Many people won’t know that The Great Gatsby once had a prologue. It was ditched by Fitzgerald when he realised that it didn’t fit with the ’general neatness’ of the book’s design. Instead, he offered to H. L. Mencken’s new American Mercury magazine for a $118. It’ s a deeply enigmatic tale, so what is…
The Phantom of the Jazz Age
The Phantom of the Jazz Age – 100 Years of Gatsby It’s 100 years since The Great Gatsby was published. Jay Gatsby has followed the author, F. Scott Fitzgerald to Paris determined to uncover the truth about his identity. Is Scott prepared to tell everybody the truth after all these years? Although a fictional scene,…
A ‘Secret Mission’ to Russia. How F. Scott Fitzgerald very nearly became a spy.
In 1917, F. Scott Fitzgerald, author of The Great Gatsby, was nearly recruited for a covert mission to Russia, posing as a Red Cross secretary for Father Sigourney Fay. The mission, tied to US State Department interests during the Russian Revolution, aimed to gauge religious freedom and political shifts. Complicated by secret diplomacy and escalating…
Descendents of the Real Jay Gatsby — Alfred A. Stork aka Charles A. Stork I
Pleased to say that after a long search I’ve finally been able to trace the living descendants of Max Stork Gerlach, the man that author F. Scott Fitzgerald used as a partial basis for his most famous character, Jay Gatsby. I have found through them through following the family line of Max’s half-brother Alfred Andrew…
The Usual ‘Unusual’ Suspects. The Lindbergh Kidnapping, Arms Deals and a New York Prohibition Scandal.
“I was immediately struck by the number of young Englishmen dotted about; all well dressed, all looking a little hungry, and all talking in low, earnest voices to solid and prosperous Americans.” The Great Gatsby I’d like to go back to another Max Gerlach conundrum. On Max’s 1942 World War II Draft Registration Card, Gerlach…
Repeating the Past with Genius: Understanding the role played by Americanism & the Catholic Church in the creation of The Great Gatsby
“I wouldn’t ask too much of her,” I ventured. “You can’t repeat the past.” “You can’t repeat the past?” he cried incredulously.“Why of course you can!” He looked around him wildly, as if the past were lurking here in the shadow of his house, just out of reach of his hand. The Great Gatbsy With…
Max von Gerlach aka Max Stork – The Original Great Gatsby?
“He started as one man I knew and then changed into myself.” That’s how the author described his most famous creation, Jay Gatsby. And on the evidence currently available there’s no reason to doubt him. Discoveries made by Matthew J. Bruccoli and Horst Kruse suggest that the ‘one man’ he knew was Max Gerlach, whose…
The Cult of Tradition: Let’s Make The Past Great Again! ™
Before you went to the bar, Mr Farage, we were talking about why people like you and me were jumping into our little spaceships and hurtling back through time. I was talking about time just being another modern consumable and argued that providing there were enough independent time traders like your good self around, going…
George Shanks and the Protocols Matrix
On the 100th anniversary of the book being exposed as a forgery, a recent discovery I made in the archives in Dublin suggests that the 1920 British translation of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (The Jewish Peril) was not the work of ‘lone wolf’ anti-Semite George Shanks, but part of a sophisticated propaganda…
Monocled Mutineer – Mutiny at the BBC
Why did Bleasdale’s drama cause such a media storm? Why was the BBC Director Alasdair Milne removed? And what were Willie Whitelaw’s links to Toplis’ killer?
The Enchanting Secret Behind the Monocled Mutineer
Unhappy is the land that needs a hero. What makes the legend of the Monocled Mutineer such a compelling mystery?
The Glorious Fourth – A Writer’s Declaration. A Listenable 10-page storybook
At 10.00am yesterday morning I received an email prompt from Google asking me to check out a new A.I feature called Gemini Storybook. I was busy proofing a book that I am writing on F. Scott Fitzgerald, but curious, I took a look. And I’m glad I did. Here’s the result On the morning of…
Katharine Gotzian Tighe Fessenden — Proofing Paradise
After quitting his job in New York and returning to his parents’ house in Saint Paul in July 1919, the 23 year-old Scott Fitzgerald was getting down to work on a new version of his debut novel, This Side of Paradise, that had a bit more order, and a bit more of a conclusion. On…
Death of Umberto Eco: Never Leaving, Always Arriving
He provided signposts in a world of infinite junctions, a road map in a world of infinite signs. Discovering Umberto Eco at University was a bit like discovering sex. During the long bleak months of winter 1990 I’d read his novel, The Name of The Rose back to back with Travels in Hyperreality — a…
Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us.
The first draft of Fitzgerald’s novel would be completed in a villa in Valescure, near St. Raphael in France during the summer and fall of 1924. In the last week of October 1924, Scott, positively glowing with satisfaction, mailed a copy of his novel to his literary agent Harold Ober and his editor Max Perkins…
The Washingtons. The role played by the descendents of the family of George Washington in the life and work of F. Scott Fitzgerald
Among the mourners at the funeral of Scott’s grandmother, Cecilia Aston Scott Fitzgerald, in 1924 were the Forrest family, a distinguished Washington family whose ancestral home in Georgetown Cecilia had stayed at during her early years in the capital. The head of the Forrest family was well-known government attorney Randolph Keith Forrest, the nephew of…
16 Percy Circus, St Pancras — 1905
Why was Vladimir Lenin lodging with Liberal Candidate Philip Whitwell Wilson and his family at the height of the first Russian Revolution in 1905 and how did his friend and press colleague, Henry Brailsford get embroiled in an assassination attempt at the Hotel Bristol in St Petersburg that same year? A REVOLUTION IN ST PANCRAS…