In honor of the centennial of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s first day of classes at Princeton University — Sept, 24, 1913, the same as his birthday — the library is offering public access to his manuscripts.
Princeton University Library has digitized Fitzgerald’s manuscripts and typescripts of his autobiographical first novel, This Side of Paradise. The materials are online through the Princeton University Digital Library at pudl.princeton.edu/collections/pudl0044.
The manuscripts and typescripts are part of the F. Scott Fitzgerald Papers in the manuscripts division of the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections. The papers were a gift from the author’s daughter, Scottie Fitzgerald Lanahan, in 1950.
Curator of manuscripts, Don Skemer, said Fitzgerald’s first novel was shaped by his time at Princeton.
“While Fitzgerald never graduated, dropping out in 1917 to join the U.S. Army during World War I, he began learning the craft of writing as an undergraduate and befriended other students who were aspiring authors, Edmund Wilson, Class of 1916, and John Peale Bishop, Class of 1917,” Skemer said in a statement.
Fitzgerald began writing This Side of Paradise at Princeton, continued in November 1917 at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., with the working title “The Romantic Egoist,” and completed a first draft at Cottage Club in March 1918.
After this draft had been rejected twice by New York publisher Charles Scribner’s Sons, Fitzgerald returned to his parents’ home in his native St. Paul, Minn. and wrote five new chapters.He changed novel’s first-draft title to “The Education of a Personage” and then to “This Side of Paradise.”
Fitzgerald sent the novel to Maxwell Perkins at Scribner’s, who accepted it on Sept. 16, 1919, and published it on March 26, 1920. Publication of the novel launched the young author on a successful writing career, with nearly 50,000 copies in print by 1921.
The manuscripts and typescripts, reveal how the author wrote and revised the “The Romantic Egotist” and “The Education of a Personage.”
Two versions survive and have been digitized; “The Romantic Egotist,” the earlier corrected typescript in five chapters that Fitzgerald sent to Charles W. Donahoe in October 1918, and “This Side of Paradise,” which includes about 80 typescript pages that Fitzgerald reused from “The Romantic Egotist.”
Fitzgerald wrote by hand and did not type, so errors were likely introduced by the anonymous typist, who drew diagonal lines through pages as they were typed. In addition to the author’s own corrections, a St. Paul school friend named Katherine Tighe — formerly described as an anonymous reader, called “the Grammarian” — went through the manuscript to correct spelling, grammar and expression.
The novel is filled with local references to Princeton University, including the Nassau Lit, Daily Princetonian, Triangle Club, and Cottage Club. Princeton football, the Nassau Inn, and other subjects also come up. Fitzgerald’s protagonist, Amory Blaine, reveals the author’s love of the university, its campus and Collegiate Gothic architecture.
This Side of Paradise joins the previously digitized autograph manuscript and corrected galleys of The Great Gatsby in the Princeton University Digital Library.
