteriorate to the Zane Grey-Rupert Hughes level, as it has in the case of Tarkington, fundamentally a brilliant writer... It is encouraging to notice that the number of pleasant sheep-i.e: people who think they're absorbing culture if they read Blasco Ibanez, H. G. Wells and Henry Van Dyke-are being rounded into shape. This class, which makes up the so called upper class in every American city, will read what they're told and now that at last we have a few brilliant men like Mencken at the head of American letters these aimable sheep will pretend to appreciate the appreciable of their own country instead of rushing to cold churches to hear noble but intelligable lords and meeting once a week to read papers on the afore-mentioned Blasco Ibanez. Even the stupidest people are reading Main Street and pretending they thought so all the time. I wonder how many people in St. Paul ever read The Titan 4 or Salt or even McTeague. All this would seem to encourage insincerity of taste. But if it does it would at least have paid Drieser for his early stuggles at the time when such cheapjacks as Robert Chambers were being hailed as the "Balzacs of America."

F Scott Fitzgerald

Notes:

2 Letter published as "The Credo of F. Scott Fitzgerald," St. Paul Daily News (20 February 1921), feature section, 8.

3 The Beginning of Wisdom (1921).

4 By Theodore Dreiser (1914).

xxx. TO: Robert D. Clark

ALS, 4 pp. Bruccoli

38 W 59th St.

New York City

Feb 9th 1920 [1921]

Dear Bob:

Your letter riled me to such an extent that I’m answering immediatly. Who are all these “real people” who “create business and politics”? and of whose approval I should be so covetous? Do you mean grafters who keep sugar in their ware houses so that people have to go without or the cheapjacks who by bribery and high-school sentiment manage to controll elections. I can’t pick up a paper here without finding that some of these “real people” who will not be satisfied only with “a brilliant mind” (I quote you) have just gone up to Sing Sing for a stay—Brindell and Hegerman, two pillars of society, went this morning.

Who in hell ever respected Shelley, Whitman, Poe, O. Henry, Verlaine, Swinburne, Villon, Shakespeare ect when they were alive. Shelley + Swinburne were fired from college; Verlaine + O Henry were in jail. The rest were drunkards or wasters and told generally by the merchants and petty politicians and jitney messiahs of their day that real people wouldn’t stand it And the merchants and messiahs, the shrewd + the dull, are dust—and the others live on.

Just occasionally a man like Shaw who was called an immoralist 50 times worse than me back in the 90ties, lives on long enough so that the world grows up to him. What he believed in 1890 was heresy then—by by now its almost respectable. It seems to me I’ve let myself be dominated by “authorities” for too long—the headmaster of Newman, S.P. A, Princeton, my regiment, my business boss—who knew no more than me, in fact I should say these 5 were all distinctly my mental inferiors. And that’s all that counts! The Rosseaus, Marxes, Tolstois—men of thought, mind you, “impractical” men, “idealist” have done more to decide the food you eat and the things you think + do than all the millions of Roosevelts and Rockerfellars that strut for 20 yrs. or so mouthing such phrases as 100% American (which means 99% village idiot), and die with a little pleasing flattery to the silly and cruel old God they’ve set up in their hearts.

A letter

Stratford-on-Avon
June 8th 1595

Dear Will:
Your family here are much ashamed that you could write such a bawdy play as Troilius and Cressida. All the real people here (Mr. Beef, the butcher and Mr. Skunk, the village undertaker) say they will not be satisfied with a brilliant mind and a pleasant manner. If you really want to ammount to something you’ve got be respected for yourself as well as your work

Affectionately
Your Mother, Mrs. Shakespeare

Concieted Ass! says Bob.

And I don’t blame you for saying so, neither do I blame anybody much for anything. The only lesson to be learned from life is that there’s no lesson to be learned from life.

Have you read Main Street? Its a great book. Had a letter from Sinclaire Lewis telling me we must not expect our books to sell in St. Paul. I expect my new one, just completed, “The Beautiful and Damned” to be barred from the St. Paul library—by the wives of Mr. Frost and Mr. Rietsky—and Mr. Severance.

Don Stuart vowing he can stand business no longer has come to N.Y. to take up writing. He’s a knock-out, I think.

But really Bob, fond as I am of you, I do think that was a silly letter to write me.

Come on east + look us up when you do.

Faithfully
F Scott Fitzg—

Notes:

Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street (1920) satirized small-town, midwestern values.

Donald Ogden Stewart became a successful humorist and screenwriter.

xxx. TO James Branch Cabell

From Turnbull.

[38 West 59th Street] New York City

February 23, [1921]

Dear Mr. Cabell:

I was delighted to get Figures of Earth. I had just ordered it at the bookstore, which copy I shall present to some unworthy charity.

I am cancelling all engagements to read it today and tomorrow.

Having finished my second novel nee The Beautiful Lady Without Mercy but now known as The Beautiful and Damned I am about to sell my soul… and go to the coast to write one moving picture…. “Well,” as Codman says in his touching monograph on Anchovies, “there is no movie in Jurgen. It just won't fillum.” Incidentally given free rein, wouldn't it be a treat to see it unexpurgated in the movies?

That was an idiotic review of The Cords of Vanity by Richard Le Gallienne—which reminds me I must order France's new book, The Fall of the Angels. It must be a sequel to The Revolt of the Angels.

Still hoping that we may meet soon.

Faithfully, F. Scott Fitzgerald

xxx. To: Lorainne Pell

c. March 1921

Inscription in The Flappers and Philosophers.

For Lorainne Pell. In substitution for the drunken hieroglyphics of last Thursday night or last Wednesday night or was it last Tuesday night From
yours faithfully,
F. Scott Fitzgerald.

xxx. To Tom

ALS, 1 page [letter affixed to the rear pastedown of a 1920 hardcover edition, second printing, of This Side of Paradise], Auction

March 27, 1921

Dear Tom
Congratulations on your magnificent engagement. Send me an invitation & I’ll drink some of your wedding liquor. Our adress [sic] is 38 W 59th St & our phone is Plaza 7780. Please call when you next come to N. Y.

Notes:

Letter written from Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald’s childhood home at “6 Pleasant Ave, Montgomery Ala. The recipient of this letter lived across the street from 6 Pleasant Avenue, Zelda Sayre’s home until 1920 when she married F. Scott Fitzgerald. The Fitzgeralds then lived at 38 West 59th Street in Manhattan from October 1920 through April 1921, the period in which Scott wrote his second novel, The Beautiful and the Damned. When Zelda learned she was pregnant in February 1921 she traveled home to Montgomery, followed a month later by Scott. In May 1921, they took their first trip to Paris; the magazine photo affixed to the front endpaper of Fitzgerald, Zelda, and their daughter Scottie is from a later visit, at their Parisian apartment at 14 rue de Tilsitt, where they lived from late April–August 1925.

xxx. To Carl Hovey

[from Fitzgerald/Hemingway Annual, 1978]

Fri, April 22nd 1921

38 W. 59th Street

Dear Mr. Hovey:
I’m sending you today, through Reynolds, the first of the three parts of The Beautiful and Damned. The second part should reach you Monday and the third part Tuesday.

After the ten months I have been working on it it has turned out as I expected—and rather dreaded—a bitter and insolent book that I fear will never be popular and that will undoubtedly offend a lot of people. Personally, I should advise you against serializing it— now that the damn thing is off my hand I can try a few cheerful stories. If you do not want it, I don’t believe I shall offer it to anyone else but shall let Scribners bring it out in September—which is probably the psychological time anyhow.

On May 3d Zelda and I are going abroad for a few months (and I expect to write several movies and short stories while I’m over) so I’m sending you the thing in parts that I may get as early a decision as possible. Could you let me know, do you think, by Saturday the thirtieth? You see if you don’t serialize it I shall have to depend on an advance from Scribner for our trip and of course I can’t ask for that until I hear from you.

My best to Mrs Hovey

Sincerely
F Scott Fitzgerald

Notes:

through Reynolds - The Paul Revere Reynolds Agency, where Harold Ober was a partner.

probably the psychological time anyhow - In a letter to Perkins, dated 21 April 1921, Fitzgerald repeats what he tells Hovey; he feels the Metropolitan will not serialize the novel, but that Cosmopolitan might.

xxx. TO: Ralph Block

2 May 1921

38 W. 59th St. New York City

ALS, 2 pp. Princeton University

Dear Ralph:

You certainly were slick to remember about the letter. I probably never would meet Aldous Huxley. Very boiled at present but think you're a very good egg. Will get in touch with you when I return. My book appears in England (This Side ect.) the week I get there. Sail tomorrow. Have you heard about S. amuel G. oldwyn + G. eorge B. ernard S. haw:

Scene 1st + last

G.B.S: “The trouble is that you're thinking about art + I'm thinking about money. We never could get together.” This is vouched for. Is it veritas?

Yours in Christ F. Scott Fitzgerald
% Goldwyn

Notes:

Ralph Block apparently provided Fitzgerald with a letter of introduction to Huxley.

xxx. FROM: John Galsworthy

May 13 [1921]

ALS, 2 pp. Scrapbook. Princeton University

Dear Mr. Scott Fitzgerald,

Mr. Maxwell Perkins tells me you are just arrived over here. It would be a great pleasure to my wife + myself if Mrs. Fitzgerald and you could come and dine here with us at 8 o'clock.¹ The St. John Ervines² are coming, and possibly Lennox Robinson, the Irish playwright.

If you come by 'Tube,' take your train at 'Strand' station, to Hampstead station, and we are 4 minutes walk, up Holly Hill into The Grove, and turn to the left toward the tall white Admiral's House. Grove Lodge adjoins it.

Much hoping to see you. Sincerely yours John Galsworthy

By taxi-cab its about twenty minutes from the Hotel Cecil.
J.G.

Notes:

¹ The Fitzgeralds accepted the invitation.

² English playwright and novelist.

xxx. To Shane Leslie

From Turnbull.

Paris, France

May 24, 1921

Dear Mr. Leslie:

Just a word to thank you for your courtesies to us. I think Zelda enjoyed her trip through Wapping more than anything that's happened so far.

We had dinner with Galsworthy the night before we left and I was rather disappointed in him. I can't stand pessimism with neither irony nor bitterness. Incidentally, I tried all over London to get you The Mysterious Stranger by Twain but evidently it's not published in England. I am almost through with Manning ¹ and intend to review him in The Bookman.

France is a bore and a disappointment, chiefly, I imagine, because we know no one here. Italy on Wednesday.

Faithfully,
F. Scott Fitzgerald

Notes:

¹ Leslie's biography of Cardinal Manning.

xxx. TO: Ruth Sturtevant Smith

June 10th 1921

Grande-Hotel letterhead. Rome The American Express Co. Rome Italy

ALS, 2 pp. Albert Sturtevant

Dear Ruth:

In Venice we were bored one day and seeing an American destroyer in the harbor we took a gondola out to see it. A very polite officer showed us about + you can imagine my surprise when I saw in the mess room a large photograph of your brother, Al. It was destroyer 240, “The Sturtevant”

Below the picture was a bronze tablet—name, date of birth + death + rank.

I don't suppose you've ever seen the ship so I tried to make some snapshots—but the enclosed is the only one to come out. They were anxious to know all about your brother so I told them all I knew. They are sending you a painting of the ship.

We are having a rather punk time. Best to Curt.

As Ever
F. Scott Fitzg—

xxx. To Carl Hovey

ALS, 2 pp. Letterhead of Claridge's, London. Huntington Library [from Fitzgerald/Hemingway Annual, 1978]

June 25th, 1921

Dear Mr Hovey:

What you say about the book fell sweetly on my ear. This Side of Paradise is having a checkered career in England. I’m not sure yet whether its going to be a sucess or not.

We spent a month in Italy + had a rotten time. We’re coming to America early in July and I’m curious to see what you’ve done with the novel. Perhaps some of your cutting away may give excellent suggestion for further pruning of the book section.

Zelda and I feel you’ve made a grave mistake about the illustrator. This Benson did one of my stories in the Post + My God! you ought to see the grey blurs he made of my beautiful protagonists. But perhaps he’ll rise to the occasion. My best to Mrs. Hovey.

