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.

Book Review: The St. Paul Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Edited by Patricia Hampl and Dave Page (2004)

The cover of The St. Paul Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Edited by Patricia Hampl and Dave Page, 2004. (Photo by Mark C. Taylor)

F. Scott Fitzgerald was born in Saint Paul, Minnesota, on September 24, 1896. His family moved to Buffalo, New York in 1898, but they returned to Saint Paul in 1908, and the city would be Scott’s home, off and on, until 1922. 

Fitzgerald led a peripatetic life, spending considerable amounts of time in Minnesota, New York, Montana, Louisiana, Connecticut, Delaware, Alabama, Maryland, North Carolina, and California. And that’s not even counting the numerous places where he and Zelda lived in France. Scott and Zelda never owned a home of their own. It’s difficult to say that any one place has a special claim on him. However, Saint Paul was where he first entertained the idea of becoming a writer, where he published his first writings, and where he finished his first two novels. Fitzgerald always saw places through the lens of an outsider, and I suspect that he secretly wondered if he truly belonged anywhere. 

The 2004 collection The St. Paul Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald, edited by Patricia Hampl and Dave Page, does a superb job of advocating for the importance of Saint Paul in Fitzgerald’s writings. Fitzgerald’s family was socially well-connected in Saint Paul, as his mother, Mollie McQuillan Fitzgerald, was born into a prominent and wealthy family. Mollie’s father, P.F. McQuillan, had come to Saint Paul from Ireland when he was just a boy. He eventually established a very successful wholesale grocery business, and built a mansion in the section of downtown Saint Paul known as Lowertown. (The mansion was torn down, as were all the mansions of Lowertown.) The McQuillans rubbed shoulders with people like the shipping and railroad tycoon James J. Hill, who had a nearby mansion of his own in Lowertown. Unfortunately, P.F. McQuillan died at the age of 43 in 1877 of Bright’s Disease, a kidney disorder. He left behind a fortune of about $250,000, a significant sum of money. However, after grandfather McQuillan’s death, no new money was being earned by the family, so by the time Scott was a young man, the family was still very well off, but they weren’t in the financial stratosphere like the Hills. In 1891 James J. Hill finished building his gigantic mansion on Summit Avenue, which totaled 36,000 square feet and included an art gallery. In contrast, Scott Fitzgerald was born in 1896 in a spacious rented apartment, one of six units in a building on Laurel Avenue, four blocks off of the prestigious Summit Avenue. It was still a very nice residence in the best part of town, but it was most definitely not a mansion.

Fitzgerald’s father, Edward, was from Maryland, and was the epitome of the Southern gentleman. Handsome, courtly, and well-dressed, he was unfortunately not successful at business. Nevertheless, young Scott Fitzgerald grew up rubbing shoulders with the elite of Saint Paul. He attended Saint Paul Academy, the most prestigious private school in the city, and also attended dancing school, which was a must in those days for anyone in the upper classes. He went to parties at the University Club, and Town & Country Club. Fitzgerald’s unique social position gave him access to the world of the very wealthy, but he knew that he would have to make his own way in the world. There was not enough family money for him to coast idly through life. 

If Fitzgerald had been either higher or lower in the social strata, he might not have developed into the brilliant observer of class and status that he became. Had he been a member of the idle rich, he might not have fully understood how his life was different from other people’s, and he might not have been interested in chronicling it. If Fitzgerald had been lower class, he wouldn’t have had access to the rich to see how they lived. But Fitzgerald had enough access to the rich to absorb their social milieu, and he knew how unique it was. There’s a brilliant quote from the critic Malcolm Lowry about Fitzgerald: “It was as if all his novels described a big dance to which he had taken the prettiest girl, and as if at the same time he stood outside the ballroom, a little Midwestern boy with his nose to the glass, wondering how much the tickets cost and who paid for the music.” Lowry called this Fitzgerald’s “double vision” and I think it sums up Fitzgerald perfectly. He is at once both involved participant and detached observer, and that’s one reason why he was such a great writer. 

The St. Paul Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald includes some of his greatest short stories, like “Bernice Bobs Her Hair,” “The Ice Palace,” and “Winter Dreams.” It also features the very funny “The Camel’s Back,” which Fitzgerald said he pounded out in a sleepless twenty-two hour stretch. 

