Editing this book is probably the most fun Maxwell Perkins, 39, has ever had in his job, but it was also the biggest pain in the patoot.
Maxwell Perkins
Perkins was introduced to the author, well-known columnist Ring Lardner, also 39, by Scribner’s hit novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald, 27. Last July Scott invited Max to have dinner with them out on Long Island where they both lived. A lovely drunken evening ended when Scott drove Max into Durand’s Pond. But that’s another story.
Lardner’s first book, You Know Me Al, a series of letters from an imaginary minor league baseball player, was a success seven years ago. Perkins really wanted to have Scribner’s bring out a collection of Ring’s newspaper columns and magazine articles.
You Know Me Al by Ring Lardner
The problem was that Ring never kept track of where his work had been published. Perkins had to do all the searching and calling around.
At one point he even asked his boss, Charles “Old CS” Scribner, 69, for some extra help, telling him,
I should be of more value if I were more free.”
Ring apologized for all the trouble, and told Max he could visit Great Neck again,
It’s safer now…as Durand’s Pond is frozen over.”
Max did get together with Ring out on Long Island a few times, and, although Lardner was talking about taking a trip to Europe soon, he didn’t look well. His chain smoking was making his cough worse, and, although they both had a lot of drinks, Ring didn’t eat much.
The resulting book, How to Write Short Stories (With Samples), published this month, has been worth the effort, according to Perkins. This should get Lardner some well-deserved recognition.
How to Write Short Stories (With Samples) by Ring Lardner
At the end of the month, Max’s wife is leaving on a Caribbean cruise with some friends, but the editor has too much work to do to be able to join her.
He has to drive to Richmond, Virginia, to meet with one of his authors. Perkins has considered taking a small detour to Middleburg to visit a lovely woman he has met a few times when she visited relatives up north, Elizabeth Lemmon, 31.
But Max is thinking it would be better not to make the detour.
Mark your calendar! The Greater Pittsburgh Festival of Books returns to the Pittsburgh Theological Seminary in Highland Park this Saturday, May 11. Stop by the “Such Friends” booth in Writers’ Row to receive the special Festival discount on all five volumes.
This summer I will be talking about the literary 1920s in Paris and New York at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at Carnegie-Mellon University.
Manager as Muse, about Perkins’ relationships with, Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe, is also available on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk in both print and e-book versions.
Surrounded by 17 pieces of luggage, several crates filled with volumes of the Encyclopedia Brittanica, and copies of his own novels and short story collections bound in pale blue leather with gold lettering, F. Scott Fitzgerald, 27, sits in his living room waiting for the taxi to take him, his wife Zelda, 23, and their two-year-old daughter Scottie, to board the SSMinnewaska to sail to Cherbourg, France.
SS Minnewaska
They have also thrown in a one-hundred-foot roll of copper screening. Might be bugs.
Scott and Zelda had been to France once before, a few years ago, right after the publication of his first novel, This Side of Paradise. Zelda was sick the whole time, pregnant with Scottie. They didn’t like it.
But now they both feel they need a big change. Scott has been working on his third novel, and he feels as though he is stuck. They have a small nest egg, and income from the magazine short stories he’ll keep writing. At the current exchange rates, the money will go a lot further in the south of France than in Great Neck.
This time, the Fitzgeralds decided to plan ahead a bit more. They hosted a dinner at Christmastime to get some tips from friends about where to go, whom to see.
Their Great Neck neighbor, Esther Murphy, 26, suggested that they make contact with her brother Gerald, 36, a painter, and his wife Sara, 40. They have children around Scottie’s age and moved permanently to France a few years ago.
Esther Murphy
They sound interesting. Scott will be sure to look them up when they get to Paris.
Mark your calendar! The Greater Pittsburgh Festival of Books returns to the Pittsburgh Theological Seminary in Highland Park on Saturday, May 11. Stop by the “Such Friends” booth in Writers’ Row.
This summer I will be talking about the literary 1920s in Paris and New York at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at Carnegie-Mellon University.
Manager as Muse, about Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins’ relationships with, Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe, is also available on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk in both print and e-book versions.
Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins, 39, needs to write an encouraging letter to his top author, F. Scott Fitzgerald, 27, currently living on Long Island, but preparing to move to France with his wife Zelda, 23, and their baby girl Scottie, aged two.
