A self-portrait of a great writer. "A Short Autobiography" charts Fitzgerald's progression from exuberant and cocky with "What I think and Feel at 25," to mature and reflective with "One Hundred False Starts" and "The Death of My Father." Compiled and edited by Professor James West, this revealing collection of personal essays and articles reveals the beloved author in his own words.

F. Scott Fitzgerald's romantic and witty first novel-written when he was only twenty-three years old and catapulted Fitzgerald to instant fame-is now available in a beautifully designed special collector's edition. This Side of Paradise is F. Scott Fitzgerald's debut novel. The book's critical success was driven in part by the enthusiasm of reviewers, and it catapulted Fitzgerald to instant fame. H. L. Mencken wrote that is was the "best American novel that I have seen of late." An examination of the lives and morality of post-World War I youth, this semiautobiographical story of the handsome, indulged, and idealistic Princeton student Amory Blaine brilliantly captures the rhythms and romance of Fitzgerald's university days and offers a poignant portrait of the Lost Generation.

Widely regarded as one of America’s great authors, F. Scott Fitzgerald led a life of drama and extravagance that often overshadowed his writing career. This book refocuses attention on how Fitzgerald viewed and approached the business of writing. Fitzgerald scholar James L. W. West III explores the writer’s professional life through personal letters, manuscripts, his business ledger, editions of his novels, and even a “seven-year plan.” In assessing these diverse materials, West reveals fascinating details about what led Fitzgerald to follow authorship as a calling, why he took on certain projects, how he managed his finances, and what influenced his writing style. Connecting Fitzgerald’s career to his literary texts, West also provides new information on the development and publication history of some of Fitzgerald’s most important works, such as The Great Gatsby and Jacob’s Ladder. Throughout, West pays close attention to the delicate balance in Fitzgerald’s career between money and literary respectability, commerce and art. A keen, engaging, and intimate look at Fitzgerald’s day-to-day work of writing for a living, Business Is Good is a must-have for anyone who wants a better understanding of this American literary giant.

F. Scott Fitzgerald's second novel, The Beautiful and Damned, has frequently been dismissed as an outlier and curiosity in his oeuvre, a transitional work from the coming-of-age plot of This Side of Paradise to the masterful critique of American aspiration in The Great Gatsby The Beautiful and Damned belongs to a genre that is widely misunderstood, the "bright young things" novel in which spoiled and wealthy characters succumb to decay because of their privilege and lack of purpose. Set between 1913 and 1922, Fitzgerald's longest novel touches on many of the decisive issues that mark the passage from the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era into the Jazz Age: conspicuous consumption, income inequality, yellow journalism, the Great War, the rise of the movie industry, automobile travel, Wall Street stock scams, immigration and xenophobia, and the fixation with youth and aging. Published to coincide with the novel's centennial in 2022, this collection approaches The Beautiful and Damned for its insights more than its faults. Prominent Fitzgerald scholars analyze major themes and reveal unappreciated issues with attention to history, biography, literary influence, gender studies, and narratology. While acknowledging the novel's shortcomings, the essayists illustrate that The Beautiful and Damned has much more to say about its milieu than previously recognized. This collection provides a guide for understanding Fitzgerald's aims while demonstrating the richness of ideas that this novel explores, alongside the anxieties and ambitions that reverberate within it.

Sister Carrie The Pennsylvania Edition Revised Edition Theodore Dreiser. Edited by Thomas P. Riggio "In restoring Dreiser's masterpiece, the editors of the Pennsylvania Edition have given us more than a literary curiosity; like art historians cleaning a da Vinci fresco, they have uncovered the original glowing with an ancient newness."--Richard Lingeman, "The Nation" "No work of such historical repute . . . has ever been republished with such major change. . . . The 'new' novel . . . will probably become the accepted standard."--Herbert Mitgang, "New York Times" "The 'restored' "Sister Carrie" . . . is in many ways a different book, fuller, less cruel, more recognizably Dreiser's own work."--Alfred Kazin, "New York Review of Books" The University of Pennsylvania Dreiser Edition 1998 544 pages 6 x 9 ISBN 978-0-8122-1638-7 Paper $28.95s 19.00 World Rights Literature

Theodore Dreiser's "Russian Diary" is an extended record of the American writer's travels throughout the Soviet Union in 1927-28. Dreiser was initially invited to Moscow for a week-long observance of the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution. He asked, and was granted, permission to make an extended tour of the country.This previously unpublished diary is a firsthand record of life in the USSR during the 1920s as seen by a leading American cultural figure. It is a valuable primary source, surely among the last from this period of modern history.

