READ THIS: I'd Die For You by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Peachy Deegan's Favorite Author of All Time!!!!! Scribners, What Else Can You Find?
Just when we thought we knew everything about F. Scott Fitzgerald, Scribner found something new to the world and we could not be more thrilled.
Who is a better writer than F. Scott Fitzgerald?
If you said NO ONE, you're in the right place.
Whom You Know was named after Peachy's 10th grade English class taught by Mover and Shaker Rennie McQuilkin (sorry Mr. McQuilkin you know you have to be 2nd best writer), who introduced Peachy to Fitzgerald. Now Mr. McQuilkin is the Poet of Connecticut. We require every person being considered for interview to answer:
"
If you could have dinner with any person living or passed, who would it be and why?"
F. Scott Fitzgerald is our answer (for everyone that is not related to us. Peachy definitely would like to meet her ancestors)!
Fitzgerald is back from the dead and he's making you fall in love with him all over again.
For those of you that are strangely not familiar with Fitzgerald (do you really know us?!), you have to remember George Burns and Gracie Allen. Fitzgerald met them in 1934 when they were on tour; he did not live so so long ago. He was also living in North Carolina around the time when Charles Kuralt was born (look right to see him; he is a brilliant journalist probably having a cocktail up there with Fitzgerald; we hope they learned what the internet is so they can read us.) Of course, F. Scott Fitzgerald is known for his Jazz Age work, and The Great Gatsby is our favorite book. But a career and a talent is not static, it evolves, and Fitzgerald certainly did.
Why should you read I'll Die For You? And how should you appreciate its difference from the Jazz Age?
His talents supersede decade or era, like most legends.
This work boasts description, darkness, and depressive depths with richer, darker jewel tones of phrases that were nowhere to be seen in the 1920s; such depths are rarely examined by so-called thinkers and writers that come and go. This work shows the evolution of Fitzgerald and how his talent blossomed in later years. We all know Fitzgerald would like to be wine or any alcohol really (seriously, who do you think inspired us to want to become a cocktail?!) and this book is vintage Fitzgerald. Even the characters are more mature because of course Fitzgerald is too and he is smart enough to write about what he knows.
If you miss classic Americana, it can be found between these pages. These stories also read similar to a screenplay because Fitzgerald went Hollywood at the end of his life. We constantly wonder what the Fitzgerald movies would have been like if he had lived longer and feel what has been done by others based on his writing pales in comparison to his potential as a moviemaker.
His descriptive prowess still reigns:
"He looked at the delicate white rose of her cheeks and the copper green eyes, greener than the green-brown foliage around them." (p. 84)
"Her eyes - eyes that had an odd sort of starlight in them which actually photographed- had left the table and come to rest upon a man who had just entered." (p. 91)
"It was a lovely discontented face - if ever the two can go together. It was very American and rather sad, mirroring an eternal hope of being someone like Atlanta without either the talent or the self-discipline that makes strong individuals." (p.96)
"Her feet and legs were stiff from the day's climbing - well, she would leave her shoes behind like the evil queen in the Wizard of Oz who had been all burned up except her shoes. She kicked them to one side and put her foot experimentally on the first step - it was cool to her foot - it had seemed warm in the afternoon even through her soles." (p. 107)
F. Scott Fitzgerald still has the most compelling drama and dialogue:
"'I'm going to ask you one thing - did anybody ever really kill themselves because they loved someone too much? I mean do you think so?'" (p. 101)
"'You're young.' He sighed. '-and you're beautiful. You've got your work - and you've got any man you want for the asking. Do you remember when I told you that I belonged to another age?'" (p. 103)
Of the stories, I'd Die For You is the strongest by far but we enjoyed them all. It is completely deserving of the title. Roger in this work is a bit Nick Carraway-esque and Delannux is going to remind you of the careless Buchanans.
F. Scott please come down from heaven right now so we can interview you.
Do not miss this new work that represents the gorgeous evolution of Fitzgerald: the world must appreciate it! I'd Die For You and Everything Else that F. Scott Fitzgerald ever put a pen to has earned our Highest Recommendation. Scribners, if you can find anything else it would be our pleasure to be the editor. We'd die for it.