As Ever
F Scott Fitzgerald

Notes:

further pruning of the book section - Fitzgerald later told Ober that he would not want The Great Gatsby 'to be chopped as Hovey chopped The Beautiful and Damned' (As Ever, p. 67).

1 Fitzgerald's first version of The Beautiful and Damned-a 130,000-word typescript-was cut some 40,000 words by Hovey for serialization in The Metropolitan; Fitzgerald subsequently revised his original version for book publication.

2 Leslie L. Benson illustrated The Beautiful and Damned serial.

xxx. TO: John Franklin Carter

Aug 3d 1921

Montgomery, Alabama

ALS, 1 p. University of Wyoming

Dear John:

The Queen² arrived here safely. She's excellent isn't she. Even such an old Tory as Viscount Bryce, with whom I had a talk on the boat coming back, thinks its a great book, tho he considered Eminent Victorians an outrage.

Yrs F. Scott Fitz

Notes:

² Lytton Strachey, Queen Victoria (1921).

xxx. TO Miss Vas

From Turnbull.

Dellwood White Bear Lake, Minnesota

September 14, 1921

My dear Miss Vas:

Your teacher is probably an ass—most of them are, I've found. Your details about me are correct but your spelling is as incorrect as mine. There were 125 misspellings in the 1st printing of Paradise.

I would enjoy seeing your review—also your novel. There is no such thing as “getting your values straightened out” except for third-class minds who are willing to accept the latest jitney interpretation of the universe by some Illinois or South Carolina messiah.

Sincerely,
F. Scott Fitzgerald

xxx. TO: Thomas Boyd

Sept 19th 1921

Dellwood, White Bear

ALS, 1 p. Elizabeth B. Nash

Dear Boyd:

The enclosed is not typed—I have no typewriter!¹ Also its written in Mencken's manner which I don't mind parodying for St. Paul consumption. I have a copy of the book—shall I return you the unbound one?

Please send me three copies of the issue containing it—will you? No excitement. The Metropolitan committed very little butchery on the 2nd installment—just enough to annoy me.

Yrs.
F Scott Fitzg—

P.S. Will Crafts sue me for libel?² If so cut out the word sexual!

Notes:

¹ Fitzgerald's review of John Dos Passos' Three Soldiers in the St. Paul Daily News (25 September 1921).

² Dr. Wilbur F. Crafts, Superintendent of the International Reform Bureau and Prohibition leader, famous for his attacks on popular amusements. Fitzgerald referred to Crafts as giving “sexual thrills to the wives of prominent butchers and undertakers,” which the paper printed as “bilogical thrills.”

xxx. From H. L. Mencken To F. Scott Fitzgerald

Letters of H. L. Mencken, ed. Guy J. Forgue (New York: Knopf, 1961)

H. L. Mencken

1524 Hollins St.
Baltimore

October 7th [1921 ?]

Dear Fitzgerald

Let us, in God's name, drop honorifics. In any case, mine is not Mr. I prefer the Russian Knaiz, or Freiherr, or Mons., pronounced to rhyme with Ganz.

The Norris scheme is excellent and it goes without saying that I'll be glad to help it along. The impediment is the fact that most of the Norris books, if not all, are owned by Doubleday, Page & Co., a very lousy bunch. However, Charles Norris might be able to get control of them. A Man’s Woman is bad stuff, but it ought to go into the series. So with the book of essays, The Responsibility of the Novelist. A good man to do the Blix preface would be George Sterling. He took me on a night-hack jaunt around San Francisco to visit its scenes. You ought to do one yourself. ¹

Tell Wilson I forgive him for his article. The other day Crowninshield asked me for a photograph. I sent him one that might be used as an advertisement for a rat-poison. A heavy frown. The face of a killjoy.

But did Wilhelms tell you the sequel—how I locked him up in a room with a colored woman, and she worked her wicked will upon him?

Yours,
H. L. Mencken

Notes:

^[1] Mencken had been in San Francisco to cover the Democratic Convention in 1920.

xxx. FROM: H. L. Mencken

After 26 October 1921

ALS, 1 p. Scrapbook. Princeton University

Dear Fitz:

Congratulations! A superb patriotic feat! I only hope young Ma is in her usual excellent health and spirits. The young one will be a prize beauty. Name her Charlotte after Charles Evans Hughes.

When are you coming east again?

Yours in Xt. H. L. Mencken

xxx. TO: H. L. Mencken

After 26 October 1921

The Commodore Hotel Western Ave St. Paul, Minn

ALS, 1 p. New York Public Library

Dear Mencken—

Thank you for your note. Mother and infant are well and happy but I am feeling very old as I see the next forty years mapping themselves out for me. For God's sake tell me something to read—seriously I mean, don't send me a list of medical or spiritual titles. I am sick to my stomach with fiction and have been revelling in Paine's Mark Twain.¹

Do you know where a fella could get the Fireside Conversation in the time of Queen Elizebeth?² Your fame is spreading apace into the religious homes of St. Paul

Yours in state of extreme depression F Scott Fitzgerald

Notes:

¹ Probably Albert Bigelow Paine, A Short Life of Mark Twain (1920).

² 1601: Conversation, As It Was by the Social Fireside in the Time of the Tudors, a privately printed scatological work by Mark Twain.

xxx. FROM: H. L. Mencken and possibly also from George Jean Nathan

December 22, 1921

The Smart Set letterhead Mr. and Mrs. F. Scott Fitzgerald, 599 Summit Avenue, St. Paul, Minn.

TLS, 1 p. Princeton University

Dear Mr. and Mrs. Fitzgerald:

As you have doubtless heard, both Mr. Nathan and Mr. Mencken are in Sing Sing Prison following a peculiarly dastardly assault upon a poor colored girl in the outskirts of Stanford, Conn. I am caring for their correspondence, and will forward your Christmas card to them. This crime was committed, unfortunately, while under the influence of strong drink. The colored lady's name was Miss Gladys Johnson of Nashville, Tenn., daughter of the late Rev. Hercules Johnson, D.D.

Sincerely S. A. Golde Secretary.

xxx. From: Eugene O'Neill

1921

Inscription in O'Neill's The Emperor Jones and Diff'rent the Straw (1921). Princeton University

To Scott Fitzgerald with all that we both mean.
Eugene O'Neill

Notes:

The only known communication between O'Neill and Fitzgerald.

1922

xxx. TO Mr. Milkman

ALS, 1 p. [sold at Heritage Auction in 2007]

[1922]

Dear Mr. Milkman:

I am
Very sincerely Yours
F. Scott Fitzgerald

xxx. TO Lucy Norval

ALS, 1 p. [sold at Heritage Auction in 2019]

On envelope: "Miss Lucy Norval, Radisson Hotel, Minneapolis Minn." Another hand has crossed out the address and written "c/o McKesson & Robbins, 91 Fulton St., N.Y.C., NY"

15 February 1922

St. Paul, Minnesota

A message came yesterday from Mr. Joseph Hergesheimer telling me that you were at the Radisson hotel. I delayed writing you because we have been having a double misfortune here with a desperately sick baby and my wife's mother in such condition that only the baby kept us from starting immediately south...I didn't mean to burden you with a list of domestic calamities but I wanted to explain my apparent discourtesy in not writing immediately and availing ourselves of the pleasure Mr. Hergesheimer's message promised...

F. Scott Fitzgerald

xxx. Inscription TO Mollie McQuillan Fitzgerald

6 February 1922

Inscription to Mother in The Beautiful and Damned (University of Virginia), and autograph from another copy with the same date.

For Mother:
This book which I feel ...

xxx. TO George Jean Nathan

From Turnbull.

626 Goodrich Avenue St. Paul, Minnesota

[Winter, 1922]

Dear George:

Thanks for your note. In the same mail came a letter from Harris' office about my play.¹ I suppose they would be best as, according to Zoe Akin, Hopkins is a bad financier and John Williams is on the rocks. The play is, like most of my stuff, a very bad performance full of exceedingly good things. It varies between comedy and burlesque and is composed of three intermediate fanciful scenes strung together not too securely between a very solid first and last act.

I shall probably be sending you an exquisite novelette within the month—the best thing I've ever done—something really remarkable.

By now you've read my book and though I know it amused and entertained you I'd give anything to talk with you and hear what you thought of its artistic merits. Bunny (Edmund B.) Wilson is doing an article on me for the March Bookman in which he dissects me cruelly and completely. I can't tell you how I enjoyed it. He has a fine mind, George, and except for Aldous Huxley and Dos Passos he's worth all the rest of the “younger generation” put together.

A long time ago when Donald Stewart first met you he wondered if you recognized him as the man whom we brought to your apartment once and who went on a party with Ruth, Zelda, you and me.

We're coming East for a fortnight in March. I read The Critic and the Drama with the greatest interest, though I had read most if not all of it in the Smart Set. Best to Mencken.

As ever,
F. Scott Fitzgerald

Notes:

¹ The Vegetable.

xxx. FROM James Branch Cabell TO Scott Fitzgerald

Dumbarton, February 24, 1922

My dear Scott Fitzgerald:

Having thoughtlessly failed to keep the wrapper of your book, with the Minneapolis address, I am sending my thanks perforce in care of your publishers. I have of course been following The Beautiful and Damned in the Metropolitan—with pleasure and admiration. I have found it gratifyingly solid—moving, human, brilliant at times, and always nicely ironic. Your ending could hardly be happier. Now I find that in the serial publication there seem to have been considerable cuts, so I am going through the novel again with, I foresee, augmented delight. Meanwhile I forward my thanks both for the sending and the writing of this book.

Yours faithfully, James Branch Cabell

xxx. TO: James Branch Cabell

c. March 1922

626 Goodrich Ave. St. Paul, Minn.

ALS, 1 p. Princeton University

Dear Mr. Cabell:

I feel than by asking your permission to quote a private letter I have not acted in the best of taste. There have been, of course, innumerable precedents of late, but that does not excuse it. I appreciate your exceeding kindness and courtesy.

It seems that Perkins of Scribners had heard from some editor in Richmond that you liked the book. He had tried to get in touch with that editor to see if it was quotable—realizing how invaluable a word from you might be. For some reason he evidently failed, and he wired me Monday night—or Sunday—asking me if I had a letter from you which was quotable.¹ I wired you immediately.

Ive had the pleasure of a three day amour with an Exquisite Case of Spanish Influenza, and like all such illicit affairs it has left me weak + chastened. I hope you are not the same.

Faithfully F Scott Fitzgerald

xxx. Inscription TO Joseph Hergesheimer

c. March 1922 (?)

Inscription in The Beautiful and Damned (University of Virginia).

For Joseph Hergesheimer from F Scott Fitzgerald who thinks he will find no warmth in this cold hell. St. Paul

xxx. TO: Charles [Henry] Kingsley

c. March 1922

Inscription in The Beautiful and Damned.

Notes:

Kingsley moved to London with his family, and they rented a house in Richmond, known as the Old Palace. It was actually the gatehouse on Richmond Green and what little remains of a palace built by Henry the Vlll. And therefore, Fitzgerald's playful use of the name "Henry" being substituted for "Charles" in this inscription.

xxx. TO James Branch Cabell

From Turnbull.

626 Goodrich Avenue St. Paul, Minnesota

March 4, 1922

Dear Mr. Cabell:

Thank you for your letter. I am tremendously sorry you followed The Beautiful and Damned in the serial because it was cut to pieces. But I appreciate the compliment of your doing so. And the final book version was considerably revised. However it isn't worth going through again, for you, I mean.

Hergesheimer, that charming egotist, came through this swollen Main Street awhile back. He didn't like it.

When do we meet?

I have just finished a comedy for the commercial stage.¹

When do you publish another book? Please do soon as I am bored with all current fiction including my own.

Yours faithfully,
F. Scott Fitzgerald

This is yours. I believe I'll use it for awhile. [in the margin of farewell]

I appreciate your kindness in saying those things about the book. I cut part of the ending in the final revision, as you notice. I hope it wasn't the part you liked. I liked the other ending but it seemed to spoil the general hardness of the book.