The Fitzgeralds’ passport photos
Scott’s most recent piece in the Saturday Evening Post, just a couple of weeks ago, is titled “How to Live on $36,000 a Year.” It’s funny, but Max worries about Scott revealing his financial problems in public. In the piece he reports that, three months after marrying Zelda,
I found one day to my horror that I didn’t have a dollar in the world…This particular crisis passed the next morning when the discovery that publishers sometimes advance royalties sent me hurriedly to mine.”
Which is, of course, true.
“How to Live on $36,00 a Year” in the Saturday Evening Post, April 5
But a bit more worrisome is the lengthy letter Perkins received from Fitzgerald last week, expressing reservations about his progress on his third novel. Scott wrote in part:
It is only in the last four months that I’ve realized how much I’ve—well, almost deteriorated in the three years since I finished [his second novel] The Beautiful and Damned...If I’d spent this time reading or travelling or doing anything—even staying healthy—it’d be different but I spent it uselessly—neither in study nor in contemplation but only in drinking and raising hell generally. If I had written the B&D at the rate of 100 words a day, it would have taken me four years…I’ll have to ask you to have patience about the book and trust me that at last or at least for the 1st time in years I’m doing the best I can…[My bad habits are]:
1. Laziness
2. Referring everything to Zelda—a terrible habit, nothing ought to be referred to anyone until it is finished.
3. Word Consciousness—self doubt.
ect. ect. ect. ect….I don’t know anyone who has used up so much personal experience as I have at 27…If I ever win the right to any leisure again, I will assuredly not waste it as I wasted the past time…This book will be a consciously artistic achievement & must depend on that as the first books did not.”
So that Scribner’s can have this novel for the fall list, Max wants to encourage Scott to keep working by keeping him focused on specifics. For example, Perkins tells Scott why he isn’t crazy about the title, Among the Ash Heaps and Millionaires:
I do like the idea you have tried to express…The weakness is in the words ‘Ash Heap’ which do not seem to me to be a sufficiently definite and concrete expression of that part of the idea…I always thought that The Great Gatsby was a suggestive and effective title.”
Mark your calendar! The Greater Pittsburgh Festival of Books returns to the Pittsburgh Theological Seminary in Highland Park on Saturday, May 11. Stop by the “Such Friends” booth in Writers’ Row.
This summer I will be talking about the literary 1920s in Paris and New York at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at Carnegie-Mellon University.
Manager as Muse, about Perkins’ relationships with Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Thomas Wolfe, is also available on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk in both print and e-book versions.
Harold Ober, 43, agent at the renowned Paul R. Reynolds Literary Agency, wishes he could have done better for his client, short story writer F. Scott Fitzgerald, 27.
Fitzgerald has had a really good track record selling stories to the country’s best magazines—Saturday Evening Post, Smart Set, Cosmopolitan. But because his second novel, The Beautiful and Damned, didn’t do as well as his first, the 1920 best seller This Side of Paradise, Ober is having a harder time getting a good price for Fitzgerald’s work.
The Beautiful and Damned
Ober did finally get this three-part travel story, “The Cruise of the Rolling Junk,” into the Hearst Corporation’s Motor magazine, for the February, March and April issues, but they only paid $300.
When they were living Westport, Connecticut, almost four years ago, Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda, 24, took off in their used Marmon which they called the “Rolling Junk,” to drive over one thousand miles to see her parents in Montgomery, Alabama. The road trip makes for a good story, but none of the major magazines were interested.
The Fitzgeralds have since moved to Long Island, but they returned to Westport for one day to take some photos with a similar car to illustrate the article.
F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald posing in a car like the “Rolling Junk”
Just last month, Ober had better luck with one of Zelda’s short stories, “Our Own Movie Quarterly.” When it had been rejected by CosmopolitanScott made some changes, but told Harold that he felt that it was “a complete flop.” However, Ober was able to sell that one to the Chicago Sunday Tribune for $1,000. They’re going to run it next year, with Scott’s byline, of course.
The Fitzgeralds are getting ready to move to Paris. Ober’s not sure why they think Scott will get more work done over there. Scott says he’s working on a third novel; he’d better come up with something good or his wife will be writing his stories for him.
This summer I will be talking about the literary 1920s in Paris and New York at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at Carnegie-Mellon University, and about early 20th century supporters of the arts at Osher in the University of Pittsburgh.
Manager as Muse, about Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins’ relationships with Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe, is also available on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk in both print and e-book versions.
In one of her two Harlem townhouses, A’Lelia Walker, 38, is throwing another fabulous party.
