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…
Category: Scott Fitzgerald
Descendants 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 them through following the family line of Max’s half-brother Alfred Andrew Stork,…
For America: Roth’s ‘Europe’ & Cahan’s ‘The Rise of David Levinsky’
I would have accepted without question the information that Gatsby sprang from the swamps of Louisiana or from the lower East Side of New York. That was comprehensible. But young men didn’t—at least in my provincial inexperience I believed they didn’t—drift coolly out of nowhere and buy a palace on Long Island Sound — The…
Modernism under Surveillance. The ‘Literary Bolsheviks’ of the 1920s.
During the war, the essayist and critic H. L. Mencken was quizzed on several occasions about his German heritage and the contact he had with ‘enemy’ oculist Dr Wilhelm Sohler and Victor Hugo Erpf, a Baltimore businessman who had been arrested and imprisoned as a spy in April 1917. By this point in time, Mencken…
Colwell and Young. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s trip to London, November 1925
In an entry in his ledger dated November 1925, Scott mentions his second trip to London. Like previous entries it is difficult to piece together any kind of meaningful narrative from the handful of names and places he lists and much of our understanding of this trip has been gleaned from supporting diary entries made…
“God damn the continent of Europe”. F. Scott Fitzgerald letter to Edmund Wilson, Hotel Cecil, July 1921.
A ‘violent’ xenophobic letter written by the 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…
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
In the final part of our series on Max Gerlach — ‘The Real Great Gatsby‘ — I want to take a look at how F. Scott Fitzgerald’s first biographer, Arthur Mizener was told of his existence by Princeton graduate, Dan Piper, and how Piper had learned him first hand from the author’s wife, Zelda in…
Vegetable Eugenics Part III — Supernatural Eugenics
In Part I we looked at how Fitzgerald’s 1923 play, The Vegetable took a satirical look at the absurdities of The American Dream and what happens to people when they fail to live up to hyper-competitive capitalist and social-Darwinist ideals. The play centred around Jerry Frost, an uninspired 35-year-old railroad clerk who dreams of becoming…
Vegetable Eugenics Part II — Eugenics and Other Evils.
When Scott’s favourite British author, G. K. Chesterton addressed the press on the eve of his lecture tour of the States in January 1921, he had something he wanted to say about America. America wasn’t the great ‘Melting Pot’ it often presented itself as being. Equality may still have been the ideal in America, but…