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…
Category: The Jazz Age
The Shining Ending, July 4 1921. The Shining, Isolationism and the American Dream
The ending of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining has chilled and intrigued movie-goers for years. In the closing scene of the film the camera moves from Jack Nicholson’s Jack Torrance sitting upright, dead in the snow, to a gallery of pictures in the ballroom of the Overlook Hotel. On one of the pictures is Jack in…
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…
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…
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…
A New Race of Man — How Trotsky’s Dream of a Soviet Superman Helped Perfect the American Dream
When F. Scott Fitzgerald sat down to work on his third novel, The Great Gatsby there was probably no greater influence on its composition than the author’s rediscovery of Percy Bysshe Shelley, a poet once memorably described by Harold Bloom as the Leon Trotsky of his day. D. Appleton and Company had just that year…
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…