West 136th Street, Harlem
As the president of the Madam C. J. Walker Manufacturing Co. since her mother’s death four years ago, A’Lelia’s is known for the legendary salons she hosts, with her attention to detail over every aspect of the festivities. The fold-out invitation for this dinner reads on the cover “Merrie Christmas” in an elegant typeface, and inside,
May your lives be filled with music.”
The menu includes venison, bacon and filet mignon.
In addition to presiding over a terrifically entertaining evening, wearing a turban that makes her appear taller, A’leila also makes a point of showcasing African-American talent with quotations of poetry by her friend Langston Hughes, 22, on the walls, and books by black authors displayed in a special cabinet.
*****
Downtown, in the theater district, the hit playwrights Marc Connelly, just turned 33, and George S Kaufman, 34, are presiding over one of their few flops to date. The musical Helen of Troy, New York just closed at the Times Square Theatre after fewer than 200 performances.
A few blocks away, at the Garrick Theatre on West 35th Street, Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw, 67, is having a big success with his Saint Joan, starring Winifred Lenihan, 25. Truth be told, the idea for this play came from Shaw’s wife, Charlotte, 66.
Garrick Theatre, 67 West 35th Street, Theatre District
Over on Fifth Avenue, in his office in the Scribner’s building, editor Max Perkins, 39, is packing up some manuscripts to take with him on his annual family holiday in Windsor, Vermont.
Max has spent this fall tracking down stories and essays by his newest author, Ring Lardner, 38. His work has appeared in magazines and newspapers all over the country, but Ring never kept track of where.
Now that Max has pulled them all together for a collection he’s calling How to Write Short Stories, Perkins is so enthusiastic for the project that he pushed it through the Scribner’s editorial board meeting before he even got official approval from Ring.
But all this activity has made Perkins realize how much his duties have increased in the past few years. Scribner’s is getting on average 500 more manuscripts a year than they did before the Great War. After the holiday, he’s going to ask president Charles “Old CS” Scribner, 69, to get him more help. Max will make the case that his time is best spent seeking out and nurturing new talent.
*****
Perkins’ top novelist, F. Scott Fitzgerald, 27, is hosting a dinner party in the city this Christmastime. He and his wife Zelda, 23, are planning to move to Paris next year, with their two-year-old daughter Scottie. They have invited some of their literary friends who have just spent time in Paris to pass on personal contacts and tips about where to live. Included are novelist John Dos Passos, 27, as well as Gilbert Seldes, 30, and Edmund “Bunny” Wilson, 28, both with The Dial magazine.
*****
Down in Greenwich Village, “Bunny” has paid a visit to the small home of his former lover, poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, 31.
Ten months ago, Wilson married actress Mary Blair, 28, who gave birth to their daughter three months ago. (You do the math.) Mary has already packed the infant off to Edmund’s Mom in Red Bank, New Jersey, so she can get back to her acting career with the Provincetown Playhouse.
Mary Blair
Millay also married earlier this year but recently sent Wilson a passionate letter apologizing for her behavior when she dumped him. Edna entreated Edmund to come visit her by offering him cigarettes and a rosy apple; Wilson has given in.
This brick house is so tiny, only 8.5 ft. wide by 35 feet deep, that its three stories have no rooms, just open areas with a staircase in the middle. The top floor is a well-lit studio, and Edmund finds Edna there, drinking gin and reading poetry. As they chat, he gets the feeling that she is trying to convince him that she’s happily married. But as Wilson leaves he runs into her husband, wealthy Dutch businessman Eugen Jan Boissevain, 43. Their brief encounter confirms for Wilson that Eugen is just another boring international corporate guy. And Edna is a princess in a tower who doesn’t realize that she is behind bars.
Early in the new year I will be talking about the literary summer of 1923 at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at the University of Pittsburgh, and early 20th century patrons of the arts in the Osher program at Carnegie-Mellon University.
Manager as Muse, about Perkins’ relationships with Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe, is also available on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk in both print and e-book versions.
“Such Friends” once again interrupts its usual chronology of what was happening in the literary world 100 years ago with the solution to your holiday gift giving problems.
What to get for those bookish friends? You know they are fans of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Woolf—even Gertrude Stein. But what have they read and what haven’t they read?
Betcha they haven’t read this!