In 1992 the University of Pennsylvania Press published a new edition of Theodore Dreiser's second novel, Jennie Gerhardt. The original published text was altered significantly from the author's intentions: its sexual energy was short-circuited, its criticisms of organized religion were blunted, its language was smoothed and sentimentalized, and, most important, Jennie Gerhardt was reduced to a less thoughtful, less womanly character. The restored edition brings back the sexual charge, reinstates the social and religious criticism, and makes the language Dreiser's again. This volume brings together 19 fresh readings, together with an introduction, of the Pennsylvania edition by three generations of Dreiser critics. The volume includes general assessments, analysis of main characters, treatments of the autobiographical roots of the narrative, views of various traditions (realistic, sentimental, ethnic) on which Dreiser drew, and investigations of historical contexts that inform his story.

This book examines literary authorship in the twentieth century and covers such topics as publishing, book distribution, the trade editor, the literary agent, the magazine market, subsidiary rights, and the blockbuster mentality.

"To write it took three months; to conceive it-three minutes; to collect the data in it-all my life." So said F. Scott Fitzgerald regarding This Side of Paradise, the novel he began writing in November 1917 and published on March 26, 1920. This Side of Paradise launched Fitzgerald as the "Prophet of the Jazz Age" and the spokesman for his generation. It is still one of the major reasons for his fame today. The story of how Fitzgerald wrote and published the book is fascinating. In The Making of "This Side of Paradise", James West studies the inception, composition, publication, and textual history of the novel. He traces its growth from its earliest version, entitled "The Romantic Egotist," to its final published form. Based on preserved documentary evidence-fragments of "The Romantic Egotist," the manuscript of This Side of Paradise, surviving correspondence, and other papers-this volume blends the techniques of biographical, critical, and textual scholarship to tell the story of the making of the quintessential novel of the twenties.

The twenty short stories in A Change of Class were published by F. Scott Fitzgerald between September 1931 and March 1937. Fitzgerald wrote these stories for money, which he badly needed. His wife was being treated at expensive sanitariums and he was heavily in debt to his publisher and literary agent. The stories in A Change of Class are not all among Fitzgerald's best, but they are important in his career. They concern the Great Depression, social striving, class divisions, and professionalism. Several are set in the world of medicine and depict the lives of doctors, nurses, and their patients. The writing is strong, with vivid descriptions and sharp dialogue. A Change of Class provides freshly edited texts, based on surviving manuscripts and typescripts. Important readings, edited out or censored by magazine publishers, have been restored. The volume includes facsimiles, historical annotations, and a full record of emendation.

This eighteenth and final volume in the Cambridge Edition of the Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald is a variorum edition of The Great Gatsby (1925), the author's masterpiece. The variorum text is based on multiple witnesses including the extant holograph of the novel and Fitzgerald's revised galley proofs; the first edition and later impressions from the first-edition plates; and importantly, Fitzgerald's personal copy of the novel, which bears corrections and revisions in his hand. This edition removes instances of over-correction in later editions of the novel, where there are numerous examples of textual corruption, thus giving control of the text back to Fitzgerald. This critical edition includes an introduction, tracing the history of the novel, an emended text, emendation tables, Fitzgerald's 1935 introduction, and fourteen illustrations. Historical annotations provide identifications of persons, places, events, popular songs, and literary works - all now made available to readers, teachers, critics, and scholars.

In "Waiting for Nothing" and Other Writings, the works of the depression-era writer Tom Kromer are collected for the first time into a volume that depicts with searing realism life on the bum in the 1930s and, with greater detachment, the powerless frustration of working-class people often too locked in to know their predicament.Waiting for Nothing, Kromer's only completed novel, is largely autobiographical and was written at a Civilian Conservation Corps camp in California. It tells the story of one man drifting through America, east coast to west, main stem to side street, endlessly searching for "three hots and a flop" food and a place to sleep. Kromer scans, in first-person voice, the scattered events, the stultifying sameness, of "life on the vag" the encounters with cops, the window panes that separate hunger and a "feed," the bartering with prostitutes and homosexuals. In "Michael Kohler," Kromer's unfinished novel, the harsh existence of coal miners in Pennsylvania is told in a committed, political voice that reveals Kromer's developing affinity with leftist writers including Lincoln Steffens and Theodore Dreiser. An exploration of Kromer's proletarian roots, "Michael Kohler" was to be a political novel, a story of labor unions and the injustices of big management. Kromer's other work ranges from his college days, when he wrote a sarcastic expose of the bums in his hometown titled "Pity the Poor Panhandler: $2 an Hour Is All He Gets," to the sensitive pieces of his later life short stories, articles, and book reviews written more out of an aching understanding of suffering than from the slick formulas of politics. Waiting for Nothing remains, however, Kromer's most powerful achievement, a work Steffens called "realism to the nth degree." Collected here as the major part of Kromer's oeuvre, Waiting for Nothing traces the author's personal struggle to preserve human virtues and emotions in the face of a brutal and dehumanizing society.