Notes:

¹ The Vegetable.

xxx. TO: Shane Leslie

12 March 1922

St Paul, Minn 626 Goodrich Ave.

ALS, 2 pp. Bruccoli

Dear Leslie—

Don't tell me that having moved to the Riererra you're not going to get the copy of my new bitter book sent to 10 Talbot Square!

So you called the novel The Oppidan. As you know I have read some of it and was enormously interested. I do not understand what you mean when you say “Scribner is taking 1000 copies” but I shall certainly get one as soon as it can be got, and review it for either The Bookman or The Literary Review (N.Y. Post.)¹ I intended to review Manning² but by the time we were settled in one place and I took up writing again it was too late.

Your advertisments scattered about the page are hilarious—especially “Pawn Main Street and by The Oppidan.” I wish to heaven I was on the Riviera and perhaps I could think up something gay also. We often talk of you and of how meeting you in London was the best thing in our whole trip, not excepting Galesworthy and the Pope. We have been out in my home city, St Paul, for the winter but are going east for three weeks tommorrow. I doubt if we'll get abrood for a year. My compliments to Mrs. Leslie and your progeny.

Scribners have brought out my second novel in a 1st edition of 10,000—and the reviews—all except the puritan Times which damned it unmercifully—have been very favorable. I hope to heaven you havn't been reading the battered, shattered version of it which appeared in the Metropolitan.

Zelda and I both send entheusiastic greetings to you. She has never forgot that romantic walk through Wapping.³ She would like to take it again—but me—give me a primrose path under the full sun

Yours
F Scott Fitzgerald

Notes:

¹ “Homage to the Victorians,” New York Tribune (14 May 1922).

² Leslie's biography of Cardinal Manning.

³ Leslie's notes with this letter read:

For Fitz' LIFE if ever written

The romantic walk in the foggy East End refers to Zelda riding on my back when she tired. I wish we three cd have been photographed.

Letter Fitz wrote me in 1922

Shane Leslie

I took Zelda & Fitz through London Docks & Slums—ending at Wapping.

xxx. TO: George A. Kuyper

ALS, 1 p. Princeton University

You embarrass me, Mr Kuyper, beyond words. I did not suspect until your letter came that Gloria's birthday was a movable feast.¹ And then I looked it up—My God! And I can never straighten it out without rewriting the whole book.

It is really a most embarrasing predicament. God! This bugbear of inaccuracy. My first novel had 210 mispellings when it issued from the press!²

Thank you for your kindness in saying you liked the novel. It's a wretched novel, excellent in detail. I may do better later

Sincerely F Scott Fitzgerald

626 Goodrich Ave. St Paul, Minn March 13th, 1922

Notes:

¹ The Beautiful and Damned stipulated three different birth dates for Gloria.

² An exaggerated figure.

xxx. FROM James Branch Cabell TO Scott Fitzgerald

Dumbarton, March 18, 1922

My dear Scott Fitzgerald:

... It was a pleasure to be quoted as an admirer of your new book; of course if I had written something expressly for that purpose, I would gladly have been more loud in phrase. I believe that, upon the whole, my feeling as to the book is pretty accurately—with one exception—summed by Mencken in the April Smart Set. The exception is the incredible dictum about “the thing is botched at the end”—I having particularly joyed in the end,—but all the last part of Mencken’s review is the most accurate possible statement of my reasons for liking The Beautiful and Damned.

Perhaps by good luck, I had not seen the last installment in the Metropolitan when the book came, so that the only ending known to me is the book version; I shall not look into the other, as this one I find amply satisfying.

You ask about my new book—I shall, D.V., begin on it two weeks from to-day, but as yet even its subject matter remains unknown. All that the at all near future promises is the new Gallantry and the little Lineage of Lichfield, which I think more important than anybody else appears to, and which therefore will be limited to 365 copies—I mean, on account of my publisher’s failure to appreciate the book’s “universal appeal.”

Yours faithfully,
James Branch Cabell

xxx. TO James Branch Cabell From H. L. Mencken

Baltimore, March 21 [1922]

Dear Cabell:

I find by my records, greatly to the distress of my conscience, that I did not send you The American Language. Well, blame Knopf: he got the whole matter of the advance copies horribly balled up. But God will not forgive me. At the least he will send me the great pox. I enclose a slip to glue into the book. Also a copy of the confidential Credo.

Fitzgerald blew into New York last week. He has written a play, and Nathan says that it has very good chances. But it seems to me that his wife talks too much about money. His danger lies in trying to get it too rapidly. A very amiable pair, innocent and charming.

I have had no news from Hergesheimer, save a telegram. Gouverneur Morris, who is at Monterey, has laid in 100 jugs against his coming. I have a suspicion that he will try them all.

I am tackling Prejudices III and it is very hard going.

Sincerely yours,
H. L. Mencken

xxx. TO James Branch Cabell

From Turnbull.

The Plaza New York City

March 27, 1922

Dear Mr. Cabell:

Am dictating this and it is the most profound agony I have ever gone through. The stenographer embarrasses me because I feel that I have got to think quickly and in consequence everything comes in broken clauses. But I simply cannot let your very kind letter go unanswered any longer. You were very nice to allow me to place such an endorsement in the advertisements of my book. It has gone up beyond 30,000, in fact it will touch 40,000 within the week, but I doubt very much if as many people will like it who liked This Side of Paradise. I saw Mencken and Nathan for a minute the other morning. Mencken seemed nervous and tired, but Nathan is his usual self, albeit developing a paunch and losing a bit of his remarkable youthfulness. Why do not you publish a geography of the lands of your own creating on the inside, front and back covers of your next book, much as Conrad has in the last edition of Victory? I think it would be very amusing both for you and for your public, or would it, in the case of an imaginative country, appear too obvious?

Am in New York, having rather a poor time and will return to St. Paul Sunday.

As ever,
F. Scott Fitzgerald

xxx. TO: Mr. Braddy

TLS, 1 p. Princeton University

Plaza Hotel letterhead. New York City

March 27, 1922.

Dear Mr. Braddy:—

I am amazed at the difference of opinion about the ending of my book. Mencken and Nathan insist that I botched the thing by having them get the money in the end, while Cabell and Benchley (of “Life") think that it is the best thing in the book. You seem to be one of the few people who even read those last two paragraphs in the Metropolitan, and I am still confused as to whether or not I made a mistake.

Again thank you for the praise which it pleases you to give me.

Sincerely, F Scott Fitzgerald

xxx. To Thomas Boyd

[End of March (?) 1922]

Dear Boyd,
It seems to me that that was a rather ill-advised interview Sunday. Should it come to the attention of the Metropolitan it is apparent that all friendly relations between Hovey and myself should (crossed out) would cease. I thought you understood that a popular magazine reserves the rights to make changes--you see it would be bad business for me to criticize them publicly for making changes that they have bought the right to make.

I trust that clause of it won't appear elsewhere.
Sincerely, B.
F Scott Fitzgerald

xxx. TO: John Franklin Carter

Spring 1922

626 Goodrich Ave. St Paul, Minn.

ALS, 1 p. University of Wyoming

Dear John:

Thanks for your letter. The B. + D. is a better book than Paradise tho I havn't the same affection for it.

Liking the people of Williamstown would cramp my style too. You'd better reread My Antonia before you revise.

Send me a copy of the Ladies Reading Club Article.

I remember Rome chiefly as the place where Zelda and I had an appalling squable. In fact that afternoon and noon with you was the only luminous spot in our stay.

Yours
F Scott Fitzgerald

We may go to Hollywood this summer.

xxx. TO: Burton Rascoe

c. April 1922

626 Goodrich Ave. St Paul, Minn

ALS, 1 p. University of Pennsylvania

Dear Burton:

I'm writing you at the behest of the famous author, my wife, to tell you that the great paper which you serve is with holding from her the first money she has ever earned¹ Whatever it be, from a rouble to a talent, prick your clerk into satisfying her avarice—for she has become as one mad.

You have certainly done wonders with the pages in the Tribune. Why not booklet form? Even the unspeakable Herald has an unspeakable literary booklet. Have you discovered that Vivian Shaw is not Bernard's daughter as was originally reported.² I wish we could have seen more of each other. My best regards to your wife

Clip for preservation on dotted line. F Scott Fitzgerald

Notes:

¹ Zelda reviewed The Beautiful and Damned for the New York Tribune (2 April 1922).

² Gilbert Seldes wrote reviews under the pseudonym Vivian Shaw.

xxx. TO: Chester B. Sikking

Postmarked 7 April 1922

626 Goodrich Ave. St Paul, Minn

ALS, 2 pp. Princeton University

Dear Chester:

Thanks both for the clipping,² which I had not seen and for (especially) your letter. I have thought about you frequently and thot of sending you a copy of my second book but I didn't know whether you'd even recognize my name on the cover.

One of the chapters in it is concerned with a southern camp and you'd doubtless recognize many of the incidents. In fact the hero's position in the army is, up to a certain point, very much like yours was. As you may know I married Zelda Sayre, the Montgomery girl I was so smitten with. We have one child and divide our time between St Paul and New York and Europe. Whenever I pass through Illinois I think of the motley crew with which you arrived—you especially, with a battered hat tipped rakishly over one ear and a beautiful pair of fallen arches.

I hope we will meet someday. Pay my respects to Mrs. Sicking + to young Chester (whose arrival gave you, as I recall, considerable worry). I remain

Most cordially yours
F Scott Fitzgerald

Notes:

² An article about the 67th Infantry.

xxx. TO: Harford Powell

ALS, 2 pp. Auction

626 Goodrich Avenue,
St. Paul, Minnesota

April 19, [1922]

Dear Mr Powell—
Reynolds writes me that you have bought Benjamin Button. I would like to make a suggestion ..... short blurb ... stimulate the reader's interest ...

Mark Twain once remarked that it was a pity that the best part of life came first and the saddest part afterward. He thought that old age should be run through with first and childhood saved as a reward. What do you think? Perhaps when you've finished this extraordinary story you'll agree with him - and perhaps not.

xxx. TO: Charles Scribner II

TLS, 4 pp. Princeton University

626 Goodrich Avenue,
St. Paul, Minnesota,

April 19th, 1922.

Dear Mr. Scribner:

I am consumed by an idea and I can’t resist asking you about it. It’s probably a chestnut, but it might not have occurred to you before in just this form.

No doubt you know of the success that Boni and Liveright have made of their “Modern Library”. Within the last month Doubleday Page & Company have withdrawn the titles that were theirs from Boni’s modern library, and gone in on their own hook with a “Lambskin Library”. For this they have chosen so far about 18 titles from their past publications—some of them books of merit (Frank Norris and Conrad, for instance) and some of them trashy, but all books that at one time or another have been sensational either as popular successes or as possible contributions to American literature. The Lambskin Library is cheap, bound uniformly in red leather (or imitation leather), and makes, I believe, a larger appeal to the buyer than the A. L. Burt reprints, for its uniformity gives it a sort of permanence, a place of honor in the scraggly library that adorns every small home. Besides that, it is a much easier thing for a bookseller to display and keep up. The titles are numbered and it gives people a chance to sample writers by one book in this edition. Also it keeps before the public such books as have once been popular and have since been forgotten.

Now my idea is this: the Scribner Company have many more distinguished years of publishing behind them than Doubleday Page. They could produce a list twice as long of distinguished and memorable fiction and use no more than one book by each author—and it need not be the book by that author most in demand.

Take for instance Predestined and The House of Mirth. I do not know, but I imagine that those books are kept upstairs in most bookstores, and only obtained when some one is told of the work of Edith Wharton and Stephen French Whitman. They are almost as forgotten as the books of Frank Norris and Stephen Crane were five years ago, before Boni’s library began its career.