“Such Friends”: The Literary 1920s, Volumes I through IV
The four volumes of “Such Friends”: The Literary 1920s, covering 1920 through 1923, contain fascinating vignettes about the personal lives of the literary characters throughout this decade.
The easy-to-read layout means you can dip in and out of any volume or sit down and read it straight through from January 1 to December 31.
Sample pages from “Such Friends”: The Literary 1920s, Volumes I through IV
Can’t decide which volume to start with? Choose Volume I, covering 1920—think of it as your entry into the network.
But wait! Amazon can’t get it to you on time?! Shame on them!
If you’re of the European persuasion, head on over to Thoor Ballylee, W. B. Yeats’ tower in Co. Galway, and pick up some copies in the bookshop.
And if none of those options work for you, email me at kaydee@gypsyteacher.com. I can send out copies from our vast inventory through the local post office, or, if you live on a Pittsburgh Regional Transit route, hand deliver signed copies in person.
Everyone’s reading “Such Friends”
So one way or another, make “Such Friends” part of your gift giving this year.
Happy holidays!
Early in the new year I will be talking about the literary summer of 1923 in the Osher Lifelong Learning program at the University of Pittsburgh, and early 20th century supporters of the arts at the Osher program at Carnegie-Mellon University.
Another gift for your bookish friends, Manager as Muse, about Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins’ relationships with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Thomas Wolfe, is also available on Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk in both print and e-book versions.
This is getting to be ridiculous. The audience is all leaving.
It’s the second intermission in the premiere of The Vegetable: From President to Postman: A Comedy in Three Acts, the first play written by hit novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald, 27.
Nixon’s Apollo Theatre
Scott has been so hopeful about his play. Once he finally found a producer willing to take it on, all the people backstage were telling him it would definitely move on to Broadway.
He even promised his publisher, Scribner’s, that he would assign them the royalties to clear off some of the debt accrued from the loans he’s been taking over the past few years. His editor, the extremely understanding Max Perkins, 39, had deposited money in Scott’s bank account a few weeks ago when the panicked author had written to him,
If I don’t in some way get $650 in the bank by Wednesday morning, I’ll have to pawn the furniture…I don’t even dare come up there personally, but for God’s sake try to fix it.”
Scott’s wife, Zelda, 23, even bought an expensive dress for this premiere.
At this point, Fitzgerald and his friend, sportswriter Ring Lardner, 38, go backstage and approach the lead actor, theatre veteran Ernest Truax, 34. Are the actors actually going to continue and finish the last act?!
Truax assures them that the show will go on.
Scott and Ring leave and head to the nearest speakeasy.
The Vegetable by F. Scott Fitzgerald, published in book form
In the new year, I will be talking about the literary summer of 1923 at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at the University of Pittsburgh, and early 20th century arts patrons in the Osher program at Carnegie-Mellon University.
Manager as Muse, about Perkins’ relationships with Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe, is also available on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk in both print and e-book versions.
Elinor Wylie, 38, is marrying for the third time. The groom, William Rose Benet, 37, is a widower, so on his second go-round.
Elinor Wylie
Bill helped Elinor a lot during her recent divorce from Horace Wylie, 55, after seven tumultuous years of marriage. Through his many literary contacts, including his brother, poet Stephen Vincent Benet, 25, Bill has been serving as her unofficial agent. He has encouraged Elinor to submit work to different magazines and helped her negotiate contracts.
Elinor’s career is going well. Her first novel, Jennifer Lorn: A Sedate Extravaganza, about a woman being destroyed in a disastrous marriage, was heralded with a torchlight parade organized by one of her Greenwich Village friends when it was published at the beginning of this year. Her second book of poetry, Black Armour, dedicated “To W. R. B.,” received excellent reviews. Her contemporaries, such as hit novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald, 27, have praised her poems. Although she heard that Scott thought a particular one was based on him. (It wasn’t.)
Jennifer Lorn by Elinor Wylie
As poetry editor of Vanity Fair magazine, Elinor has made friends with the literary set in Manhattan, and some of them feel that she may be marrying Benet just to keep him as her agent. Critic Edmund “Bunny” Wilson, 28, told her of his doubts and she replied,
Yes, it would be a pity that a first-rate poet should be turned into a second-rate poet by marrying a third-rate poet.”
