I found a copy of Paraic O’Donnell‘s “The Maker of Swans” while I was in Seattle, it seems the perfect thing to distract me from the news this evening and take me into some kind of sorcery, that I’m more than intrigued by, and have no clear concept of, as…
Tag: F. Scott Fitzgerald
When I was in college I went through a period when all I read was Fitzgerald. I’d forgotten how much I loved the glimmer and precision of his prose, until I picked up a copy of The Love of the Last Tycoon: A Western, the novel he was writing when…
They called him “The Boy Wonder” and his filmmaking methods are still in use today. “That man has never written a word, yet he can tell me exactly what to do with a story. I didn’t know you had people like that out here.” George S. Kaufman “Thalberg has always…
He had one of the rarest qualities in all literature, and it’s a great shame that the word for it has been thoroughly debased by the cosmetic racketeers, so that one is almost ashamed to use it to describe a real distinction. Nevertheless, the word is charm — charm as…
Anita Loos worked for a very long time in the film industry, had an unfailingly cheerful disposition, and knew a whole hell of a lot of people. She wrote several books, including “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes,” and a few memoirs, from which we cull the following: A fan letter from William…
It was at Camp Sheridan that Zelda met a young officer named Scott Fitzgerald. He was beautiful, like Zelda — they were both petite, with blond hair and light eyes. Years later, in her autobiographical novel Save Me the Waltz (1932), she wrote: “He smelled like new goods. Being close…
The high (or low) lights of the Fitzgeralds’ turbulent marriage included Zelda’s romantic entanglement on the Riviera with a French pilot, her suspicions that Fitzgerald was having a sexual relationship with Ernest Hemingway, and accusations on both sides that the other had “plagiarised” their life. Cline points to an exchange…