“Bernice Bobs Her Hair” was one of Fitzgerald’s first short stories to be published in The Saturday Evening Post, and concerns the popular Marjorie and her seemingly hopeless cousin Bernice, who is visiting her for the summer. A young man thinks about Bernice: “He wondered idly whether she was a poor conversationalist because she got no attention or got no attention because she was a poor conversationalist.” (p.52) However, with Marjorie’s help, Bernice is able to achieve social popularity. The story also features this beautiful line, which shows how Fitzgerald was wise beyond his years: “At eighteen our convictions are hills from which we look; at forty-five they are caves in which we hide.” (p.56) 

“Winter Dreams” is one of Fitzgerald’s finest short stories, and he wrote that it was a “sort of 1^st draft of the Gatsby idea.” (p.107) It’s a beautiful, haunting story, as Dexter Green tries to win the heart of the cold Judy Jones. Dexter Green isn’t exactly Jay Gatsby, but they have similarities in their single-minded focus to achieve their fantasies. 

 As usual in Fitzgerald’s writing, there are beautiful, poetic sentences in “Winter Dreams,” such as: “When the scarlet corners of her lips curved down, it was less a smile than an invitation to a kiss.” (p.119) And: “In the middle of May when the weather balanced for a few days on the thin bridge that led to deep summer he turned in one night at Irene’s house.” (p.125) 

“Winter Dreams” was the last short story that Fitzgerald wrote while he was living in Saint Paul, but his hometown continued to be a setting and influence on his work. The 1927 short story “A Short Trip Home” is an interesting one. It mixes the supernatural with more typical Fitzgerald story material about young love. The story connects to Fitzgerald’s strong morality. While he’s often seen as the epitome of Jazz Age excesses, Fitzgerald had a strong moral sense of good and evil. As his friend Oscar Kalman said of him: “Poor Scott, he never really enjoyed his dissipation because he disapproved intensely of himself all the time it was going on.” (The Far Side of Paradise, by Arthur Mizener, p.93) Fitzgerald himself said, “Parties are a form of suicide. I love them, but the old Catholic in me secretly disapproves.” (The Far Side of Paradise, p.135) In Fitzgerald’s first novel, This Side of Paradise, the main character Amory Blaine sees a physical manifestation of the devil, just as the mysterious man in “A Short Trip Home” functions as a physical manifestation of evil.  

In 1928 and 1929, Fitzgerald was suffering from a severe case of writer’s block as he attempted to write the novel that would become Tender is the Night. So he returned to his adolescence in Saint Paul for a series of stories about Basil Duke Lee. The stories are excellent, and I strongly suspect that the young Basil Duke Lee shared many similarities with the young F. Scott Fitzgerald. The first Basil story was “The Scandal Detectives,” the short story taking its name from an actual club that the teenaged Fitzgerald started with his friends. The story features this lovely sentence, as Basil stares at Imogene Bissel: “For the first time in his life he realized a girl completely as something opposite and complementary to him, and he was subject to a warm chill of mingled pleasure and pain.” (p.167) 

Fitzgerald describes Basil’s youthful idea of what his life will be like: “This summer he and his mother and sister were going to the lakes and next fall he was starting away to school. Then he would go to Yale and be a great athlete, and after that—if his two dreams had fitted onto each other chronologically instead of existing independently side by side—he was due to become a gentleman burglar.” (p.168) Like Basil, Fitzgerald dreamed of finding glory on the athletic fields, but it was not to be. He badly wanted to make the football team at Princeton, but he was cut the first day of tryouts. 