“Such Friends”: 100 Years Ago… is the basis for the series, “Such Friends”: The Literary 1920s. Volumes I through IV, covering 1920 through 1923 are available at Thoor Ballylee in Co. Galway, at Pan Yan Bookstore in Tiffin, OH, and at Riverstone Books in Squirrel Hill, Pittsburgh, PA. where, as part of their sixth anniversary celebration, I will be signing copies from 4 to 5 p.m. on Friday, October 13th. They are also on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk in print and e-book formats. For more information, email me at kaydee@gypsyteacher.com.
My piece about Wylie’s friendship with Dorothy Parker is on the Something Rhymed website.
This fall I will be talking about the women of Bloomsbury and the Left Bank at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at Carnegie-Mellon University, and about art collector John Quinn at the Tiffin-Seneca Public Library, co-sponsored by the Heidelberg University English Department, in Quinn’s hometown of Tiffin, OH..
Manager as Muse, about Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins’ relationships with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe, is also available on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk in both print and e-book versions.
Littsburgh is a locally-run website devoted to all things literary in Pittsburgh. They host a directory of author’s biographies, and also invite us to submit interviews about our latest works. So I did…
Q&A: Kathleen Dixon Donnelly, author of “Such Friends”: The Literary 1920s
FROM THE PUBLISHER
Thanks to Littsburgh for the opportunity to tell you about my paperback series, “Such Friends”: The Literary 1920s. The series is based on blogs I’ve been posting at www.suchfriends.wordpress.com, chronicling what was happening in the literary and artistic world 100 years ago. The title comes from a poem by William Butler Yeats, “…say my glory was I had such friends.” Volumes I through IV, covering 1920 through 1923, are available at Thoor Ballylee in Co. Galway and as signed copies at Riverstone Books in Squirrel Hill in Pittsburgh, and on Amazon in both print and e-book formats, or from me at kaydee@gypsyteacher.com.
As an author I jumped at the chance to interview myself, but, I have to say—that felt a bit narcissistic. So I enlisted the help of one of my best friends, Liz, to do the honors over glasses of chardonnay in her back garden.
Three volumes of “Such Friends”: The Literary 1920s
LIZ BFF: So what’s this obsession you have with the 1920s?
KDD: My Mom always talked about the 20s in a good way. She was born in 1920, one month to the day after Prohibition went into effect (I snuck her into Volume I). And your first nine years are usually remembered fondly.
My mother talked a lot about Dorothy Parker—
Men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses”
—and her friends who lunched together as the Algonquin Hotel Round Table throughout the 20s.. For example, I remember she told me that the humorist Robert Benchley—we read his essays in 9th grade English—instructed his wife to have him cremated and go to the cemetery in a taxi with his ashes in his briefcase next to her on the seat. Imagine my surprise to find out when doing my academic research that my mother was right—the story is true.
LIZ BFF: That’s right—your research. This all started with your academic research.
KDD: Yes—but these books aren’t academic! My Ph. D., from Dublin City University in Ireland, was about writers and artists who hung out together. How did these friendships affect their creativity? I looked at four main “salons,” two before and two after World War I: Yeats and the Irish Literary Renaissance who founded Dublin’s Abbey Theatre; Virginia Woolf and the writers and artists in the Bloomsbury group in London; our fellow Pittsburgher Gertrude Stein and the Americans who came to Paris in the 1920s; and, of course, Parker and the Round Table. 31 creative people all together. For the books I’ve expanded a bit to include others who weren’t in the groups, and important world events going on during the decade.
LIZ BFF: That’s a lot of creative people. Who are your favorites?
KDD: Well, Parker for one. I feel as though she was doing a lot of the same things all my friends and I were doing in our 20s—free-lance writing, whining about our relationships with men. But she paid a higher price—back alley abortions, for example.
But my other favorite would be Virginia Woolf’s sister, painter Vanessa Bell. She’s often overlooked, even by British feminists. She was a terrific painter; I use one of her works, A Conversation, on the cover of Volume II, 1921. And she was the earth mother for the Bloomsberries. Everyone came to her houses, in London and Sussex. One of their friends described the sisters this way:
People admired Virginia; they adoredVanessa.”
“Such Friends”: The Literary 1920s, Volume II–1921
LIZ BFF: Those are the kinds of stories and descriptions I’ve really enjoyed reading in your books. How do Gertrude Stein and W. B. Yeats fit in?
KDD: Gertrude’s relationships with writers like Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald are probably the best known. She and her partner, Alice B. Toklas, were the most committed couple of all my 31 writers. In the words of one of their biographers, Diana Souhami, from the day they met they were together; they
never traveled without each other or entertained separately, or worked on independent projects.”
