Book Review: F. Scott Fitzgerald in Minnesota: The Writer & His Friends at Home, by Dave Page, Photographs by Jeff Krueger (2017)

Fitzgerald historian Dave Page, author of F. Scott Fitzgerald in Minnesota: The Writer & His Friends at Home, 2017.

Photographer Jeff Krueger.

I’m a big fan of F. Scott Fitzgerald, and I give Fitzgerald walking tours of the Saint Paul neighborhood he lived in. The more I read by and about Fitzgerald, the more intrigued I am by this man who wrote such fantastic prose. 

In 2017’s F. Scott Fitzgerald in Minnesota: The Writer & His Friends at Home, author Dave Page has produced the essential work about Fitzgerald’s life in Minnesota. Page has written about Fitzgerald before: in the 1996 book F. Scott Fitzgerald in Minnesota: Toward the Summit, co-written with John J. Koblas, in the notes he wrote for the 2004 collection The St. Paul Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald, which he co-edited, and in his perceptive Introduction and Afterword to the 2013 re-printing of The Thoughtbook of F. Scott Fitzgerald, a teenage diary that Fitzgerald kept. 

F. Scott Fitzgerald in Minnesota: The Writer & His Friends at Home is beautifully illustrated with photographs by Jeff Krueger, who has done a fantastic job at capturing the essence of Fitzgerald’s neighborhood. There are also period photos of some of the houses and buildings, as well as newspaper clippings about Fitzgerald and his friends. 

F. Scott Fitzgerald in Minnesota: The Writer & His Friends at Home was published by Fitzgerald in Saint Paul, a non-profit organization dedicated to “celebrating the life and literature of F. Scott Fitzgerald.” The organization was started by an endowment from Richard McDermott, who lived in Fitzgerald’s birthplace for almost forty years. 

Throughout the book, Page reminds us of Fitzgerald’s place in the Saint Paul society of his adolescence and young adulthood—he was not merely on the fringes of the Saint Paul elite, he was among the elite. Scott’s family was prominent enough in Saint Paul that when he visited Europe for the first time in 1921, the Archbishop of Saint Paul wrote him a letter of introduction to the Pope! (Despite the kind words from the Archbishop, Scott and Zelda did not meet the Pontiff.) Fitzgerald sometimes exaggerated his stories, as when he expressed his fear that his family would have to go to the poorhouse after his father lost his job in 1908. Page cuts through those misconceptions to give us a portrait of Fitzgerald as he truly was—someone born into a prominent family of some means, but who would also have to work for a living. 

Fitzgerald was an insider who could also project himself to be an outsider. There’s a beautiful passage in The Great Gatsby where Nick Carraway does exactly that. He’s at a party with Tom Buchanan and Myrtle Wilson:

“Yet high over the city our line of yellow windows must have contributed their share of human secrecy to the casual watcher in the darkening streets, and I was him too, looking up and wondering. I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.” (p.40) 

I suspect that it must have been that way for Fitzgerald in his own life—at the same time he was experiencing something, there was part of his brain that was cataloguing it, storing it for later, gathering information and scenes that would later inform his fiction. 

Page has done his homework, and he uncovers tidbits that other Fitzgerald historians have not. For example, it’s sometimes stated that Scott’s two older sisters died in an epidemic, which makes it sound as though they died close together. As Page shows, they actually died seven months apart. Sure, that fact by itself probably doesn’t mean much to all but the most devoted Fitzgerald aficionados, but my point is that Page is dispelling myths, and the more myths we can dispel, the more accurate we can be about Fitzgerald’s life. Numerous biographies repeat the story that Scott’s sisters died in an epidemic, and once an error like that appears in print, it can multiply indefinitely, as the book then becomes the source for others. 

Sprinkled throughout the book are insights into Fitzgerald from his childhood friends and contemporaries. Bob Clark gives us a sense of Scott’s charm: “He absolutely charmed the older women. My mother thought he was great…he absolutely charmed you when he was talking to you, as if you were the most interesting person in the world.” (p.139) 

There’s a lovely quote from Scott’s aunt, thanking him for his letter after the sudden death of his uncle: “…nothing touched me so much as your beautiful telegram & letter. I read them over & over and will always keep them. Father Barron said, ‘No one but Scott could have written that.’” (p.152) 

F. Scott Fitzgerald in Minnesota: The Writer & His Friends at Home will give great pleasure to passionate Fitzgerald fans who want to know more about his life in Minnesota, and how Saint Paul impacted his life and work. It will also no doubt give enjoyment to those not deeply immersed in Fitzgerald’s life and work as a beautiful visual record of the Saint Paul neighborhood that he called home.