To be specific, I can imagine that a Scribner library containing the following titles and selling for something under a dollar would be an enormous success:

1. The House of Mirth (or Ethan Frome)	Edith Wharton
2. Predestined	Stephen French Whitman
3. This Side of Paradise	F. Scott Fitzgerald
4. The Little Shepherd or Kingdom Come	John Fox, Jr.
5. In Ole Kentucky	Thomas Nelson Page
6. Sentimental Tommy	J. M. Barrie
7. Some Civil War book by	George Barr Cable
8. Some novel by	Henry Van Dyke
9. Some novel by	Jackson Gregory
10. Saint’s Progress	John Galsworthy
11. The Ordeal of Richard Feverel	George Meredith
12. Treasure Island	Robert Louis Stevenson
13. The Turn of the Screw	Henry James
14. The Stolen Story (or The Frederic Carrolls)	Jesse Lynch Williams
15. The Damnation of Theron Ware (I think Stone used to own this)	Harold Frederick
16. Soldiers of Fortune	Richard Harding Davis
17. Some book by	Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
18. Simple Souls	John Hastings Turner

Doubtless a glance at your old catalogues would suggest two dozen others. I have not even mentioned less popular writers such as Burt and Katherine Gerould. Nor have I gone into the possibilities of such non-fiction as a volume of Roosevelt, a volume of Huneker, or a volume of Shane Leslie.

As I say, this is quite possibly an idea which has occurred to you before and been dismissed for reasons which would not appear to me, an outsider. I am moved to the suggestion by the success of the experiments I have mentioned. They have been made possible, I believe, by the recent American strain for “culture” which expresses itself in such things as uniformity of bindings to make a library. Also the selective function of this library would appeal to many people in search of good reading matter, new or old.

One more thing and this interminably long letter is done. It may seem to you that in many cases I have chosen novels whose sale still nets a steady revenue at $1.75—and that it would be unprofitable to use such property in this way. But I have used such titles only to indicate my idea—Gallegher (which I believe is not in your subscription sets of Davis) could be substituted for Soldiers of Fortune, The Wrong Box for Treasure Island, and so on in the case of Fox, Page and Barrie. The main idea is that the known titles in the series should “carry” the little known or forgotten. That is: from the little known writer you use his best novel, such as Predestined—from the well-known writer you use his more obscure, such as Gallegher.

I apologize for imposing so upon your time, Mr. Scribner. I am merely mourning that so many good or lively books are dead so soon, or only imperfectly kept alive in the cheap and severe impermanency of the A. L. Burt editions.

I am, sir,
Most sincerely,
F. Scott Fitzgerald

xxx. TO: Marguerite Mooers Marshall

n.d. [April 1922]

626 Goodrich Ave. St Paul Minn

ALS, 1 p. Auctioned

I liked your interview immensely. Thank you for the publicity which it gave me—but mostly for the interest which inspired you to write it.

Notes:

Marguerite Mooers Marshall's interview of Fitzgerald for the New York Evening World was published 1 April 1922. Interview reprinted in F. Scott Fitzgerald: In His Own Time In Fitzgerald's interview with Marshall, he discusses the Jazz Age culture that served to inspire much of his body of work, observing: 'New York is going crazy! When I was here a year ago I thought we'd seen the end of night life. But now it's going on as it never was before Prohibition. I'm confident that you can find anything here that you find in Paris. Everybody is drinking harder—that's sure. Possessing liquor is a proof of respectability, of social position…Prohibition, it seems to me, is having simply a ruinous effect on young men.' The interview also quoted a passage from The Beautiful and Damned, for which Scribners had mounted a publicity campaign; Fitzgerald's second novel sold well enough to put 50,000 copies into print.

xxx. TO James Branch Cabell From H. L. Mencken

Baltimore, April 20, 1922

Dear Cabell:

Certainly I’ll be glad to review The Lineage of Lichfield. Where is the book? It has not yet reached me. I am delighted to hear what you say about Untermeyer. His parodies seem to me to be genuinely first-rate. He is miles beyond J. C. Squire.

I am sweating through Prejudices III, a fearful job. Theoretically, the book is simply a series of reprints, but actually I am rewriting most of it. The opening chapter will be a treatise on Americanism, with a philosophical glance at the chivalrous attitudes visible during the war. I am in no mood for work. I hope to go to Europe in August, and the great mass of routine that I must get through before then paralyzes me.

No news from Hergesheimer save a telegram and a letter. But from various agents I gather the following: In Seattle he was robbed of his diamond-mounted toothpick. In Portland he came down with wood alcohol. In San Francisco he won $17 shooting dice, and then blew it upon a hand-painted shirt. In Los Angeles he drank 40 cocktails in 40 hours. He seems to be having a roaring time of it.

Isn’t your annual pilgrimage to Babylon almost due?

Sincerely yours,
H. L. Mencken

xxx. TO: Burton Rascoe

After 30 April 1922

626 Goodrich Ave. St Paul Minn

ALS, 1 p. University of Pennsylvania

Dear Burton—

I have just seen that silly story printed in your book page in reference to Robert Bridges and myself.¹ Whether the lie is Mr. Stake's or not I don't know—but it seems to me that it was rather bad taste to reprint anything which puts me in such an awkward and unpleasant position with people with whom I have to deal.

Yours F Scott Fitzgerald

P.S. Zelda recieved the check. Thanks F.S.F.

Notes:

¹ Rascoe had printed publisher Frederick A. Stokes' report that Fitzgerald pulled the gray hairs from Bridges' beard: “A Bookman's Day Book,” New York Tribune (30 April 1922). See Fitzgerald's May letter to Bridges in Letters.

xxx. TO: Harford Powell

ALS, 2 pp. Auction

St. Paul, Minnesota

circa early May 1922

Dear Mr Powell—
Your letter was very interesting. The trouble is this: all the obvious stuff of romance & mystery while it is at the same time the best stuff has in the last twenty five years been pretty well pawed over by newspaper feature writers and detective story Shakespeares not to mention people like Doyle, Haggard, Wilkie Collins & Bulwer Lytton…They've done their pawing with such clumsy hands that they've taken the color pretty much off the near east and the far east and the whole criminal world…The jewel business has facilitated me too and in fact I have done a satirical story on almost the materials you suggest. It appears as a novelette in the next smart set & wish that you'd read it. It's the second of a series of such stories of which the first was The Russet, Witch in the Metropolitan & the third was Benjamin Button…

Notes:

Fitzgerald comments on the writing of fellow authors of romance and mystery along with mentioning the publication of "The Russet Witch" in the Metropolitan, and "Benjamin Button". Fitzgerald's letter is accompanied by a typed response letter from Powell, which is dated May 9, 1922.

xxx. To Robert Bridges

From Turnbull

626 Goodrich Avenue St. Paul, Minnesota

[Before May 13, 1922]

Dear Mr. Bridges:

As Mr. Perkins has no doubt told you I was aghast and horrified at that silly anecdote sprung from God knows whither which Burton Rascoe had the ill-taste to reprint in his column.¹ I wrote him an indignant letter about it but I haven't heard from him.

I can only tell you what I have long suspected—that any strange happening in the new literary generation is at once attributed to me. When we returned from Europe last summer there were legends enough current to supply three biographers.

Needless to say I regret the indignity done to you by the association with your name of such a piece of unwarranted vulgarity—and believe me.

As ever sincerely,
F. Scott Fitzgerald

Notes:

¹ Rascoe wrote, “Fitzgerald, during a conversation with Robert Bridges, had leaned over and plucked a hair from Dr. Bridges' beard with the comment that it was grey, and the dignified gentleman had been so nonplussed by this amazing performance that he did not remonstrate until Fitzgerald had plucked out six hairs.”

xxx. From Zelda Fitzgerald To Carl Hovey

ZELDA SAYRE FITZGERALD is printed letterhead.

[from Fitzgerald/Hemingway Annual, 1978]

[May (?) 1922]

Dear Mr. Hovey—
I am very ashamed of myself—but you know how it is to be a drinking woman! Here is this foolish thing and I hope it will be something like what you wanted. “The Flapper” is a very difficut subject for me because I cherish a secret ambition of being one someday—and take the cuties quite seriously.

We enjoyed seeing you in New York, and thanks again for the slick party.

Sincerely,
Zelda Fitz—

Would the end of the week be too late for the picture? And could you let me know if you are in a hurry. And will Mrs Hovey come thru here on her way East?

Notes:

something like what you wanted - Almost certainly 'Eulogy on the Flappers,' Metropolitan Magazine (June 1922), 38-39.

xxx. From ZELDA FITZGERALD to Sonia Hovey

Letterhead of Hotel Christie, Hollywood.

[May (?) 1922]

[from Fitzgerald/Hemingway Annual, 1978]

Sonia!
Sorry as hell I missed you! Studio all day + just in, to find your note. Wept at thought of your taking walk alone.

Tomorrow one of those smoky orgies known as conferences but will phone you then + we’ll arrange lunch or dinner or perhaps I’ll give my fete this week Sent Carl the letter.

Bought the car—Kaiser was fine. I had the jitters about traffic + he was very patient

Till Soon
Your Chattel
Scott Fitz

xxx. To Carl Hovey

[May (?) 1922]

[from Fitzgerald/Hemingway Annual, 1978]

Dear Carl and Sonya:
Feel like a bitch leaving you with sickness and not saying goodbye. The last days crept up on us like telegraph poles on the Broadway limited with work still to do and people and the Barlycorns which are to Hollywood what the Smiths are to the English speaking world.

Zelda sends long nuptial kisses. The black shape above is my heart.
Scott

The mss were of enormous help.

Notes:

Fitzgerald drew a heart around the Hotel Roosevelt (Washington, D.C.) letterhead.

xxx. TO: Ernest Boyd

Fall 1922(?)

Great Neck, Long Island

ALS, 1 p. Princeton University

Dear Earnest—

I was in Vanity Fair office the other day (quite stewed) and Bunny was just dictating the letter to you. I had a dim idea it was one of those things like they ran before only the critics being rated by the novelists instead of vice-versa.²

I have a hunch that all the people in your letter will either take a crack at the obselete books or flog dead horses—all except Mencken, and frankly I'd rather not do it because I'd have ten men—half of whom have been kind to my stuff—after me with clubs and sling shots. And as far as pronouncing on the classics I have so little general culture that my opinions wouldn't be of the slightest value

When are you coming out? Any week-day or any week-end we'll always be glad to see you.

As Ever
F. Scott Fitzg—

Notes:

² In April 1922 Vanity Fair published a poll by critics in which Fitzgerald scored 1 on a scale of 25.

xxx. TO: Burton Rascoe

May 5, 1922.

626 Goodrich Avenue, St. Paul, Minn.,

TLS, 1 p. University of Pennsylvania

Dear Burton

This is a book just published by Scribners.¹ Leslie has rather a wide audience among people who have read his volume of Reminiscences, his Cardinal Manning, and his the Celt and the World.

Zelda is trying to think up something for McCall's, in fact, she has it about half written and will probably send it on soon.²

I hope you can use this in your book page.

As ever F Scott Fitzgerald

P.S. You are all wrong about The Beautiful and Damned, but I don't care.

Thine. Fitzg—

Notes:

1 The Oppidan.

² Zelda Fitzgerald wrote an article for McCall's called “Where Do Flappers Go?” that was not published. In addition to editing the book page of the New York Tribune, Rascoe was also at this time associated with McCall's.

xxx. TO John V. A. Weaver

[from The Crack-Up, Turnbull]

[May (?) 1922]

626 Goodrich Ave. St. Paul, Minn

Dear John:
I was tickled to write the review. I saw Broun’s&F.P.A.’s reviews but you know how they love me&how much attention I pay to their dictums.

This is my new style of letter writing. It is to make it easy for comments&notes to be put in when my biographer begins to assemble my collected letters.

The Metropolitan isn’t here yet. I shall certainly read Enamel. I wish to Christ I could go to Europe.

Thine
F.Scott Fitzgerald

Notes:

write the review - Of John V. A. Weaver’s Margey Wins the Game (1922) or, possibly, book of poems, In American (1921).

new style of letter writing - This note was written in a very small hand in the middle of a sheet of paper.

xxx. FROM: John V. A. Weaver

After 7 May 1922

TLS, 2 pp. Princeton University Brooklyn Daily Eagle letterhead

Dear Scott,

I'm still sorta gaspin' with ecitement over the review! Gee, gosh, etc! It certainly was swell. I appreciate it all the more because, if there is one person who knows that stuff, you are it. You know, that dumbbell Broun and also, to my surprise, F.P.A. only wrote little squibs to the effect that they thought the slang was punk, being altogether exaggerated and overdone. They don't get it at all. I know the story itself, as I told you when you were here, is as light as the people in it. But the slang is correct, now isn't it?

