Tracing F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Minnesota Roots

Louisville, KY belongs on your Fitzgerald list. While in the Army here at Camp Taylor he met the Louisville girl who was the model for Daisy Buchanan in "Gatsby." In that novel the actual Seelbach Hotel figures in the story.

Deej=Back in the 1950s (while a graduate student at the "U" [of M] ) I lived
on Summit directly across from F. Scott FITZGERALD's boyhood home. Halcyon Daze for Me, too. So Rah/Rah/Rah for Ski-U-Mah. Best/Noel
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It seems to be a big year for Fitzgerald. Songs he wrote as a Princeton student for Triangle Club shows will be played, for perhaps the first time in 100 years, by the jazz era band Vince Giordano and the NIghthawks in NYC on May 9 and 10.

For those interested, there is a nice little book published by the Minnesota Historical Society called A Guide to F. Scott Fitzgerald's St Paul by John Koblas. Lots of photos, maps and suggestions on walking tours. Excellent footnotes.

Also, book The Basil and Josephine Stories contains a number of wonderful St. Paul short stories by Fitzgerald.

Regarding the nature of St Paul, Garrison Keillor once said "St Paul is pumpernickel and Minneapolis is Wonder Bread."

In the 1950's, my grandparents lived near the Summit/Cathedral Hill neighborhood and when I was old enough to bike around town, I saw all of these sites from the street. Like FSJ, I left St Paul, but more gradually, moving my way eastward to Milwaukee, Chicago, and New Haven (high school, college and grad school, respectively). Rarely back there now, it still calls to me with great fondness, as my birthplace nearly 68 years ago. It was there I saw "Ike" close-up in an open car from my dad's shoulders. It was there that my German ancestors settled, my great-grandfather a master woodworker in Borglum's graceful Capitol; and my Anglo-Irish grandfather practiced pharmacology and taught me to love opera! Thanks for this fine article, read through misty eyes!

Oh My !....having grown up a half block from the now governors mansion on Summit Ave in St Paul, I learned about "my place" in the world from the people who lived close by. When I attended Our lady Of Peace High School, located on Summit Ave in the early 60's, I was surprised and pleased to learn that my peers were awed that I lived in a large stone home on Portland Ave with eight bedrooms. It took me years to learn, that they enjoyed my place in the world but not me. Sadly, Fitzgerald also knew his place but never recovered.

The Fitzgerald Theater in St. Paul is there thanks to Garrison Keillor. He also lives near the home where F. Scott once lived. Keillor has done a great deal to keep alive in St. Paul the memory of Fitzgerald. He might have been mentioned in the very good article.

Thanks for the terrific article. Great coverage, but there is so much more to explore in the world of Fitzgerald and his Minnesota roots. Our organization (Fitzgerald in Saint Paul) will be hosting the 14th international Fitzgerald conference the last week of June, 2017. For anyone interested, this will be a unique opportunity to explore in depth the world of Fitzgerald's youth. Conference details - include a host of activities and special tours - will be posted this fall. For information, visit www.fitzgeraldinsaintpaul.org.

Thank you. I enjoyed the article. There’s a collection of Fitzgerald’s short stories called the St. Paul Stories. As you might expect it contains those stories set in and around St. Paul. My wife and I live in the neighborhood and sometimes walk along Summit Avenue and the neighboring streets to try to compare what they look like now to how they were when Fitzgerald was here. As Garrison Keillor wrote, “Fitzgerald is a presence in St. Paul, a ghost who patrols his old neighborhood and keeps talking to us.”

Via mechanizations far beyond my understanding and control, I spent the summer of 1973 living in the Benedict Canyon mansion "Greenacres" built by the then recently deceased Twenties film star Harold Lloyd. He'd evidently had someone fully stock his library for the opening of the place in 1928 for there was nary a later-issued volume to found anywhere on the shelves. I spent much of that glorious summer reading his set of complete works of Fitzgerald while lounging among the crumbling and dusty relics from that gilded age. Harold had not changed any of the furniture, window draperies nor carpets in those then nearly fifty years. What a fitting setting for my introduction to the world of Fitzgerald!

