do you see?

Why do I like The Great Gatsby?  Same reasons millions of other people have, I suppose.  Same reasons Hollywood movie studios keep on trying, with uneven success, to put it in film version.  (Leonardo Dicaprio?  ...I don't know....)

And I sort of grew up hearing the name F. Scott Fitzgerald.  (Thought it was a guy named "Escott" Fitzgerald until someone cleared that up.)

There's a writer named A. Scott Berg.  He wrote a biography of Maxwell Perkins, the editor who worked with Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe, and other giants of that era in the fiction business.  I think it was on the Perkins book's jacket that I read of Berg that he admired Fitzgerald's work & was applying to Fitzgerald's alma mater, Princeton, and in his application letter mentioned that he hoped he would be accepted and that even if he was not, he was going to come anyway.  : )

What other biographies has he written?
Besides Max Perkins --
Katharine Hepburn
and
Charles Lindbergh.

------------------------ [excerpt, Max Perkins:  Editor of Genius]:
Not long after Maxwell Perkins introduced F. Scott Fitzgerald to Van Wyck Brooks in the summer of 1920, Edmund Wilson, one of Fitzgerald's Princeton companions, wrote an imaginary conversation for the New Republic between Perkins's newest friend and his oldest, a meeting of two of the most celebrated literary minds of the day.  Wilson supposed Fitzgerald would acknowledge that Brooks was "the greatest writer on the subject [of American literature]" and then tell him:  "Of course, there were a lot of people writing before This Side of Paradise -- but the Younger Generation never really became self-conscious before then nor did the public at large become conscious of it.  I am the man, as they say in the ads, who made America Younger Generation-conscious." 

Brooks later remarks, "Scarcely had the first crop of young writers arrived and achieved, like you, some impressive success than a host of publishers, editors and journalists appeared ready to exploit and commercialize them -- with the result that there is now more demand for 'younger' writers than there are younger writers to supply it."

Scribners resisted the trend.  Old CS had no intention of converting his publishing house into a pulp factory, grinding out trashy fiction that failed to live up to his company's seventy-five-year reputation for responsible publishing.  Maxwell Perkins respected the company's standards but was inclined to take risks.  More actively than any of his colleagues, he scouted the work of new authors from all corners of the country.  In what seemed a personal crusade, he gradually replaced the hackneyed works in the Scribners catalog with new books he hoped might be more enduring. 

Beginning with Fitzgerald and continuing with each new writer he took on, he slowly altered the traditional notion of the editor's role.  He sought out authors who were not just "safe," conventional in style and bland in content, but who spoke in a new voice about the new values of the postwar world.  In this way, as an editor he did more than reflect the standards of his age; he consciously influenced and changed them by the new talents he published.
------------------------ [end excerpt]
{Max Perkins:  Editor of Genius, by A. Scott Berg.
Copyright, 1978.  Berkley Publishing Group,
New York, New York}

Books by F. Scott Fitzgerald:
This Side Of Paradise
The Beautiful And Damned
The Great Gatsby
Tender Is The Night
The Last Tycoon

---------------------------- [excerpt, The Great Gatsby] --
He did extraordinarily well in the war.  He was a captain before he went to the front....After the Armistice he tried frantically to get home but some complication or misunderstanding sent him to Oxford instead.  He was worried now -- there was a quality of nervous despair in Daisy's letters.  She didn't see why he couldn't come.  She was feeling the pressure of the world outside and she wanted to see him and feel his presence beside her and be reassured that she was doing the right thing after all.

For Daisy was young and her artificial world was redolent of orchids and pleasant, cheerful snobbery and orchestras which set the rhythm of the year, summing up the sadness and suggestiveness of life in new tunes.  All night the saxophones wailed the hopeless comment of the "Beale Street Blues" while a hundred pairs of golden and silver slippers shuffled the shining dust.  At the grey tea hour there were always rooms that throbbed incessantly with this low sweet fever, while fresh faces drifted here and there like rose petals blown by the sad horns around the floor.

Through this twilight universe Daisy began to move again with the season; suddenly she was again keeping half a dozen dates a day with half a dozen men and drowsing asleep at dawn with the beads and chiffon of an evening dress tangled among dying orchids on the floor beside her bed.  And all the time something within her was crying for a decision.  She wanted her life shaped now, immediately -- and the decision must be made by some force -- of love, of money, of unquestionable practicality -- that was close at hand.

That force took shape in the middle of spring with the arrival of Tom Buchanan.  There was a wholesome bulkiness about his person and his position and Daisy was flattered.  Doubtless there was a certain struggle and a certain relief.  The letter reached Gatsby while he was still at Oxford.

---------------

It was dawn now on Long Island and we went about opening the rest of the windows downstairs, filling the house with grey turning, gold turning light.  The shadow of a tree fell abruptly across the dew and ghostly birds began to sing among the blue leaves.  There was a slow pleasant movement in the air, scarcely a wind, promising a cool lovely day.

"I don't think she ever loved him."  Gatsby turned around from a window and looked at me challengingly.  "You must remember, old sport, she was very excited this afternoon.  He told her those things in a way that frightened her -- that made it look as if I was some kind of cheap sharper.  And the result was she hardly knew what she was saying."

He sat down gloomily.

"Of course she might have loved him, just for a minute, when they were first
married -- and loved me more even then, do you see?"

-------------------------- [end excerpt]
{The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Copyright, 1925.  Charles Scribner's Sons}

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