Of course, Gertrude and her family left Pittsburgh when she was only six months old. But we ‘burghers are quite proud.
As for Yeats and the Irish, I’ve found that they illustrate a big contrast between Ireland and the rest of the world in the 1920s. Once the Irish won their war for independence from the British, they started shooting each other in their Civil War, while people in London, Paris and New York were doing the Charleston. However, the Irish did manage to keep their theatre going.
LIZ BFF: You’ve got so many great stories about all these people. But how do you think they compare with today? I mean, stories are nice, but what’s the point? What can we learn from looking back at that decade?
KDD: Good question! I think the main lesson I’ve come away with is that the good old days weren’t. Alcoholism, depression—particularly in men—gambling addiction, suicide, eating disorders: These are issues that have always been with us but were not discussed then. The early biographies I read laughed off the addictions and depression:
She was sooo drunk! Ha ha.”
“He gambled away his apartment! Ha ha.”
“He just got up and walked away from his job! Ha ha!”
In reality, not so funny.
LIZ BFF: Well, I’ve certainly enjoyed reading them. I dip in and out because they’re short and the layout makes the books easy to read. At the end of each one I’m thinking, I can’t wait to find out what happens next.
Easy-to-read layout of “Such Friends”: The Literary 1920s
KDD: Thank you! That’s the effect I’m going for. There is an awful lot of foreshadowing. Every vignette is related to another one.
LIZ BFF: I noticed that.
KDD: For example, in 1920 an armed burglary in Massachusetts will culminate in the executions of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti in 1927—which Parker and others protested. Hemingway goes to a party and meets Hadley Richardson; a year later they get married and move to Paris. In 1921 excerpts from James Joyce’s Ulysses are found to be obscene by a New York court, and the following year Sylvia Beach’s bookstore in Paris publishes the whole book, on Joyce’s 40th birthday. Meanwhile, in London, VirginiaWoolf can barely force herself to read it, but she and her husband publish T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land the next year. So if you’ve never gotten through Ulysses, don’t feel bad. Sometimes I think most of the vignettes should end with “Stay tuned…”
LIZ BFF: I’m tuned. I can’t wait to read Volume V, 1924.
KDD: Great. I’m working on it. In the meantime, remember—they make great gifts!
LIZ BFF: That chardonnay was really nice.
“Such Friends” at the Greater Pittsburgh Festival of Books, 2023
“Such Friends”: The Literary 1920s, Volumes I through IV, covering 1920 through 1923, are available at Thoor Ballylee in Co. Galway, as signed copies at Riverstone Books in Squirrel Hill, and on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk in both print and e-book formats. There is a discount for reading this far and ordering directly from the publisher (me), and if you live on a Pittsburgh Regional Transit bus route, I will hand deliver your signed copy. Email me at kaydee@gypsyteacher.com.
This fall I will be talking about the women of Bloomsbury and the Left Bank at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at Carnegie-Mellon University.
Manager as Muse, about Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins’ relationships with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe, is also available on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk in both print and e-book versions.
On the advice of his most successful novelist, F. Scott Fitzgerald, 26, Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins, 38, had contacted Fitzgerald’s neighbor out in Great Neck, Long Island, sports columnist Ring Lardner, also 38.
Ring Lardner
Perkins wrote to Lardner at the beginning of this month, proposing the idea of collecting Lardner’s essays and stories into one book, saying,
I would hardly have ventured to do this if Scott had not spoken of the possibility, because your position in the literary world is such that you must be besieged by publishers, and to people in that situation their letters of interest are rather a nuisance.”
Fitzgerald cajoled Perkins to come out to Great Neck so the three could have dinner together. Ring was open to Perkins’ idea but confessed that he hadn’t kept copies of any of his work, so would have to contact each of the publications that ran them individually.
After quite a few drinks, Lardner went home, and Fitzgerald insisted on driving Perkins around Long Island, despite having too much alcohol in him. Max told his wife that Scott
was saying what a good egg I was, and what a good egg Ring was, and what a good egg he was, and then, without thinking, as though it was something one good egg did to another good egg, he just drove me into the damned lake!”
This fall I will be talking about the women of Bloomsbury and the Left Bank at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at Carnegie-Mellon University.
Manager as Muse, about Perkins’ relationships with Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe, is also available on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk in both print and e-book versions.
SuchFriends Blog 