This article is quite timely. Our theater company, the Lex-Ham Community Theater in Saint Paul, is currently preparing our production of Fitzgerald's early play, Assorted Spirits. This is a comic play he wrote (in Saint Paul) and acted in with his Summit Avenue friends in 1914. I'm guessing that our production is the first one staged since then. If you're a Fitzgerald fan and can make it to Saint Paul, our performances are on May 12 - 14 at the Commodore Bar & Restaurant - where Fitzgerald spent many nights. See www.SteppinOutWithLexHam.org for more information.

Visitors to W.A. Frost's might also take note that playwright August Wilson did much of his writing at the bar there.

Stories get confused. The coffee shop across the street from where Fitzgerald bought his cigarettes is indeed named Nina's, after Nina Clifford, brothel owner, but the building was not the brothel. That was below the hill on the rough edge of respectable downtown. The limestone cellars of these buildings in Cathedral Hill are picturesque, but there are no tunnels connecting them or leading to the river. The original Art Deco "mirror bar" in the Commodore came in the 30s, after Fitzgerald, although there was certainly a bar there before.

My great Aunt Florence told my cousin and I about being F. Scott's nanny/au pair. It was long after her death that I read his works and walked down Summit and tried to connect the dots. The only way I ever had to try to verify the story was to discover that she lived right off Summit for a number of years a block or two from the Laurel and Summit addresses mentioned in the article. It's a lovely part of the world on a sunny day.

While the quote from "Winter Dreams" is memorable, nothing touches the grace and importance of a sentence near the conclusion of "The Great Gatsby,'' in which Nick Carraway says of Gatsby's dream of the promising abundance of New York: "He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night." What a writer!

St. Paul, MN isn't the only lodestar of F. Scott Fitzgerald.

The time he spent at Princeton University made a firm imprint upon him although he never did graduate. The Princeton years opened him up to broader horizons. About ten years after he unceremoniously, tellingly he wrote of it as the greatest country club in America.

During his student days at the university he encountered the debutante Ginerva of Lake Forest, IL. King at the time attended a finishing school in Connecticut.

Fitzgerald visited King in Lake Forest on a couple of occasions, although eventually -- measured in months -- she threw him over.

I believe that it was someone in Lake Forest -- with its cultivated landscapes as well as aristocratic people -- who told Fitzgerald to the effect that "the rich are different from you and me."

King became immortalized -- Daisy Buchanan -- in Fitzgerald's "Gatsby" as well as "The Beautiful and Damned." She also appeared in the short story collection "Taps at Revile" as Josephine. At some point in "Gatsby" there is a fleeting reference to Lake Forest " . . . as string of polo ponies down from Lake Forest."

Near the close of his spiraling life King agreed to meet Fitzgerald (for cocktails, of course) in Santa Barbara, CA.
During the course of this encounter he became intoxicated and verbally abusive. King departed hastily. This final meeting ended upon a troubled note that encapsulated the last years of Fitzgerald.

First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you.
F. Scott Fitzgerald

I did the same thing a couple summers ago--I wish I could share some of the pictures I took. This is a fun article! The gilded age mansion of james j hill is also on summit ave, and the tour helps you picture the world scott fitzgerald grew up in. That mansion had its own school room for the kiddos in the family, and if i have it right, FSF was kept out of full time schooling when he was very young. That and his "doting" (read: obsessive) mother seems like it would send anyone running away from home as soon as they were old enough (and then returning, routinely, wracked with guilt.). That University Club is a sight to behold also. Their website captures its essense pretty well. It was full of activity when I was talking my sculking little walking tour of summit ave--people in formal wear, taking pictures on the manicured lawn, or by the 10 ft bronze New York Life Eagle in the adjacent cliffside park. I, being a bit of a judgemental class warrior, felt the need to cross the street when a pack of them came down the sidewalk. They are a princely sort, to say the least!

fergodsake, the title of the book is THE BEAUTIFUL AND DAMNED. Not
"The Beautiful and the Damned." Correctly citing the title of a major work by a major author should be a baseline for anyone presuming to write about said author. Has Jason Diamond even read any of Fitzgerald's work? Or is he just goldbricking? Surely NYTimes could do better.

As a graduate of the same St. Paul Academy that Fitzgerald attended, where I first read The Great Gatsby, a great article. One nit: it's "The Beautiful and Damned," not "The Beautiful and THE Damned."

Thank you for correcting the mis-cited title of Fitzgerald's second major work so quickly after I submitted my first comment (not published here) about 25 minutes ago. As it is now (correctly) written in both picture caption and in the body of Jason Diamond's piece, it is THE BEAUTIFUL AND DAMNED, not "The Beautiful and the Damned" as was incorrectly written-- twice-- before. Was this an editorial or authorial error?

