It’s 11.30am on Friday, June 23 2023. I’ve been rifling the archives and punching in keywords for the past few hours. Suddenly I’m excited. I’ve found a report in a copy of Variety Magazine dated July 27, 1927. It’s unlikely to have been seen by another pair of eyes for close to a 100 years….
Category: Scott Fitzgerald
“God damn the continent of Europe”. F. Scott Fitzgerald letter to Edmund Wilson, Hotel Cecil, July 1921.
A ‘violent’ xenophobic letter written by author F. Scott Fitzgerald to his friend Edmund Wilson from the Hotel Cecil in London in July 1921 has been a constant source of embarrassment to his biographers. “The negroid streak creeps northward to defile the Nordic Race,” he writes. How much does the letter tells us about Scott…
Designs on Gatsby: Max Gerlach, Francis Cugat and F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Max von Gerlach, an associate of author F. Scott Fitzgerald, made regular trips to Havana. At one time, Havana was also the home of Francis Cugat, the Spanish-Cuban artist who designed the famous dust-jacket for Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel, The Great Gatsby. Here we explore the remarkable life of Cugat and the very faintest possibility that…
I am the Resurrection. The Death of Max Gerlach and the Birth of an American Hero
How Max Gerlach became associated with Arnold Rothstein isn’t clear. There is an eight-year period in Max’s life, starting 1912, when his exact location and activities are the subject of much speculation. This becomes clear in the report put together by Agent Harry W. Grunewald in the summer of 1917. After serving with the Atlantic…
Vegetable Eugenics — Genius Lost and Genius Regained.
16-minute podcast discussion If F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby exposed the tragic reality of Eugenics and the cruel, pyrrhic triumph of the American Dream, then it was only because previous attempts to drive a nail through its genetically superior heart with comedy had failed to prevent its moronic spread. The cheeky, irreverent view the…
Eugenically Speaking — How F. Scott Fitzgerald’s ‘Love or Eugenics?’ prepared the way for Gatsby
Listen the 11-minute podcast The Great Gatsby wasn’t the first time that F. Scott Fitzgerald had confronted the rising tide of bigotry that had been surging around Eugenics. As an 18 year-old student at Princeton University, Scott had written what even his contemporaries — and more extraordinarily still, his fellow students — had regarded as…
The Rise of the Coloured Empires — Gatsby and Eugenics
“Civilization’s going to pieces,’ broke out Tom violently. ‘I’ve gotten to be a terrible pessimist about things. Have you read The Rise of the Coloured Empires by this man Goddard? Well, it’s a fine book and everyone ought to read it … This idea is that we’re Nordics. I am, and you are, and you…
The Holocaust Was Complete: The Great Gatsby and the Lost Green Light of Liberty Part II
The second of a two-part look at the impact that the sinking of the Titanic may have had on the conception of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. What does the author mean by ‘the Holocuast was complete’? What was the author saying about the times? Henry Adams and F. Scott Fitzgerald weren’t the only…
The Green Light at the End of the Dock. The Great Gatsby and Titanic
April 10, 2023 marks 98 years since the publication of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, and 111 years since the RMS Titanic left Southampton’s White Star Dock on its ill-fated maiden voyage. This article explores the meaning and symbolism behind the green light and its possible inspiration in the Titanic disaster. This article explores…
Meyer Wolfsheim — Arnold Rothstein, Scott Fitzgerald and The Great Gatsby
A 157-page PDF book of this story can be found here Among the masses of articles and books on the Jewish origins of Jay Gatsby, by far the most popular evidence that gets cited on a regular basis relates to Gatsby’s small, flat-nosed friend and mentor Meyer Wolfsheim — ‘the man who fixed the World…