Another Basil story, “A Night at the Fair,” describes the wonders of the Minnesota State Fair. If you haven’t had the good fortune to attend the Minnesota State Fair, let me assure you, it is a wonderful event, and one that most Minnesotans feel quite passionately about. Fitzgerald perfectly captures the mood of the Fair in this passage:

“The first lights of the evening were springing into pale existence; the afternoon crowd had thinned a little, and the lanes, empty of people, were heavy with the rich various smells of popcorn and peanuts, molasses and dust, and cooking Wienerwurst and a not-unpleasant overtone of animals and hay. The Ferris wheel, pricked out now in lights, revolved leisurely through the dusk; a few empty cars of the roller coaster rattled overhead. The heat had blown off and there was the crisp stimulating excitement of Northern autumn in the air.” (p.190)

At the Fair, Basil meets a girl. In Fitzgerald’s stories, there is always a girl, and she is always beautiful: “Her eyes, dark and intimate, seemed to have wakened at the glowing brilliance of the illumination overhead; there was the promise of excitement in them now, like the promise of the cooling night.” (p.191) 

As Basil waits for his first pair of long pants to arrive by courier, Fitzgerald sums up Basil’s thoughts: “Like most of us, he was unable to perceive that he would have any desires in the future equivalent to those that possessed him now.” (p.198) 

In another Basil story, “He Thinks He’s Wonderful,” Fitzgerald comes close to describing what Malcolm Cowley called his “double vision” as an author: “Passing from the gleaming store into the darkness, Basil was submerged in an unreality in which he seemed to see himself from the outside, and the pleasant events of the evening began to take on fresh importance.” (p.212) I think Fitzgerald was able to be both participant and observer in his own life, which was a trait that rankled some of his acquaintances. Donald Ogden Stewart, a friend of Fitzgerald’s who met him in Saint Paul in 1919, and encountered him again in Hollywood in the late 1930’s, wrote in his memoirs that Fitzgerald’s “note-taking watchfulness…kept me from ever feeling that he was really my friend.” Everything in Fitzgerald’s life was a possible story idea or a line of dialogue. 

“At Your Age” is an interesting story of a much older man falling for a younger woman. The story was published in The Saturday Evening Post in August of 1929, and Fitzgerald was paid $4,000 for it—which would be approximately $58,000 today. One particularly lyrical passage was incorporated into Fitzgerald’s 1934 novel Tender is the Night. Here is the passage from “At Your Age”:

“They came near and Tom admired the faint dust of powder over her freshness, the guarded sweetness of her smile, the fragility of her body calculated by Nature to a millimeter to suggest a bud, yet guarantee a flower.” (p.281) 

In Tender is the Night this very similar passage occurs as Dick Diver admires the much younger Rosemary Hoyt: “It took him a moment to respond to the unguarded sweetness of her smile, her body calculated to a millimeter to suggest a bud yet guarantee a flower.” (Tender is the Night, p.104)

“At Your Age” also contains this beautiful description of Minnesota winters: “It was a long winter, even in a land of long winters. March was full of billowy drift, and when it seemed at last as though the cold must be defeated, there was a series of blizzards, desperate as last stands.” (p.291)

“A Freeze-Out,” from 1931, was the last short story by Fitzgerald that mentioned Minnesota. It’s an interesting, if somewhat slight story. But it features this nice line, once again about Minnesota weather: “On the day spring broke through and summer broke through—it is much the same thing in Minnesota—Forrest stopped his coupe in front of a music store and took his pleasant vanity inside.” (p.296) 

Fitzgerald never wrote about his home town again, but he did mention it in letters that reveal his complicated relationship to Saint Paul. He wrote to his childhood friend Marie Hersey in 1934, “Having rambled so much I no longer regard Saint Paul as my home any more than the eastern seaboard or the Riviera. This is said with no disloyalty but simply because after all my father was an easterner and I went east to college and I never did quite adjust myself to those damn Minnesota winters. I was always freezing my cheeks, being a rotten skater, etc.—though many events there will always fill me with a tremendous nostalgia.” (The Letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald, p.536-7)

Fitzgerald contradicted himself in a 1936 letter to Hersey: “St. Paul contacts have been so infrequent that I am practically determined to go out there next summer for a while and bring the daughter. In spite of a fifteen-year absence, it still is home to me.” (The Letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald, p.568)

One wonders what Fitzgerald’s true feelings about Saint Paul were, but surely they were feelings that ran deep, given how often his hometown was referenced in his fiction.

Reflections on the 14th International F. Scott Fitzgerald Society Conference

Poster for the 14th International F. Scott Fitzgerald Society Conference in Saint Paul, Minnesota, 2017. (Photo by Mark C. Taylor)

Me with Sam Lanahan, the grandson of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, June 26, 2017.