***
From the beloved writer of The Great Gatsby,
For the first time in print
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s final collection
I’D DIE FOR YOU
And Other Lost Stories
Edited by Anne Margaret Daniel
“‘I spent a lot of money—I backed plays and tried to fly the Atlantic and tried to drink all the wine in Paris—that sort of thing. It was all pointless and that's why it's so dated—it wasn't about anything.’”
—“I'd Die For You”
“He was one of those Americans who seem left over from the days when there was a frontier, and he had chosen to walk, ride or fly along that thin hair line which separates the unexplored and menacing from the safe, warm world. Or is there such a world—”
—“The Women In the House”
“There was a sort of bitter amusement in him, as if life had flung him about so carelessly that he preferred to stand a little apart and ask ‘What’s next.’”
—“The Pearl and the Fur”
Scribner is proud to present I’D DIE FOR YOU (April 25, 2017), a collection including the last complete unpublished stories by F. Scott Fitzgerald, the iconic American writer of The Great Gatsby, who is more widely read today than ever. I’D DIE FOR YOU includes introductions by editor and Fitzgerald scholar Anne Margaret Daniel, and offers an intimate look into the process and range of one of America’s favorite writers.
These stories are Fitzgerald, unfiltered. Most were submitted individually to major magazines during the 1930s and accepted for publication during Fitzgerald’s lifetime, but were never printed. Some were written as movie scenarios and sent to studios or producers, but not filmed. Others are stories that could not be sold because their subject matter or style departed from what editors expected of Fitzgerald. They date from the earliest days of his career to the last. They come from various sources, from libraries to private collections, including those of Fitzgerald’s family.
Readers will experience Fitzgerald writing about controversial topics, depicting young men and women who actually spoke and thought more as young men and women did, without censorship. Rather than permit changes and sanitizing by his contemporary editors, Fitzgerald preferred to let his work remain unpublished, even at a time when he was in great need of money and review attention.
The collection’s title story is drawn from Fitzgerald’s stays in the mountains of North Carolina when his health, and that of his wife Zelda, was falling apart. With the addition of a Hollywood star and film crew to the Smoky Mountain lakes and pines, Fitzgerald brings in the cinematic world in which he would soon be living. Most of the stories printed here come from this time period, during the middle and late 1930s, though the collection spans Fitzgerald’s career from 1920 to the end of his life. Some of the eighteen stories were physically lost, coming to light only in the past few years. All were lost, in one sense or another: lost in the painful shuffle of the difficulties of Fitzgerald’s life in the middle 1930s; lost to readers because contemporary editors did not understand or accept what he was trying to write; lost because archives are like that, and good things can wait patiently in libraries for many centuries sometimes.
Written in his characteristically beautiful, sharp, and surprising language, exploring themes both familiar and fresh, these stories provide new insight into the bold and uncompromising arc of Fitzgerald’s career.
I’D DIE FOR YOU is a revealing, intimate look at Fitzgerald’s creative process that shows him to be a writer working at the fore of modern literature—in all its developing complexities.
╔╦╩╦╩╦╩╦╗
About the author: F. Scott Fitzgerald was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1896, attended Princeton University, and published his first novel, This Side of Paradise, in 1920. That same year he married Zelda Sayre and the couple divided their time among New York, Paris, and the Riviera, becoming a part of the American expatriate circle that included Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, and John Dos Passos. Fitzgerald was a major new literary voice, and his masterpieces include The Beautiful and Damned, The Great Gatsby, and Tender Is the Night. He died of a heart attack in 1940 at the age of forty-four, while working on The Love of the Last Tycoon. For his sharp social insight and breathtaking lyricism, Fitzgerald stands out as one of the most important American writers of the twentieth century.
About the editor: Anne Margaret Daniel teaches literature at the New School. Her articles, essays, and reviews have appeared in books, critical editions, magazines, and journals from The New York Times to The Times Literary Supplement. Anne Margaret has degrees in American history and English literature from Harvard (A.B.), Georgetown (M.A.), and Princeton (Ph.D). As a graduate student at Princeton in 1996, she gave the keynote lecture at the F. Scott Fitzgerald Centenary Conference, and has published extensively on his writing, and on American Modernism. Anne Margaret lives in Manhattan and in upstate New York with her husband.
