Boyhood pranks in the backyards of Cathedral Hill mansions. Young love at the Minnesota State Fair. Jazz Age parties at the University Club, golfing and dancing at the White Bear Yacht Club. F. Scott Fitzgerald's St. Paul boyhood shaped him--and provided scenery and plots for many of his most successful short stories. Fitzgerald's parents moved many times, but they stayed in the same well-to-do city neighborhood. The young writer continued this pattern after his marriage and early popular success. In this book, informative biographical detail blends with lustrous vignettes from the fiction of one of the greatest writers in twentieth-century America, offering easy access to over 100 places of interest in Minnesota's capital city. The first part of this guidebook tells the story of Fitzgerald in St. Paul by describing his connections to 35 significant places in the city, from his birthplace to the schools, homes, and businesses he knew. Part two identifies 106 places associated with the city's most famous literary son.

Fitzgerald's sensitivity about wealth and position--later made evident in such classics as The Great Gatsby and Tender is the Night--was bred of his St. Paul family and associations.

If you think you know F. Scott Fitzgerald, this book will come as a delightfully intimate surprise. Fitzgerald scholar Dave Page has meticulously scoured the letters, scrapbooks, and diaries of the great American novelist, offering a fresh look at the young writer and his St. Paul friends and neighbors. Readers will learn about--and recognize--the sources for the characters and the places he wrote about--as well as understand why St. Paul so inspired him. F. Scott Fitzgerald fans already know and love some of the enchanting and mischievous characters that populate his early novels and short stories. There was Bernice, who bobbed not only her hair but her cousin's as well. And those pranksters who crashed the wrong party disguised as an exotic camel! And then there was the poor Southern belle who almost froze to death in the St. Paul Winter Carnival's ice palace. Many of Fitzgerald's characters and tales were based on real people and events from the young writer's life, set against the socioeconomic times of the Jazz Age, where he perceived a great gulf between the haves and the have-nots in his hometown. F. Scott Fitzgerald in Minnesota combines insights into the writer's early career with the rich architectural history of St. Paul, taking readers into the homes and places he frequented. Page's well-researched analysis is complemented by Jeff Krueger's sensitive color photographs of homes still standing, and supplemented by fascinating historic photographs of lives well lived in old St. Paul.

Well known as the most prestigious and beautiful street in the Twin Cities, Summit Avenue runs past the opulent mansion of railroad tycoon James J. Hill, an early home of F. Scott Fitzgerald, and several residences designed by renowned architect Cass Gilbert. In its heyday the four-and-one-half-mile-long boulevard included 13 churches, 9 schools, and 440 residences, 373 of which survive. St. Paul's Historic Summit Avenue highlights the fascinating story of this boulevard, from its pre-Civil War origins, when the area was still considered wilderness, to its fashionable height at the turn of the century. Ernest R. Sandeen discusses the preservation of Summit Avenue and takes readers on a walking tour of the first and grandest mile of the street, beginning with the Cathedral of St. Paul. A second walking tour gives the reader Fitzgerald's Summit Avenue, including excerpts from his notebooks and stories describing the area. The book concludes with an index of Summit Avenue houses built through the 1970s. Before his death in 1982, Ernest R. Sandeen was the James Wallace Professor of History and codirector of the Living Historical Museum at Macalester College. He served as a member of St. Paul's Historic Preservation Commission and as a partner in Lanegran, Richter, and Sandeen, an architectural preservation, design, and land-use firm.

The Historical Guides to American Authors is an interdisciplinary, historically sensitive series that combines close attention to the United States' most widely read and studied authors with a strong sense of time, place, and history. Placing each writer in the context of the vibrant relationship between literature and society, volumes in this series contain historical essays written on subjects of contemporary social, political, and cultural relevance. Each volume also includes a capsule biography and illustrated chronology detailing important cultural events as they coincided with the author's life and works, while photographs and illustrations dating from the period capture the flavor of the author's time and social milieu. Equally accessible to students of literature and of life, the volumes offer a complete and rounded picture of each author in his or her America. Book jacket.

The fiction of F. Scott Fitzgerald serves as a compelling and incisive chronicle of the Jazz Age and Depression Era. This collection explores the degree to which Fitzgerald was in tune with, and keenly observant of, the social, historical and cultural contexts of the 1920s and 1930s. Original essays from forty international scholars survey a wide range of critical and biographical scholarship published on Fitzgerald, examining how it has evolved in relation to critical and cultural trends. The essays also reveal the micro-contexts that have particular relevance for Fitzgerald's work - from the literary traditions of naturalism, realism and high modernism to the emergence of youth culture and prohibition, early twentieth-century fashion, architecture and design, and Hollywood - underscoring the full extent to which Fitzgerald internalized the world around him.