"I Am Used To Being Dunned":

F. Scott Fitzgerald and the Modern Library

ANDREW B. iMYERS
 

T
 

^HE twenties were over. The curtain had come down on
the short, glamorous first act in the lives of F. Scott Fitz¬
gerald and his adored, and equally doomed Zelda. It was
the '30's and, whether they liked it or not, these sometime Jazz
Age headliners were into the slow, sad second act.

The Depression had deepened after these world-weary expatri¬
ates had drifted home finally in 1931. For rhe gifted but erratic
Scott it became, gradually, a time of often ignominious stumbling
toward a future he could only guess at. His wife, after a European
breakdown, and helpful psychiatric treatment, was living in the
shadow of lurking schizophrenia. His writing, the one thing that
pulled his troubled life together best, had during 1932 and 1933
become a compulsive effort to complete, with his right hand, a ma¬
ture novel again—his last, The Great Gatsby, published in 1925,
was years behind him—while with his left he turned out, almost
mechanically, tales for popular magazines, which paid for slick-
ness as much as anything else. One wonders, for example, how
many Saturday Evening Post fans then realized that on occasion
their commuter reading offered, in a Fitzgerald short story, what
would in time be seriously regarded as contemporary literature.

In the midst of life in this real valley of ashes, Fitzgerald, in the
late spring of 1934 became involved in an exchange of corres¬
pondence with Random House, which resulted, in early fall of
that year, in the reappearance of The Great Gatsby in their quite
successful Modern Library series. The archives of the parent firm,
now in the Columbia Libraries, provide the script for a brief tragi¬
comedy of editorial pressure, hasty writing, unsatisfactory galleys.