F. Scott Fitzgerald's second novel, The Beautiful and Damned, has frequently been dismissed as an outlier and curiosity in his oeuvre, a transitional work from the coming-of-age plot of This Side of Paradise to the masterful critique of American aspiration in The Great Gatsby. The Beautiful and Damned belongs to a genre that is widely misunderstood, the "bright young things" novel in which spoiled and wealthy characters succumb to decay because of their privilege and lack of purpose. Set between 1913 and 1922, Fitzgerald's longest novel touches on many of the decisive issues that mark the passage from the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era into the Jazz Age: conspicuous consumption, income inequality, yellow journalism, the Great War, the rise of the movie industry, automobile travel, Wall Street stock scams, immigration and xenophobia, and the fixation with youth and aging. Published to coincide with the novel's centennial in 2022, this collection approaches The Beautiful and Damned for its insights more than its faults. Prominent Fitzgerald scholars analyze major themes and reveal unappreciated issues with attention to history, biography, literary influence, gender studies, and narratology. While acknowledging the novel's shortcomings, the essayists illustrate that The Beautiful and Damned has much more to say about its milieu than previously recognized. This collection provides a guide for understanding Fitzgerald's aims while demonstrating the richness of ideas that this novel explores, alongside the anxieties and ambitions that reverberate within it.

Last Kiss brings together some of the most interesting and idiosyncratic of F. Scott Fitzgerald's writings from throughout his career. Included in this volume are Fitzgerald's Thoughtbook, a revealing adolescent diary; an amusing self-interview, written in the early days of his initial fame; The Vegetable, his only published play; the five poems that he published after becoming a full-time author; twelve early book reviews, published between 1921 and 1923; seven short stories from the last decade of his career; seventeen public letters; six items of journalism, four of which attempt to explain the 'flapper' phenomenon; and unusual miscellaneous pieces. The texts, many of which are based on surviving manuscripts and typescripts, are fully annotated and are supported by an apparatus that records all emendations and editorial adjustments.

F. Scott Fitzgerald had a busy and productive literary apprenticeship, writing in a great variety of genres. This volume contains his writings for the student magazine at his high schools and his Princeton writings for the Daily Princetonian, the Princeton Tiger, and the Nassau Literary Magazine. Of special note in this volume are the complete lyrics that Fitzgerald composed for three student musical comedies mounted by the Triangle Club at Princeton - Fie! Fie! Fi-Fi! (1914), The Evil Eye (1915), and Safety First! (1916). The volume includes a scholarly introduction, a record of variants and emendations, and numerous facsimiles and other illustrations. Explanatory notes identify the literary works, Broadway shows, movie queens, stage stars, politicians, historical figures, criminals, sports heroes, and popular songs referred to by Fitzgerald in these early writings.

F. Scott Fitzgerald began composing Tender Is the Night in the summer of 1925, but he struggled with the novel and reworked it intensively over the next nine years. A study of the disintegration of a talented young American psychiatrist, set among wealthy American expatriates living in Europe after the First World War, the novel, finally published in 1934, is now considered one of his major works. Fitzgerald saved a great many of his working materials - notes, diagrams, holographs, typescripts, proofs and correspondence - making it possible to reconstruct in detail the passage of Tender Is the Night from manuscript to print. The Cambridge edition follows the order of the first edition; it includes a history of composition, an analysis of Fitzgerald's plan for republication and an explanation of the chronology of the narrative. The edition also contains full historical annotations, facsimiles of surviving drafts and a record of emendations.

This edition presents the manuscript of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, the earliest full version of the novel that survives. Study of this manuscript reveals much about the composition of the novel - about the development of its characters and themes and the revision of its language. Fitzgerald reworked the manuscript, putting it through several drafts and continuing to edit until a few weeks before publication. The period of its creation was an amalgamation of his talent, inspiration, and self-discipline which resulted in a masterpiece. An introduction by James L. W. West, III, the general editor of the series, gives the compositional history of the novel; a bibliographical commentary by Don C. Skemer, Curator of Manuscripts at Princeton University Library, describes the manuscript and gives the story of its preservation, acquisition, and restoration. The reading text is presented without emendation and with a minimum of editorial apparatus. This edition will allow critics, teachers, and students to study The Great Gatsby as a fluid text, evolving and progressing toward its final form from its very earliest incarnation.