You said in the review that you wanted more. Now I don't know whether that is merely a friendly gesture or what, but anyway, in the June Metropolitan, the same issue in which appears Zelda's Eulogy on the Flapper, is a story called “Enamel” by me. I enjoyed Zelda's article exceedingly. She can sure write. I'm doing an article called “The Younger Degeneration” for Metro, in which I tell what I think is the matter with these now young people. I'm a reactionary! 'ray!

I'm head over eardrums in work, trying to scrape enough dough together to depart around the first of June for Yurrup on a freight boat. Oh, God, if I can only get a little rest!

Thanks once more for the review which couldn't possibly have been more cheering. I am grateful to you from the cockle of my heart.

Yours towjewers, John

Notes:

Fitzgerald reviewed Weaver's Margey Wins the Game in the New York Tribune (7 May 1922).

xxx. TO: Harry W. Winslow

31 May 1922

ALS, 1 p. Auctioned in 1972.

Princeton, New Jersey

For Harry W. Winslow J.B.; M.D.; Ph. D
from the very reverend F. Scott Fitzgerald
Archbishop of the Church of St. Voltaire ...

xxx. TO: Unknown

21 June 1922

Inscription in The Beautiful and Damned.

xxx. TO: A. L. Sugarman

2 August 1922

Inscription in The Beautiful and Damned. Bruccoli collection.

To a bookseller
who declared himself ...

xxx. TO: George Stair

c. August 1922

To George W. Stair
from
F. Scott Fitzgerald
New York City

Inscription in The Beautiful and Damned.

xxx. TO: Unknown

1922 [? it seems like this inscription was made in 1930's]

Inscription in The Beautiful and Damned. University of Virginia

The phrase:
"Beautiful but Dumb" was this book's contribution to its time.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
It has awful spots but some good ones. I was trying to learn.

xxx. TO: May Dowd

1922 [?]

Inscription in The Beautiful and Damned.

To May Dowd
on this curious (at least it seems curious to me) day--on which I have stayed awake almost permanently.

xxx. TO: Unknown

1922 [?]

Inscription in The Beautiful and Damned.

xxx. TO: William J. Flynn, ex-Chief of the United States Secret Service, Author of crime fiction

c. 1922

Inscription in The Beautiful and Damned.

xxx. TO: Arthur William Brown

Fall 1922

ALS, 3 pp. Unlocated (Auction Catalogue Charles Hamilton Auction Number 111, 23 March 1978)

To Mr. Brown—

Dear Mr. Arthur William Brown:

The story concerns a poor boy, his rise and his attempts to win a rich girl. He first sees her when he is a caddy about 14 years old and she is a little “belle laide” of 11. She comes on the golf course with her nurse carrying her clubs and tries to get a caddy. The sight of her stirs the poor boy to give up his job of caddying—He is too proud to caddy for a little girl as young as that—

***

He rises in the world. At 25 he is a guest at the golf club where he has been a caddy. He swims out to a raft one moonlit night. She comes by in a motor boat + they go surf-board riding under the moon (as you know in the inland lakes surfboard riding means being pulled behind a motor-boat on a board. They take turns.

My other scenes do not offer much pictorial possibility. I have just destroyed the second part of the story + am doing it over again—so I hope you can get two illustrations from the 1st page of this letter. Here are some suggestions.

(1) Little girl nervous at her 1st appearance. Nurse also out of depth + afraid to adress caddy. Caddy looking on intently.

(2) Little girl trying to hit nurse with golf club. Caddy looking on admiringly Caddy is a blond. Nurse is white linnen

(3) Caddy telling flabbergasted caddy-master that he won't caddy ever again. Little girl + nurse looking on—not sure enough of themselves to be angry. By the way the little girl is dark. And I have stressed in the story that she has big eyes + her lips turn down at the corners

(4) Man on raft. Girl hailing him from motorboat. Moonlight. Girl beautiful—lips turn down in corner.

(5) Man driving motorboat and girl on surfboard or vice-versa. Moonlight.

I'm sorry my suggestions are so few + so fragmentary but Mr. Hovey has asked me for them right away + it has been a most peculiar story—not nearly so obvious as it sounds here. I like all your work very much and was tremendously pleased at your illustrations for “The Camel's Back” and for “The Jellybean.”

Most Sincerely
F Scott Fitzgerald

If you want a 3d picture there is a scene where the heroine—same age as in surf-board scene—drives a mashie shot into the belly of a member of a foursome playing ahead of her. The foresome is composed of hero (25 yrs. old), one man of thirty—silly ass—and two old men—one of whom got hit in belly

xxx. TO: Bill Brown

c. September 1922

Inscription in The Beautiful and Damned.

xxx. To Edward LeBaron Howard

ANS, 1 page, card of 5 x 5.5 inches, Auction

September 16, 1922

An autograph for Edward LeBaron Howard, from one who becomes tongue tied when asked to write anything appropriate, F. Scott Fitzgerald, September 16th, 1922, St. Paul, Minn.

xxx. TO: H. L. Mencken

September 1922

Inscription in Tales of The Jazz Age. Enoch Pratt Library. St. Paul, Minnesota.

For the notorious
H. L. Mencken
under whose apostolic blessing ...

Please read The Table of Contents

xxx. TO: Mollie McQuillan Fitzgerald

September 1922 (?)

Inscription in Tales of The Jazz Age. Auction.

For Mamma from Her Angel Child Scott

xxx. TO: Gelett Burgess

c. October 1922

Great Neck, Long Island.

ALS, 1 p. University of California—Berkeley

Dear Mr. Gellett Burgess:

My excuse for not answering your very kind letter is that I have been moving myself east, and family also. I have been enormously amused by the razzing of poor Liveright for his indescretion and also by the report that I arose and said
“Volstair—Volstair”!
and sat down.

As a matter of fact I wish I had but I couldn't think of anything so clever.²

Anyways you were an awfully good egg to console me with such a comforting note. I hope we'll meet soon + lunch together or something

Sincerely
F Scott Fitzgerald

Notes:

² This occasion was reported in an unlocated clipping: “Horace B. Liveright, Gelett Burgess, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Others of Authors' League Fellowship Help Along 'Friendly Discourse.' “

xxx. TO: Cecilia Delihant Taylor

After October 1922

ALS, 2 pp. Princeton University

Great Neck, Long Island

Dear Cousin Cecie:

The pictures are wonderful—also you are a very sweet person (as always) to write me about Tales of the Jazz Age. We are established in the above town very comfortably and having a winter of hard work. I’m writing a play which I hope will go on about the 1st of Jan. I wish you could arrange to come up for the opening.

Great Neck is a great place for celebrities—it being the habitat of Mae Murray, Frank Craven, Herbert Swope, Arthur Hopkins, Jane Cowl, Joseph Santley, Samuel Goldwyn, Ring Lardner, Fontayne Fox, “Tad,” Gene Buck, Donald Bryan, Tom Wise, Jack Hazard, General Pershing. It is most amusing after the dull healthy middle west. For instance at a party last night where we went were John McCormick, Hugh Walpole, F.P.A, Neysa Mcmien, Arthur William Brown, Rudolph Frimll + Deems Taylor. They have no mock-modesty + all perform their various stunts apon the faintest request so its like a sustained concert. I don’t know when we’re going to have a chance to see you again. Zelda hasn’t seen her mother now for almost two years and it doesn’t look as tho we’ll be able to get south till Spring.

Our Love to All of you
Yr. Devoted Cousin
Scott

xxx. TO Miss Paxton

From Turnbull.

Great Neck, Long Island

[Fall, 1922-Spring, 1924]

Dear Miss Paxton:

As I have nothing but respect for Theta Sigma Phi it would be a mean trick for me to agree to make a speech for them. How would you like to have a collapsed novelist wandering wildly over the campus of the University of Illinois? I suggest Mr. Bryant or Mr. Cone as an alternate.

Seriously I'd love to do it but I'm absolutely incapable through constitutional stagefright. With appreciation of the honor of being asked, I am

Most sincerely,
F. Scott Fitzgerald

P.S. My price for lectures is 12,000 louis d'or or when, lecturing in Guatemala, I accept my fee in rubber.

xxx. FROM: Thomas Boyd

December 1922

ALS, 2 pp. Princeton University

Dear Scott:

To attempt to tell you of my honest gratitude would only show up my inability fully to express myself. When Scribner's turned down Through the Wheat I cried on reading the letter of rejection—as I also did when I wrote certain parts of the book. And besides, I felt that so long as it remained unpublished I could never write anything else: the best of which I am capable is in Through the Wheat, and to dam that would be to dam all subsequent transcriptions of thoughts and experiences. I feel quite aware that it is only through you and your inexhaustable exuberance that Scribner's took the book. I hope for all of your sakes that it exhausts one edition. Strange, but I doubted that you would like it; why, I don't know. And when I sent it I did not believe that you intended doing with it. I thought you wanted only to read it. Well, it was a surprise. The wire came early in the morning over the telephone and getting me angrily out of bed at seven—I had not planned to do anything with it for five or six more years. But while the ms. was sunk my ambition was sunk also. You know how much I appreciate what you have done, don't you.

The book shop is moved under the Womens City Club. It now has spacious and luxurious quarters. Alener Crosby has died which has had no effect upon us. Did you read Peggy's review of The Jazz Age?¹ Van² and I sent you a book today and it is a Christmas remembrance. It went early for fear, if it didn't, it would arrive late.

Perkins doesn't want to publish my book until Fall. What do you counsel?

If there ever is time in this Christmas rush I will write—

Love to Zelda
Tom

Peggy of couse inundates you both with pleasurable feeling toward you.

Notes:

¹ St. Paul Daily News (10 December 1922).

² Cornelius Van Ness, Boyd's partner in the Kilmamock Bookstore, St. Paul.

xxx. TO: C. O. Kalman

After 10 December 1922

Great Neck, L.I.

ALS, 3 pp. Princeton University

Dear Kaly:

I thought the enclosure might amuse you, as confirming a prophetic conversation we had in St. Paul. The conversation followed this scene:

Act I The Kalman's house at Dellwood

Scott (to Lou Ordway²)—“By the way, Lou, did you get that check I sent you?”

(He had lent me $5.00 the week before when a picnic caught me without my pocket-book)

Lou “No I didn't.”

Scott (greatly surprised) “That's funny. I'm sure I addressed it right.”

Lou “I never got it.”

(Scott gives Lou $5.00 cash on the spot. Reports incident to C. O. Kalman next day. C. O. Kalman cynically advises Scott to look through his bank statement)

Act II

The enclosure

Curtain

First let me thank you for all your trouble about the Kahlert + Berg business.³ I appreciate the time you devoted to it and especially your interest and advice in the matter.

What I'll do with the script I don't know. The B.+D. will not boost its chances. Kaly, Zelda and I saw it Sunday at the Strand and its by far the worst movie I've ever seen in my life—cheap, vulgar, ill-constructed and shoddy. We were utterly ashamed of it. I only hope you don't lose any money by it—and that's that.

Your letter of the 3d amused us both enormously. Ring is now on the wagon for a year at his wife's urgent request (as per your letter. We're going to try to go to Europe in the spring if we can afford it. The Metropolitan Magazine has, thank God, gone into the hands of a reciever and now I can write some stuff for the Post + perhaps collect on a few movie rights. Famous Players have been dickering for me to write a story for Bebe Daniels but its all in the air.⁴

Tales of the Jazz Age has sold beautifully. My poor play is still in abeyance. Blythe Daly, daughter to your friend Arnold, came over the other night. We didn't like her very much—affected, scrawny + not particularly amusing.

Scribner has now accepted Tom Boyd's book Through the Wheat. Its a wonder, I think. We expect you in February

Our best to both of you

Scott F—

Clip signature on dotted lines.

