We know you’re busy wrapping holiday gifts, keeping the cat away from the Christmas tree and baking great-grandma’s sugar cookies. Take a break as we look ahead to Friends of the St. Paul Public Library’s yearlong celebration of one of the most significant international literary events of 2025, the 100th anniversary of St.
Paul native F. Scott Fitzgerald’s enduring novel “The Great Gatsby.” Published on April 10, 1925, Fitzgerald had worked hard on his third novel (after “This Side of Paradise” and “The Beautiful and Damned”).
He completed the manuscript when he and his wife, Zelda, were living an unhappy summer in the south of France, but he was excited about this book. He wrote to his editor, Maxwell Perkins: “I feel I have an enormous power in me now, more than I’ve ever had in a way..
. This book will be a consciously artistic achievement, and must depend on that as the first books did not.” The 29-year-old author wrote to a friend: “My book is wonderful.
So is the Air and the Sea” (referring to the French Riviera, which hadn’t yet become a playground for the wealthy). The above quotes are from the new book “F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Composite Biography,” edited by Niklas Salmose and David Rennie (University of Minnesota Press).
This is a collection of 23 essays by writers and scholars who look at Fitzgerald’s complicated life and career, including his turbulent marriage and other aspects of his life and times, divided into two-year chapt.