This volume brings together three series of short stories by F. Scott Fitzgerald - the Basil Duke Lee stories of 1928-29, the Josephine Perry stories of 1930-31, and the Gwen Bowers stories of 1936. The texts published here are based on surviving typescripts that preserve Fitzgerald's final revisions for their first publication in the Saturday Evening Post. Collations have revealed cuts and revisions by the Post editors aimed at removing profanity and blasphemy, sexual innuendo, real names of people and places, and references to racial prejudice. These passages have been restored to the Cambridge texts. This volume includes a scholarly introduction, a record of variants, facsimiles and other illustrations, and an appendix that presents early endings for the stories 'The Captured Shadow' and 'Basil and Cleopatra'. Full historical notes identify popular songs, sports heroes, literary works, Broadway shows, and sources for the stories.

Making the Archives Talk is a collection of twelve essays by editor, biographer, bibliographer, and book historian James L. W. West III. In these essays, West sets forth his views of editorial theory, archival use, textual emendation, and scholarly annotation. He has published editions of major writings by Theodore Dreiser, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and William Styron. Drawing on these editions for examples, West defends intentionalist editing and the eclectic emendation of texts. He discusses the treatment of both public documents (novels, stories, and nonfiction) and private texts (letters, diaries, journals, and working papers). Highlights of the collection include "The Scholarly Editor as Biographer," "Editorial Theory and the Act of Submission," "Double Quotes and Double Meanings in Jennie Gerhardt," "Annotating Mr. Fitzgerald," and "The End Is Near." Two of the essays, "Toxic Words and the Editor" and "Keeper of the Flame: Editing the Literary Remains of William Styron," are previously unpublished.

During the last six years of his life, F. Scott Fitzgerald was an Esquire author. Between 1934 and 1940, Fitzgerald sold some forty-five pieces of writing to the magazine - fiction, nonfiction, and personal essays. This volume of the Cambridge Edition includes thirteen short stories published by Fitzgerald in Esquire, together with the entire Pat Hobby Series -seventeen stories about an aging screenwriter scrambling to make a living in Hollywood during the 1930s. One other story - 'Dearly Beloved', submitted to Esquire but not published there - is included as an appendix. The volume provides restored, accurate texts based on Fitzgerald's surviving manuscripts, typescripts, and proofs. A textual apparatus records editorial decisions; explanatory notes identify people, places, literary works, historical events, and references to Hollywood actors, directors, and films. The volume also includes selected facsimiles of Fitzgerald's manuscripts and typescripts for the Esquire writings.

This volume of the Cambridge Fitzgerald Edition includes the original nine stories selected by Fitzgerald for All the Sad Young Men, together with eleven additional stories, published between 1925 and 1928, which were not collected by Fitzgerald during his lifetime. This edition is based on extensive surviving manuscripts and typescripts. The volume contains a scholarly introduction, historical notes, a textual apparatus, illustrations, and appendices. The complex history of composition for 'The Rich Boy' is untangled, and Fitzgerald's thorough revision of 'Winter Dreams' is described. Important passages of sexual innuendo and tabloid-style scandal in 'Jacob's Ladder', 'The Love Boat', and 'Magnetism' - removed by editors at the Saturday Evening Post - are restored to the Cambridge texts.

F. Scott Fitzgerald's second novel, The Beautiful and Damned (1922), was a pivotal book in his career. A trenchant satire of the Jazz Age, it is very much a novel of its times. This edition is based on the surviving manuscript, the serialized version from Metropolitan magazine, the Scribners 1922 first American edition, and the Collins 1922 first British edition. The volume includes a detailed account of the composition of the novel, a textual apparatus, a chronology of composition, and, uniquely, three versions of the ending. Explanatory notes identify Fitzgerald's topical and historical references - to books and authors, Broadway shows and Manhattan cabarets, movie stars and sports heroes, statesmen and criminals, business tycoons and historical figures. These notes situate The Beautiful and Damned in its times and deepen the reader's understanding of Fitzgerald's sources for the novel.

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.

F. Scott Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise is the opening statement of his literary career. Published originally in 1920, the novel captures the rhythm and feel of the gaudy decade that was to follow in America. This Side of Paradise made Fitzgerald simultaneously famous and infamous: famous for the stylish exuberance of his writing and infamous for the errors - in spelling, fact, grammar and chronology - that peppered his text. This authoritative critical edition offers an accurate, fully annotated text based on Fitzgerald's original manuscript, explanatory notes, textual apparatus and appendices.