Author Scott Donaldson speaking at the Conference, June 26, 2017. (Photo by Mark C. Taylor)

Last week I attended the 14^th International F. Scott Fitzgerald Society Conference in Saint Paul. It was an excellent opportunity to meet some of the leading Fitzgerald experts from around the world, and to indulge my own burgeoning fascination with Fitzgerald. 

I read Fitzgerald in high school, back in the late 1990’s, The Great Gatsby in 10^th grade, and some of his short stories after that. But for some reason, even though I loved Fitzgerald’s writing and bought several of his books, I didn’t go on a Fitzgerald binge the way I did with Hemingway at around the same age. So now I’m finally really digging into Fitzgerald’s life and work, and it’s been richly rewarding. He’s a great author who is still having a significant impact on popular culture, and he led a richly fascinating life. His writing obviously still speaks to people in a meaningful way in 2017, 121 years after his birth. 

I was excited to meet several of the scholars attending the conference, but Scott Donaldson was the one I was most excited about. I’ve been aware of Scott Donaldson’s work for about twenty years. At some point in 1995 or 1996, during my freshman year of high school, I picked up The Stories of John Cheever. The compact little paperback, with its distinctive bright red cover with the large, swooping C on it, quickly transported me to a post-war suburbia full of drinking, adultery, and page after page of gorgeous prose. At some point over the next year or two, I found Donaldson’s 1988 biography of Cheever at a bargain bookstore in an outlet mall. I read bits and pieces of it, but didn’t read it cover to cover, and I added it to my growing Cheever collection. A couple of years later, I learned that Donaldson and I were both alums of The Blake School. My awareness of Donaldson’s work has increased in the last couple of years, with the reissue of his biography of Fitzgerald, Fool for Love, by the University of Minnesota Press in 2012, and his 2015 book The Impossible Craft: Literary Biography. I recently reviewed Fool for Love and his 1999 book Hemingway vs. Fitzgerald. 

Scott Donaldson was very nice, and he was actually the first person I talked to at the conference, he was walking out of Hotel 340 as I was walking in, so I said hi to him, told him I’d enjoyed his books, and mentioned that we had Blake in common. He said he’s always looked back fondly on his time at Blake. His talk Monday afternoon was about Tender is the Night, and he said his next book will be about Tender. Later in the week I was able to ask Donaldson if he had known William F. Buckley when he was at Yale. Donaldson laughed and said, “I used to beat him at bridge all the time!” It turns out that Donaldson and his roommate regularly played Buckley and his roommate. He told me that it was obvious then that Buckley was brilliant. I knew that Donaldson had written a biography of Charlie Fenton, a professor at Yale who taught a class called “Daily Themes.” I told Donaldson that Buckley also had great things to say about the “Daily Themes” class. 

I also met Sam Lanahan, grandson of Scott and Zelda and son of Scottie Fitzgerald. He gave a talk about some of Zelda’s relatives, which was fascinating and informative. Lanahan has some resemblance to his grandfather—the eyes and nose especially. Lanahan was also an excellent speaker, with a quiet charisma that drew the audience in. As I was listening to him, I thought, “This is probably similar to what Scott Fitzgerald was like.” I chatted with Lanahan briefly after his talk, and he was a delight. 

One of the highlights of the conference was an early morning session with A. Scott Berg, who has written acclaimed biographies of Fitzgerald’s editor Maxwell Perkins, Charles Lindbergh, and Woodrow Wilson. (I reviewed Berg’s biography of Wilson here.) Berg was a fascinating speaker; I could have listened to him all day. He’s actually named after F. Scott Fitzgerald, as his mother was reading Fitzgerald’s novels when she was pregnant with him. Berg and Chris Keyser discussed the upcoming Amazon TV series The Last Tycoon, based on Fitzgerald’s unfinished novel. It sounds pretty interesting, and the clips they showed made it look good. I hope it’s better than the 1976 movie that Elia Kazan directed, which I reviewed here.