Notes:

² St. Paul boyhood friend of Fitzgerald.

³ William G. Kahlert and Einar A. Berg were proprietors of Outlook Photoplays, Inc., of New York, which produced a movie version of Sinclair Lewis' Free Air in St. Paul. On 25 August 1922 Fitzgerald granted Kahlert and Berg movie rights to This Side of Paradise for $3,000 against a 15% share of the profits. The assignment was canceled on 12 December, when Kahlert and Berg failed to make the payment. The rights were sold to Famous Players-Lasky in 1923, but the movie was not made.

4 Fitzgerald did not work on this movie.

xxx. TO: Thomas Boyd and Cornelius Van Ness

After 10 December 1922

ALS, 1 p. Princeton University

Great Neck, Long Island Dear Van + Tom—	Prelude
The book is mavellous, both in content and exterior, in close-ups and long shots. I have never heard of the gentleman with whom it is chiefly concerned but presume him to be one of our cleaner American humorists.	Gay Opening
Seriously I'm reading it now and enjoying it immensely—as I should the definative biography of my favorite poet. Thank you both immensely for the present and for the remembrance.	More Serious Stuff
Tom's namesake Earnest is coming out over New Years. Saw our own Mencken here in N.Y. today. If you want a good laugh see the screen version of the B.+D.	News Section
My love to both of you + to your wives and children with the august thanks and blessings of	Climax
Yours Ever F. Scott Fitzgerald Released by Fitzgerald-Artcraft to 4th + Cedar Sts.	Fade Out

xxx. TO: Thomas Boyd

December 1922

ALS, 4 pp. Princeton University

Great Neck, Long Island

Dear Tom:

While I'm in favor of Spring publication I wouldn't push it if I were you. One other thing—if Scribners object to a word or two—they don't mind “whore” + “goddamned” but they may chalk merde + Oh christ on the proof, maybe not—I wouldn't kick about it. I've sacrificed “Christ” several times.

In order to help along the idea of Spring publication I made those few minor changes myself—in brief they are

(1.) I'll, you'll, it's ect for I will, you will and it is in dialogue. I may have missed a few + you better pick them up in the proofs.

(2) About 4 sentences of Hick's philosophy—his occasional Mr. Britlingism.¹ Its not good, its stale + it doesn't fit Hicks. Hicks is a rather incoherent kid + his intelligence is suggested + not shown. On page one I put “Young Hicks” for the 1st “William Hicks” + I think it was a good move. If you give the impression that he's 25 or so you'd have to do as Perkins says and show more of his background. This is the best way to get around it by hinting that he's 19—as he actually was

(3) The satire was too heavy hitting in the Major Generals speech. I softened some of his coarsest inner refections.

(4) Just to hurry it along I supplied a few missing words where you left blanks. “The stars came out like——” I put in “eyes” (which is cheap) just because of the printing. You can fix it in proof.

(5) I changed the “beast” to “the animal Its not as good but you'd better keep it—“Beast” got a connotation of sentimal allegory in the more hysterical days of the war + people will think you're referring to “German Imperialism” or some such rot like Blasco Ibanez.² If you can think of a better word than animal put it in

(6) About a dozen little corrections—misprints, misspellings ect ect.

If you don't like any of these changes you can change them back in the proof. I'm pulling for Spring publication + I suggested a few blurbs to Scribner.

Have had some dealings with Famous Players. I suggested The Love Legend to them. I quote in part from the letter of the head of the scenario dept

I looked up Woodward Boyd's “THE LOVE LEGEND” and find it makes wonderful reading, but the connected stories are so indeterminate in their results that it does not seem to me it would make a picture without such extensive re-writing as to destroy the original entirely. I certainly agree with you, however, that it is a very interesting story.

Sincerely, Johnson³

Best to Peggy. Glad the acceptance made you happy. It needn't have. The more I see the book the more I'm convinced that its a perfectly superb piece of work. Quite as good as The Red Badge of Courage—which, by the way, you can now safely read. Be sure + send Peggy's review

Thine
FScottF

P.S. I suggested a marine green binding with a white tab or label on the front. Perkins agrees⁴

Notes:

¹ Refers to Mr. Britling Sees It Through (1916) by H. G. Wells.

² Vincente Blasco-Ibanez, author of The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1916).

³ Fitzgerald clipped and pasted on the paragraph from Johnson's letter.

⁴ Through the Wheat was bound in a standard Scribners binding, without a label.

xxx. TO: Guy Holt

c. 1922/1923

ALS, 1 p. University of Virginia

Great Neck, L.I.

Dear Holt:

You're asking me to read 50,000 words of the most terrific bunk.² If you're willing to let yours or Cabell's judgement serve for mine I'm perfectly willing for you to use my name. But I have no secretary and I know from experience that these things take up an awful lot of time. Movie publicity is not of the faintest value to book writers unless their sales go over two hundred thousand per vol.

I'd love to lunch with you. I will phone you when I'm next in

Sincerly F Scott Fitzgerald

Notes:

² Holt was editing Jurgen and the Law (1923), a protest against the suppression of James Branch Cabell's novel; he had solicited a statement from Fitzgerald.

xxx. TO: T. R. Smith

ALS, 1 p. Unlocated

1922-1924

Great Neck, L.I.

Dear Tom:

The books arrived and I'm looking forward eagerly to reading the coon volume + the English book. The Waldo Frank novel² is I'm afraid just his usual canned rubbish. He seems to me to be an ambitious but totally uninspired person under the delusion that by filching the most advanced methods from the writers who originated them to express the moods of their definate personalities, he can supply a substitute for his own lack of feeling and cover up the bogus “arty-ness” of his work. He strains for a simile until his belly aches and brings up a mess of overworked words “lived and loved,” “bronzed face” ect ect ect—three to a page. His horror of the cliche is entirely Freudian—and a man incapable of the disassociation of ideas can never think in any words except those that are immortally paired. His prose is of the relative importance of the bogus Ossian which colored theological writing in North Carolina from 1840-1847. I'm afraid Horace³ has made a bad guess on him. I wish to God you'd republish Gertrude Stien's “Three Lives” and expose some of these fakers. Her book is utterly real. Its in her early manner before the attempt to transfer the technique of Mattisse + Picasso to prose made her coo-coo.

Thanks ever so much for sending the books. Come out again soon.

As Ever F Scott Fitzgerald

Notes:

² Boni & Liveright published four of Frank's novels while Fitzgerald was living in Great Neck: Rehab (1922), Holiday (1923), The Unwelcome Man (1923), and Chalk Face (1924).

³ Liveright.

1923

xxx. TO: Holger Lundbergh

Early 1923(?)

ALS, 1 p. Princeton University

Great Neck, Long Island

Dear Mr Lundberg:

In the long sad tale of an author's correspondence it seldom he recieves such a pleasant, appreciative and intelligent letters as yours. Of course the Scandanavians as the present heroes of the Nordic theory can stand anything in the way of a slight—but I will say that the Ice Palace was written in the middle of a Minnesota winter when I felt that I could have been blood-brother to a warm-blooded ethiope. Its utterly unfair of course to judge a race by its lowest class.

It might interest you to know that I'm writing or rather have written a play which I hope will appear soon. I'm not starting my new novel until Spring.

With many thanks for your kind letter + hopes that we may some day meet I am

Sincerely
F Scott Fitzgerald

xxx. TO Mr. Maurice

From Turnbull.

Great Neck, Long Island

[February, 1923]

Dear Mr. Maurice:

I don't know how to apologize for my delay—but the fault is Sherwood Anderson's. It's an amazing book¹ and affected me profoundly. It reached me Friday and I didn't get to reading it until Sunday—finished it late Sunday night—intending to review it Monday morning. Well, I sat down at nine and wrote about 1500 words of the worst drivel ever launched. My wife read it, we decided it'd be criminal to hand it in. The book is the full flowering of Anderson's personality and wants the most careful consideration else one is tempted to say the wildest things about it.

This is the first time I can remember having failed to live up to my word on a thing like this—but it seemed simply out of my power. My review will reach you Friday. I suppose that's plenty of time as it's already two days too late for the issue of February 24th.

With sincere apologies, I am Yours,
F. Scott Fitzgerald

Notes:

¹ Many Marriages.

xxx. TO: Thomas Boyd

March 1923

ALS, 5 pp. Princeton University

Great Neck—(Force of habit) c/o A. D. Sayre 6 Pleasant Ave, Montgomery, Ala.

Dear Tom:

Sorry I've been so long in writing:

(1.) Enclosed find check for book. There is a rumor that it is the first of Abelards letters + has been published in English before. Is there any Truth in this?

(2) The Hearst price was $1750.00 per story. It totals $10,500.00

(3) Glenn Hunter is going to do This Side of Paradise for Paramount.¹ They paid me fifteen thousand dollars cash for it. So you see I'm now a purse proud millionaire + as good a business man as Hergeshiemer.

(4) “The Vegetable” (my same play) comes out on April 15th or 20th. In a previous version Hopkins² turned it down. No one has seen this version—it is the 6th +, like all the others, absolutely perfect. It will sell 20,000 in book form + be eagerly bid for by 20 managers—and run one solid year in New York.³

(5) Perkins is a wonder—the brains of Scribners since the old man has moved into another generation. I'd be glad to review Thru the Wheat. I wrote one blurb for it + will try another. I'll see that Wilson reviews it.

(6) I shall never write another document-novel. I have decided to be a pure artist + experiment in form and emotion. I'm sure I can do it much better than Anderson.

(7) The butler would let you in with pleasure. We get home around April 1st + you'll have to spend at least a night with us.

(8) I am offended that Peggy thinks my productive days are so nearly over that I should go to Scribners as a sort of Grant Overton.⁴ I assure her I'm not dead yet. Does she imagine that such jobs are well paid?

(9) I reviewed Grace's book.⁵ Thought it was magnificent of its type. Liked it better than Babbit as I never could sufficiently tolerate the middle-class booster Babbit to get near him.

(10) Thanks for the Doran book. I am enjoying it immensely. I feel I should return it to you as obtained under false pretenses but I have no attention of doing so.

(11) All these “marvellous” places like Majorca turn out to have some one enormous disadvantage—bugs, lepers, Jews, consumptives or philistines.

(12) I wrote Glenn Hunter's next picture “Braver + Braver.” ⁶ Also he's to play in “This Side of Paradise.” A pleasant affiliation as he's a nice kid. Paramount are now paying him $156,000 a year and two years ago he was starving in Central Park

(3) You're wise to stick with one publisher. Nobody's ever gained a damned thing by switching around unless they've actually been treated like a son of a bitch

(4) St Paul with three weeks more of winter must be hell. Down here it's heaven. Commend me to Peggy.

Yours Prosperously F Scott Fitzgerald

(No figures in this letter are for publication)
F.S.F

Notes:

¹ Not produced.

² Broadway producer Arthur Hopkins.

³ The Vegetable closed after its Atlantic City tryout. The book sold fewer than 8,000 copies.

⁴ Editor and anthologist.

⁵ Fitzgerald reviewed Grace Flandrau's Being Respectable for The Literary Digest International Book Review (March 1923).

⁶ Possibly Grit, produced by Film Guild (1924).

xxx. FROM: Sherwood Anderson

After 4 March 1923

ALS, 2 pp. Princeton University

Dear Fitz—One of my brothers sent me your review of my novel and I read it with delight.¹ It's a kind of satisfaction to get broken away from the ["realist"] notion.

It is pretty evident I did not handle with entire success the notion of the little stone given the daughter by Webster or the fellow in Poor White sitting in the train and playing with the handful of bright stones.²

You see it may well be that the idea I have isn't well digested in me. Maybe I'm a [serious] ass. Vulgarity and ugliness often hurt me physically like sitting on a board full of nails.

And at such times some little thing—a well made chair, a bit of jewelry, a touch of color remembered from some painting seems to cheer me up and make me [ ] again.

Wish I had had some chance to talk with you—with neither of us tanked.

