Fitzgerald: My Lost City
Personal Essays, 1920–1940

This volume reconstructs F. Scott Fitzgerald's planned volume of personal essays.

F. Scott Fitzgerald (Author), James L. W. West, III (Edited by)

9780521402392, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 8 September 2005

366 pages
22.3 x 14.8 x 2.8 cm, 0.565 kg

'The result is a wealth of context for these very contemporary essays …' Peter Shillingsburg, De Montfort University

Twice during the last decade of his life, in 1934 and 1936, F. Scott Fitzgerald proposed a collection of his personal essays to Maxwell Perkins, his editor at Charles Scribner's Sons. Perkins was unenthusiastic on both occasions, and Fitzgerald died in 1940 without having put his best essays between hard covers. Fortunately Fitzgerald left behind a table of contents, and with this list as a guide it has been possible to publish here the collection that he envisioned, under the title My Lost City. This volume also includes several of Fitzgerald's autobiographical writings. My Lost City, like the other volumes in the Cambridge Edition, provides accurate texts based on Fitzgerald's surviving manuscripts and typescripts. Words and passages cut by magazine editors have been restored to several of the essays. A textual apparatus has been included, along with full explanatory notes identifying people, places, books, historical events, and other details.

Introduction
Part I. Fitzgerald's Selections, 1936: 1. Who's Who - and Why (1920)
2. Princeton (1927)
3. What I Think and Feel at 25 (1922)
4. How to Live on $36,000 a Year (1924)
5. How to Live on Practically Nothing a Year (1924)
6. Imagination - and a Few Mothers (1923)
7. 'Wait Till You Have Children of Your Own!' (1924)
8. How to Waste Material (1926)
9. One Hundred False Starts (1933)
10. Ring (1933)
11. A Short Autobiography (1929)
12. Girls Believe in Girls (1930)
13. My Lost City (1935/1940)
14. 'Show Mr. and Mrs. F. to Number' (1934)
15. Echoes of the Jazz Age (1931)
16. The Crack-Up (1936)
17. Pasting It Together (1936)
18. Handle with Care (1936)
Part II. Additional Essays, 1936–1940: 19. Auction - Model 1934 (1934)
20. Sleeping and Waking (1934)
21. Author's House (1936)
22. Afternoon of an Author (1936)
23. An Author's Mother (1936)
24. Early Success (1937)
25. My Generation (1939)
Record of Variants
Explanatory notes
Illustrations
Appendix 1. 'Show Mr. and Mrs. F. to Number -'
Appendix 2. Publication and Earnings.

Subject Areas: Prose: non-fiction [DN]