I also heard James L.W. West III speak, he’s the editor of the Cambridge edition of Fitzgerald’s collected works; the 16^th volume in the series is due to be released later this summer. Anne Margaret Daniel spoke at the same session—she’s the editor of I’d Die for You, the volume of uncollected Fitzgerald stories that just came out in April, which I reviewed here. I asked Daniel after her talk about the uncollected pages still in the Fitzgerald collection at Princeton—what Fitzgerald called false starts—and if she thought those would ever be published. She said they wouldn’t, since they were so clearly unfinished and never meant for publication. But they’re still available for scholars to see at Princeton. In that same session Don Skemer spoke. Skemer is the Curator of Manuscripts at Princeton and handles the Fitzgerald papers there. He spoke about how Fitzgerald’s papers came to Princeton, and he dispelled the notion that the University didn’t want Fitzgerald’s papers. That was what I had read, so I was glad to know that Princeton understood the value of Fitzgerald’s papers, even though he was out of fashion as a writer at the time they accepted the papers. There was initially some reluctance on the part of John Biggs, the executor of Fitzgerald’s will, and Scottie Fitzgerald to allow access to letters that described Zelda’s mental illnesses, but with her death in 1948 the decision was made not to restrict access to Fitzgerald’s papers. I think this was a very smart move, as the open availability of Fitzgerald’s papers has aided so much of the research that has produced biographies that continue to kindle interest in Fitzgerald’s life and work. 

There was also a superb bus tour of Saint Paul’s Cathedral Hill/Summit Avenue/Crocus Hill/Summit Hill neighborhood, where Fitzgerald grew up. I was fortunate enough to be on the same bus as Dave Page, the leading expert on Fitzgerald’s time in Saint Paul. Page was the co-author of F. Scott Fitzgerald in Minnesota: Towards the Summit, which I reviewed here, and the sole author of the recently published F. Scott Fitzgerald in Minnesota: The Writer and His Friends at Home. Page knows just about all there is to know about Fitzgerald’s time in Saint Paul, and I learned a lot of new information on his tour. 

The Fitzgerald Conference was a lot of fun, and thanks should go to Fitzgerald in Saint Paul for helping organize it.

Book Review: F. Scott Fitzgerald in Minnesota: Toward the Summit, by Dave Page and John J. Koblas (1996)

F. Scott Fitzgerald in Minnesota: Toward the Summit, by Dave Page and John J. Koblas, 1996. (Photo by Mark C. Taylor)

Dave Page and John J. Koblas’ 1996 book F. Scott Fitzgerald in Minnesota: Toward the Summit, is a study of the author’s time spent in his home state. The book examines how Minnesota influenced Fitzgerald’s writings. Sometimes it might be a bit of a stretch-did a trip Fitzgerald took to the town of Frontenac in southern Minnesota in 1909 really serve as inspiration for the 1922 short story “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz”? It’s certainly possible, but it might not be very likely.

Dave Page and John J. Koblas have both been involved in other projects related to Fitzgerald’s time in Minnesota. Koblas authored the excellent guidebook A Guide to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s St. Paul, which I reviewed here. Page co-edited the 2004 collection The St. Paul Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald, and also edited the 2013 publication of The Thoughtbook of F. Scott Fitzgerald, a teenage diary that Fitzgerald kept in 1910 and 1911, which I reviewed here.

Page and Koblas do an admirable job of tracking Fitzgerald’s many comings and goings from Minnesota, from his birth in Saint Paul in 1896 until he left his home state for good in 1922. Fitzgerald first dreamed of becoming an author in Saint Paul, and it was in the school magazine of Saint Paul Academy that he saw his first short story published, “The Mystery of the Raymond Mortgage.” Fitzgerald’s position as an upper-middle-class boy mingling with the upper class made him finely attuned to issues of class, status, and money. These issues would be of supreme importance in his fiction. Fitzgerald’s social position made him the perfect observer of the wealthy. Fitzgerald had entry into the same social circle as the very rich, but he knew that he would have to make his own way in the world-he couldn’t just be idle and let the family fortune take care of him. Thus, he had a different sensibility from some of his peers, and he had a powerful drive to succeed. Fitzgerald had a lot of ambition as a writer, and he also had the talent to back it up.