Did Boyd—Minneapolis tell you the charming ironic story—how I went about saying you could write but your style bothered me and your people seemed to me insignificant and not worth while, while you were, at the same moment, taking the same shots at me, in the same words.

I grinned with joy when I heard it.

Am in the west—having chucked our well known centers of civilization for the time. Some day I hope really to become acquainted with you and Mrs Fitz.

Sincerely
Sherwood Anderson

Notes:

¹ Fitzgerald reviewed Many Marriages in the New York Herald (4 March 1923).

² Fitzgerald commented in his review: “Again the significance of the little stone eludes me. I believe it to have no significance at all.”

xxx. From H. L. Mencken To Theodore Dreiser

[UP] Letters of H. L. Mencken, ed. Guy J. Forgue (New York: Knopf, 1961)

H. L. Mencken 1524 Hollins St. Baltimore

March 9th [1923]

Dear Dreiser

I agree with you. Anderson's short stories often give me a great kick (as Scott Fitzgerald would say), but his novels usually seem a bit confused and muddy. I doubt that he has the sheer power needed to swing a long book. But his details are often superb.¹

I am laid up with a severe laryngitis, and can’t speak. It is a mercy. I am in training for my last days as a Trappist.

Yours,
M.

Notes:

^[1] Anderson: Sherwood Anderson.

xxx. TO Mrs. R. J. Fitzgerald

ALS, 1 page, Auction

April 22, 1924 (postmarked)

Great Neck, Long Island

Dear Miss Fitz:

I was delighted to hear from you and know I had another cousin--That is you’re Ceci’s first cousin and that makes us some sort of relation--exactly what I don't know. Don't she a wonder? One of the most charming and remarkable people I've ever known. I used to like Tom too, but since I ceased being a Catholic he thinks I’m a lost soul and won’t come near me.

I deny all complicity in that "All women over 35--’ article was written by a lady interviewer and titled by a silly editor. Evidently you don’t know that grandmother died last Feb. She was over ninety and I hated to see her pass away.

I'm afraid our meeting will have postponed a little while as we're sailing to Europe the end of this week. However I’m saving your letter and I’ll drop you a line as soon as we return. We must certainly meet.

Most sincerely,
F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Notes:

The letter written to some Cousin Ceci's relation.

xxx. TO Sherwood Anderson

From Turnbull.

Great Neck, Long Island

[April, 1923]

Dear Sherwood:

Just as I was asking the girl in Vanity Fair to save me an autograph of yours if one ever happened in there, your letter came. I liked Many Marriages much more fully than I could express in that review—It stays with me still. It's a haunting book and, it seems to me, ahead of Poor White and even of the two books of short stories.

I don't quite get you about Tom Boyd—he's a great fellow, incidentally, and a strong admirer of your work. His own first book out this month is an excellent piece of work.

Yours, F. Scott Fitzgerald

xxx. To Thomas Boyd

ALS, 2 pp. Elizabeth B. Nash

April 1923

Great Neck

Dear Tom
Thanks for the book, the pre-review and the scrumptious inscription and also for liking The Vegetable. Your book [Through the Wheat] is quite a sensation here and you certainly have to thank Perkins for the best press of the spring. As to the sale it depends on that incalculable element the public mood, the psychological state they re in. There s been so much exploitation lately that is almost impossible for a press to create a mood. However its certainly made you among the literati. I got Wilson to read it. He liked it enormously and is reviewing it. Also I sent a copy to Mencken with section of the jacket marked off (deleted) lest he get a false impression. He said of Peggy s book in his reply that it was a good substantial canny piece of work marred by some high school crudities. When she gets her royalty report in August please let me know how many it sold. I gave your name to Charlie Towne of the American Play Co. He is a first class literary agent in case either of you have any commercial short stories. Also he s a damn good man for a young writer to know I mean he goes everywhere, is enthusiastic, and talks.

Best to Cornelius. I m busy as hell. Hope you'll like my review
As Ever, Scott

P.S. Is The Vegetable selling at all there?

Notes:

1 Boyd's inscription in Through the Wheat: "for F. Scott Fitzgerald the most generous and engaging individual I've ever known-and without whom Saint Paul is a pretty sallow spot Thomas Boyd." (Princeton)

The Love Legend.

xxx. To H. L. Mencken

Before 18 May 1923

Inscription on Boyd's Through the Wheat (1923)

Enoch Pratt Library

Great Neck, Long Island

Dear Menk--
This strikes me as something extraordinary good. ...

xxx. TO: Peggy Boyd

May 1923

Inscription in This Side of Paradise.

Read the article om "Professional Youth" in the last Sat. Eve. Post. I shall revenge myself on the lady.

For Peggy Boyd ...

Reference to: Parker, Dorothy. “Professional Youth.” Saturday Evening Post 195 (April 28, 1923)

xxx. TO: Samuel Hopkins Adams

c. 14 May 1923

Great Neck, L.I.

ALS, 1 p. Princeton University

Dear Mr. X:

Thanks ever so much for the copy of “Flaming Youth.” I had of course been reading it as it appeared in the Metropolitan and enjoying it immensely. It will be a great pleasure to start from the beginning and read it thru as I had missed several installments.

Who in the devil are you? Do you know at least a dozen people have asked me if I wrote it. I wish I had but I'm sure I didn't—so who did. Tell me immediately and oblige

Yours Admiringly + Gratefully
F Scott Fitzgerald

xxx. TO: Elinor Wylie

May 1923 (?)

Inscription in The Vegetable.

Yale University

Eleanor Wylie
from
hers admiringly
...

Notes:

Fitzgerald inscription refers to the first two lines of Elinor Wylie's poem "Peregrine".

xxx. TO: Holger Lundbergh

Summer(?) 1923

Great Neck, Long Island

ALS, 1 p. Princeton University

Dear Mr. Lundberg—

Sam Harris has taken The Vegetable for fall production and of course I'm very much excited. Earnest Truax (sp) is going to play Jerry. I've just finished reading what I consider is the most wonderful novel of the 19th century—he Rouge et Le Noir by Henri Beyle-Stendahl. Your countryman George Brandes was the first to appreciate—wait tho! He was a Dane on second thought. My new novel is started and progressing—but too slowly. Tonight I'm going to chart out a schedule of work for the rest of the year.

I hope we will meet some day soon. I seldom come to N.Y. now but some of these days I will give you a ring + we must have lunch together

Sincerely
F Scott Fitzgerald

xxx. FROM: Max Gerlach

20 July 1923

ALS, 1 p., Scrapbook. Princeton

Enroute from the coast--Here for a few days on business--How are you and the family old Sport? [The note sent with this clipping]

xxx. TO: Mary M. Colum

c. September 1923

ALS, 1 p. State University of New York—Binghamton

Great Neck, L.I.

Dear Mrs. Colum:

I have turned over your letter to my attorneys and they inform me that your case against me for the stamps is very strong. Perhaps some compromise could be reached. Thanks enormously for writing me. The unanimity with which most of the critics decided that The Vegetable would flop on the boards has made me violently anxious for a big success. I have hopes that it'll be in rehearsal within the fortnight.

Bunny Wilson has promised to take me to see you sometime soon. Anticipating the pleasure of the encounter for me, I will now close. Please convey my respects to your husband.

Sincerely
F. Scott Fitzgerald

xxx. TO: C. O. Kalman

After November 11, 1923

ALS, 2 pp. Princeton University

Great Neck Long Island
5.30 A.M.
(not so much up already as up still)

Dear Kaly;—
I hear that you have given two seats to this nonsensical game between the Yale blues vs. the Princeton Elis, to F. Scott Fitzgerald. For what reason, is what I want to know.

Ring W. Lardner

Dear Kaly:

This is a letter from your two favorite authors. Ring + I got stewed together the other night + sat up till the next night without what he would laughingly refer to as a wink of sleep. About 5.30 I told him he should write you a letter. The above is his maudlin extacy.

The tickets arrived and I am enclosing check for same. I’m sorry as the devil you didn’t come. We could have had a wonderful time even tho the game was punk.

We took Mr + Mrs Gene Buck (the man who writes the Follies + Frolics.) This is a very drunken town full of intoxicated people and retired debauches + actresses so I know that you and she to who you laughingly refer to as the missus would enjoy it.

I hope St Paul is cold + raw so that you'll be driven east before Xmas.

I discover this tell tale evidence on the paper [A ring from a wet glass]

Everything is in its usual muddle. Zelda says ect, asks, ect, sends ect.

Your Happy but Lazy friend
F Scott Fitzgerald

Notes:

Gene Buck was a Great Neck resident who was associated with Ziegfeld.

St. Paul friend of the Fitzgeralds.

xxx. TO: Gene Buck

1923

Inscription in Joseph Conrad's Youth (Later printing, NY: Doubleday, Page, and Company, 1920).

For Gene Buck from Joseph Conrad
F. Scott Fitzgerald, middle-man

Notes:

Gene Buck was the founder of the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers, the composer behind all of the Ziegfeld Follies’ songs, and Fitzgerald’s neighbor in Long Island. In fact, Buck’s parties were the main source of inspiration for Fitzgerald’s opus, The Great Gatsby. Joseph Conrad, the celebrated Polish-born English author, heralded for his part in the modernist movement in literature, met Fitzgerald during a visit to the USA (in May 1923).

xxx. TO: M-me Sayre

1923

Inscription in Mark Twain's The Mysterious Stranger.

This is Mark Twain's posthumous malediction.
Scott
M. M. Sayre from F. Scott Fitzgerald
1923

xxx. To: Ernest Truex

Inscription on The Vegetable. From Bruccoli and Vanderbilt collections (two copies)

Ernest Trues
"The best postman in the world"
Atlantic City
Nov 19th, 1923

Notes:

Truex was the leading man in the theatrical production of The Vegetable. This copy was inscibed during the tryout of the play. There are known to exist three copies with the same insciption.

xxx. TO: Edna Hoopes

November 20, 1923

Inscription in The Vegetable. Auction.

For Edna Hoopes
from F. Scott Fitzgerald on the eve of the first performance of this great moral document Atlantic City Nov 20th, 1923

xxx. TO: Gelett Burgess

c. 1923

Great Neck, L.I.

ALS, 2 pp. University of California—Berkeley

Dear Gelett Burgess:

I located Eleanor the Second Hand¹ at last + read it with much interest. It is written, I see, in much the same sort of staccato prose Hutchinson² uses in “If Winter Comes.” It seems to me well-constructed, frequently witty and occasionally brilliant as in the cocktail description. It is, however, rather more sentimental than I like a story to be and for this reason seems to me fundamentally unreal. I don't mean that I mind the sentimentalism in the characters but I do mind it being condoned by the author.

However I enjoyed it immensely and I thank you for calling it to my attention. I shall certainly watch for her work in future. I critisize its sentimentality chiefly because I'm so often guilty of the same myself when trying to make a magazine story poignant + moving.

Most Sincerely
F Scott Fitzgerald

Notes:

¹ Unidentified.

² A. S. M. Hutchinson.

xxx. Monthly Expenditure List

1923 [?]

List of Monthly Expenditures for 1923.

xxx. To Callie Bruce Oldham

1923 [?]

ink signature and inscription on an off-white 5 x 3 card

For Callie Bruce Oldham, from, Hers faithfully, F. Scott Fitzgerald

Notes:

Callie Bruce Oldham - author of Down South in Dixie (1905).

1924

xxx. TO: Thomas Boyd

Early 1924

ALS, 1 p. Princeton University

Great Neck, L.I.

Dear Tom:

I was talking to Perkins on the phone today and he says The Dark Cloud¹ is a rather remarkable piece of work. He's going to send me the proof of it. No news here—I've been sweating out trash since the failure of my play but I hope to get back to my novel by March 1st. We're coming abroad either to write it or when its done. I'm not sure which. Zelda got Peggy's letter + sends her best—I enjoyed your letter a lot; you sound just faintly bored but as tho you were getting a lot of work done. Rebecca West + a rather (not too) literary crowd are coming out Sunday for a rather formal party + Zelda's scared.

Best to Peggy—Tell her I thot Lazy Laughter² was fine and I think she ought to have sent me an autographed copy for my library.