If Fitzgerald had been either higher or lower in the social strata, he might not have developed into the brilliant critic of class and status that he became. Had he been a member of the idle rich, he might not have fully understood how his life was different from other people’s, and he might not have been interested in chronicling it. If Fitzgerald had been lower class, he probably wouldn’t have had the access to the rich to see how they lived. But Fitzgerald had enough access to the rich to absorb their social milieu, and he knew how unique it was. There’s a brilliant quote from the critic Malcolm Lowry about Fitzgerald: “It was as if all his novels described a big dance to which he had taken the prettiest girl, and as if at the same time he stood outside the ballroom, a little Midwestern boy with his nose to the glass, wondering how much the tickets cost and who paid for the music.” Lowry called this Fitzgerald’s “double vision” and I think it sums up Fitzgerald perfectly. He is at once both involved participant and detached observer, and that’s one reason why he was such a great writer.

One of the more interesting tidbits in F. Scott Fitzgerald in Minnesota is that for a while in 1917 Fitzgerald and Sinclair Lewis were living just a block away from each other on Summit Avenue, Saint Paul’s showcase street. The two writers didn’t know each other at the time­­­—Fitzgerald was about to leave Princeton University and enter officer’s training school, and Lewis had published several books, but wasn’t well known yet. It’s pretty remarkable that two of the leading American authors of the 1920’s were living on the same street, albeit for just a brief time. Both Fitzgerald and Lewis burst onto the American literary scene in 1920, Fitzgerald with his first novel This Side of Paradise, which I reviewed here, and Lewis with Main Street, his scathing account of small town hypocrisy. There are some similarities between the two writers: both men lived peripatetic lives, and both were alcoholics. Fitzgerald and Lewis did meet in 1921 at the White Bear Yacht Club. According to Page and Koblas’ sources, Lewis never cared for Fitzgerald’s writing. That surprises me, but literary rivalries are often hard to understand.

Page and Koblas have excellent material about Fitzgerald’s last year in Saint Paul, from 1921 to 1922. Scott and his wife Zelda were tired of New York City, and the stifling heat of Alabama had been too much for the pregnant Zelda, so they came back to Scott’s hometown. They finally settled at a beautiful house at 626 Goodrich Avenue, rented through their friends Oscar and Xandra Kalman. (It was Xandra who had the good sense to buy diapers and other baby supplies for baby girl Scottie, as it had slipped the minds of both Scott and Zelda.) Scott was happy working at the house on Goodrich, and he also rented a small office in downtown Saint Paul where he wrote. Scott wisely kept the location of his downtown office a secret to all but a few close friends, and the exact location of it still remains a mystery. Scott was working on finishing The Beautiful and Damned, his second novel, published in March of 1922. If Fitzgerald had been married to a different woman, maybe he would have stayed in Saint Paul, moving from house to house in the Summit Avenue neighborhood, still keeping his secret writing office downtown. But Zelda hated Saint Paul, and in September, 1922, Fitzgerald left his home town for the last time, never to return. In an odd biographical twist of fate, Fitzgerald was born on Laurel Avenue in Saint Paul, and his last address was Laurel Avenue in Los Angeles. (He died at the apartment of his girlfriend Sheilah Graham on Hayworth Avenue, one block off of Laurel.)

Fitzgerald displayed mixed feelings towards Saint Paul, writing to his childhood friend Marie Hersey in 1934: “Having rambled so much I no longer regard Saint Paul as my home any more than the eastern seaboard or the Riviera. This is said with no disloyalty but simply because after all my father was an easterner and I went east to college and I never did quite adjust myself to those damn Minnesota winters. I was always freezing my cheeks, being a rotten skater, etc.-though many events there will always fill me with a tremendous nostalgia.” (The Letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald, p.536-7)

Fitzgerald contradicted himself in a 1936 letter to Hersey: “St. Paul contacts have been so infrequent that I am practically determined to go out there next summer for a while and bring the daughter. In spite of a fifteen-year absence, it still is home to me.” (The Letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald, p.568)

These two letters could simply have been written in two different moods, but perhaps after the difficulties of Fitzgerald’s “crack up” period in 1935 and 1936 he felt a tug of nostalgia for the city of his birth.

F. Scott Fitzgerald in Minnesota is essential for anyone who wants to understand the important role that Minnesota played in the life and fiction of F. Scott Fitzgerald.