Yours in Terrific Haste Scott

Notes:

¹ Boyd's second novel (Scribners, 1924).

² Scribners (1923).

xxx. TO: Carl Van Vechten

c. February 1924

Inscription in The Beautiful And Damned.

Yale University

To Carl Van Vechten
with all the proper deference which authors always inscribe ...

xxx. TO Carl Van Vechten

From Turnbull.

Great Neck, New York

[Postmarked March 1, 1924]

Dear Carl:

Thanks for the kind telegram. I'm always glad when anyone likes The Beautiful and Damned—most people prefer This Side of Paradise and while I do myself I hate to see one child preferred above another—you know the feeling. We both want to see you soon and are going to haul or drag you out here by “hook or crook” (if I may be allowed to coin a new phrase).

Thine,
F. Scott Fitz——

xxx. To Miss Esther Sanford

[postmarked Great Neck, NY, April 8, 1924]

3449 Harlbut Ave Detroit, Michigan

Dear Miss Sanford:
I absolutely refuse to give you my autograph.
Sincerely,
F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Notes:

This joke was occasionaly repeated. For example, the similiar note to some Miss Emerson, dated 1926 and signed five times, from Christie's Auction:

Dear Miss Emerson, I absolutely refuse to give you my 'autograph!,' Obstinately, F. Scott Fitzgerald.

xxx. TO: Moran Tudury

Postmarked 11 April 1924

ALS, 1 p. Unlocated [from Auction Samuel T. Freeman catalog (29 June 1979), #41.]

Great Neck, Long Island

I am so anxious for people to see my new novel which is a new thinking out of the idea of illusion (an idea which I suppose will dominate my more serious stuff) much more mature and much more romantic than This Side of Paradise. The B & D was a better book than the first but it was a false lead … a concession to Mencken … The business of creating illusion is much more to my taste and my talent.

WHO'S WHO

Alida Bigelow was St. Paul friend with whom Fitzgerald corresponded while she was at college.

Ludlow Fowler Princeton classmate of Fitzgerald's; model for Anson Hunter in the 1926 story “The Rich Boy.”

Isabelle Amorous The sister of Fitzgerald's Newman School friend Martin.

John Biggs, Jr. (1895–1979) was Fitzgerald’s roommate at Princeton; they edited the Princeton Tiger and collaborated on a Triangle Club show. Biggs wrote novels while practicing law. Scottie Fitzgerald wrote: “ ‘He left the estate of a pauper and the will of a millionaire,’Judge Biggs growled when Fitzgerald died after naming him his Executor. Then he proceeded for ten years to administer the virtually non-existent estate as a busy Judge on the United States Circuit Court, selflessly and devotedly—the very incarnation of the words, ‘Family Friend.’ “See Seymour I. Toll, A Judge Uncommon (Philadelphia: Legal Communications, 1993).

Sir Shane Leslie (1885–1971) was an Anglo-Irish man of letters. Well connected (a first cousin of Winston Churchill) and well educated (a graduate of Eton College and Cambridge University), he was a convert to Catholicism. Through his friend, Monsignor Fay, he met Fitzgerald at the Newman School. Leslie encouraged Fitzgerald’s literary ambitions and sent Fitzgerald’s first novel, The Romantic Egotist, to Charles Scribner II. Reviewing Leslie’s The Oppidan in 1922, Fitzgerald declared:

He first came into my life as the most romantic figure I had ever known. He had sat at the feet of Tolstoy, he had gone swimming with Rupert Brooke, he had been a young Englishman of the governing classes when the sense of being one must have been, as Compton McKenzie says, like the sense of being a Roman citizen.

Also, he was a convert to the church of my youth, and he and another [Fay], since dead, made of that church a dazzling, golden thing, dispelling its oppressive mugginess and giving the succession of days upon gray days, passing under its plaintive ritual, the romantic glamour of an adolescent dream.

H. L. Mencken (1880–1956) was the most influential literary and social critic in America during the 1920s. With George Jean Nathan he edited The Smart Set, the first magazine to pay for Fitzgerald’s stories. Two of Fitzgerald’s best stories, “May Day” and “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz,” were published in The Smart Set. Mencken later published “Absolution” and “Crazy Sunday” in the American Mercury. In his 1921 review of Mencken’s Prejudices Fitzgerald stated that “he has done more for the national letters than any man alive.”

John Grier Hibben President of Princeton University.

Charles G. Norris (1881-1945), whose realistic novel Salt (1917) impressed Fitzgerald; brother of author Frank Norris.

Spencer Jones a fellow Princeton classmate.

Marie Hersey had grown up with Fitzgerald in St. Paul.

David Balch Editor of Movie Weekly; associated with Metro, which made The Chorus Girl's Romance from "Head and Shoulders."

Burton Rascoe Book review editor of the Chicago Tribune.

Charles Scribner II - in 1920, the head of the Scibner's firm.

Carl Hovey - Editor of Metropolitan magazine, which serialized The Beautiful and Damned (September 1921-March 1922).

Phyllis Duganne Parker Novelist and playwright.

Mr. And Mrs. Philip Mcquillan - Philip McQuillan was a younger brother of Fitzgerald's mother.

Henry Raleigh - Magazine illustrator.

Robert D. Clark - Boyhood friend of Fitzgerald’s in St. Paul.

Ralph Block - Associated with Goldwyn Studios; he apparently provided Fitzgerald with a letter of introduction to Huxley.

John Franklin Carter - Writer and diplomat; Secretary to the American Ambassador in Rome in 1921.

Charles Kingsley [aka Henry Kingsley] - Scribners' representative in London, England

George Jean Nathan Coeditor with H. L. Mencken of The Smart Set.

Thomas Boyd and Peggy Boyd Scott and Tom Boyd were colleagues on the St. Paul Daily News. After serving in World War I as a Marine, Boyd received the Croix de Guerre and wrote his magnum opus, Through the Wheat. Thomas Boyd married Margaret Smith and they settled in Saint Paul. There he worked as a journalist at The St. Paul Daily News and ran Kilmarnock Books bookshop, where he entertained the likes of Aldous Huxley, Sinclair Lewis, Edna Ferber, Theodore Dreiser, and other literary luminaries, interviewing them and writing reviews of their current novels. Boyd and Fitzgerald were close friends for a time, and Fitzgerald took Boyd's manuscript of Through the Wheat to Max Perkins and urged its publication. Fitzgerald also wrote a glowing review of the novel upon its publication. The Boyds achieved enough success to leave journalism behind. Margaret (Peggy) wrote under the pseudonym of Woodward Boyd (The Love Legend). They left Minnesota in the 1920's for Connecticut where they pursued writing fiction full-time. Thomas Boyd would write several other books including Points of Honor (1925), a collection of stories, and Shadow of the Long Knives (1928), before his untimely death in 1935. See Brian Bruce's biography "Thomas Boyd: Lost Author of "The Lost Generation".

Chester B. Sikking An army acquaintance of Fitzgerald's at Camp Sheridan.

Robert Bridges Editor of Scribner's Magazine.

Ernest Boyd Editor and critic.

John V. A. Weaver Journalist and writer of vernacular verse.

A. L. Sugarman Minneapolis bookseller

George Stair New York bookseller

Arthur William Brown Illustrator of “Winter Dreams,” Metropolitan (December 1922). In his unpublished memoirs, provided by Marcella Holmes, Brown wrote: “One day in 1920 the Saturday Evening Post sent me the galley proofs of a story to be illustrated, called 'The Camel's Back.' … In the next few years I did many of his stories for different magazines. 'The Camel's Back' was the first thing of his that the Post purchased. He was always late on deadlines and often I would have to make drawings from his vague descriptions.”

Gelett Burgess Humorist; author of “The Purple Cow” and “Are You a Bromide?”

C. O. Kalman St. Paul businessman. The Fitzgeralds and the Kalmans became close friends during the Fitzgeralds' 1921-22 residence in St. Paul.

Guy Holt Editor at Robert McBride & Co.

T. R. Smith Editor at Boni & Liveright.

Holger Lundbergh Swedish-born poet and magazine writer.

Samuel Hopkins Adams Author of Flaming Youth (1923), under the pseudonym Wamer Fabian.

Elinor Wylie Poet and Novelist.

Max Gerlach One of the models for Jay Gatsby, see F/H Annual 1975

Mary M. Colum Critic; wife of writer Padraic Colum.

Ernest Truex was the leading man in the theatrical production of The Vegetable.

Carl Van Vechten Music Critic and novelist; author of Peter Whiffle (1922), The Blind Bow-Boy (1923), The Tattoed Countess (1923).

Moran Tudury Adventure editor.

Harford Powell was Coliier's editor.

These Letters were published in books: A Life in Letters (1993); Correspondence of F. Scott Fitzgerald (1980); The Letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald (1963).

F. Scott Fitzgerald's Life In LettersThe Correspondence of F. Scott Fitzgerald

CONTENTS

Chapter 2: September 1919–April 1924

xxx. TO: Alida Bigelow

xxx. TO: Ludlow Fowler

xxx. TO: Robert Bridges

xxx. TO: Robert Bridges

xxx. TO: Robert Bridges

xxx. TO: Robert Bridges

xxx. FROM: George Jean Nathan

xxx. TO: Robert Bridges

xxx. TO: Ludlow Fowler

xxx. TO: Robert Bridges

1920

xxx. To Unknown

xxx. TO Ruth Sturtevant

xxx. TO: Isabelle Amorous

xxx. Inscription To H. L. Mencken

xxx. TO Ruth Sturtevant

xxx. Inscription To Aiken Reichner

xxx. Inscription To W. R. K Taylor, Jr.

xxx. To: Charles G. Norris

xxx. To: Margaret Orr Green

xxx. Inscription to Elizabeth King

xxx. Inscription To Spencer Jones

xxx. Inscription To W.E. Hill

FROM: Charles G. Norris

xxx. TO Marie Hersey

xxx. TO Ruth Sturtevant

xxx. FROM: John Grier Hibben

xxx. TO: John Grier Hibben

xxx. TO: David Balch

xxx. TO: David Arnold Balch

xxx. To Shane Leslie

xxx. TO: Burton Rascoe

xxx. TO: Charles Scribner II

xxx. To Carl Hovey

xxx. To H. L. Mencken

xxx. FROM: Shane Leslie

xxx. TO: H. L. Mencken

xxx. From H. L. Mencken To F. Scott Fitzgerald

xxx. To Shane Leslie

xxx. TO: H. L. Mencken

xxx. To Carl Hovey

xxx. To Carl Hovey

xxx. TO: Phyllis Duganne Parker

xxx. To Shane Leslie

xxx. TO: Burton Rascoe

xxx. From Burton Rascoe TO James Branch Cabell

xxx. TO: George Stair

xxx. TO: Unknown

xxx. TO: Burton Rascoe

xxx. TO: John J. Fitzgerald (Paterson, N.J)

xxx. From Zelda (Mrs. F. Scott Fitzgerald) TO James Branch Cabell

xxx. From James Branch Cabell TO Zelda Fitzgerald

xxx. TO James Branch Cabell

xxx. TO Mr. And Mrs. Philip Mcquillan

xxx. FROM James Branch Cabell TO Scott Fitzgerald

xxx. TO: H. L. Mencken

xxx. From: H. L. Mencken

xxx. TO James Branch Cabell

1921

xxx. TO: H. L. Mencken

xxx. TO: John Biggs, Jr.

xxx. TO Sinclair Lewis

xxx. TO: Henry Raleigh

xxx. TO: Helen Carson

xxx. TO: H. L. Mencken

xxx. TO: Thomas Boyd

xxx. TO: Robert D. Clark

xxx. TO James Branch Cabell

xxx. To: Lorainne Pell

xxx. To Tom

xxx. To Carl Hovey

xxx. TO: Ralph Block

xxx. FROM: John Galsworthy

xxx. To Shane Leslie

xxx. TO: Ruth Sturtevant Smith

xxx. To Carl Hovey

xxx. TO: John Franklin Carter

F. Scott Fitzgerald's Life In Letters
The Correspondence of F. Scott Fitzgerald