"The Ice Palace" is another early Fitzgerald story with its roots planted in St. Paul. (It takes place at the city's annual Winter Carnival, which continues to this day.) It's hard to believe now, but St. Paul was a "safe haven" during Prohibition, where bootleggers and gangsters could take refuge from more stringent law enforcement in Chicago and elsewhere. There is no question that its character shaped Fitzgerald's early writing and his worldview.

I have loved Fitzgerald for as long as I have loved to read.Many years ago, I returned from a semester abroad in Chile to find that I was two credits short for graduation from Pomona College. I was able to arrange a once a week discussion with the late Dean Strathman, formerly an English Professor. i enjoyed a break from international relations and he loved being away from the incessant demands placed on deans. He and I read or re-read so much of what he wrote. And when I read Fitgerald todayit all comes back..

Lovely to see "Winter Dreams" get a good mention. It is one of five "Gatsby Cluster" stories (all worth reading: "The Sensible Thing," "Rich Boy," "Dice, Brass Knuckles, and Guitar," and "Absolution" are the others). Often the protagonist's life turns on a fast stroke of financial fortune -- as did Fitzgerald's when Zelda wouldn't marry him until he'd published a novel. (Not necessarily a happy thought.)

He was dogged by his relationship to money and success: from the start when he needed it to get the girl (as Gatsby felt he could do), throughout his life, and when he had to--and was largely unable--support Zelda through her mental illness.

Besides resurrecting radio as a medium of live entertainment, Garrison Keillor has done Americans another public service: reminding us nearly every week that Fitzgerald grew up in St. Paul. Sinclair Lewis, Fitzgerald, Dylan, Prince--the country's a better place because of these sons of the big cities and small towns of Minnesota.

I believe Fitzgerald wrote his first novel on the third floor of 593 Summit Ave., not 599 Summit Ave. He lived at both addresses (593 and 599) and both are part of the same brownstone rowhouse. There is a nice plaque on 599 and none on 593. I believe he was home from college when he wrote that first novel and was home with his family. (I used to live in part of 593 Summit Ave. and loved the history of it.)

It seems ironic to me, reading this article, as all the time that I lived in the Twin Cities, I could never afford to go to the bar at the Commodore, or live there, or dine at WA Frost or Forepaugh's. St. Paul practically invented the cutesy Victorian revival in the 1970s. Thankfully, it has mostly survived. My big thrill was when we would drive slowly down Summit Avenue, or visiting the museums housed there. And, now, I too, am a creative professional, like Fitzgerald, like the many others the Twin Cities breeds like fish, who leave to flounder in the big world out there that is not at all like the Upper Midwest.

As a long-time resident of St. Paul, it was incredibly remiss of this author to neglect that, although the University Club doesn't flaunt it's Fitzgerald history too much, the top of the bar famously still has his signature that he carved into its top (along with many others who did so). Any visitor quickly asks to be shown it!

What was he thinking when he did this? Perhaps one can only imagine him drinking and absent-mindedly carving his name, never dreaming - or perhaps he did - that many years later people would come and appreciate seeing it.

Thanks for the great article on St. Paul - it is a City long on great stories!

This must be some of the NYT's exciting marketing pablum I've heard so much about. Fitzgerald's "Minnesota roots" have as much to do with his novels, with Fitzgerald as a writer, as Shakespeare's Stratford-upon-Avon roots. And since it's the 400th, I'll quote Edward Bond on his Shakespeare play, Bingo: "Most 'cultural appreciation' is as relevant as a game of bingo, and less honest." What matters is what a writer learns to do with language, not the scenic elements of memory. That goes for Proust, Shakespeare, Fitzgerald--everybody. What we've got here is just more despicable tourism.

The midwest will do that to you-sap your dreams, New York and Paris, the South of France cured him. In the Great Gatsby, Jay escaped his roots. That's why every kid from anywhere but New York escapes to that city-duh.

Thank you, Mr. Diamond, for such an interesting article. As someone who grew up in the suburbs west of Minneapolis, I learned early on to venerate the "cosmopolitan, white collar, and Protestant" city of Minneapolis, and to disparage the "provincial, blue collar, and Catholic" city of St. Paul. The older I get, the more I realize just how narrow-minded and misguided my thinking was when I was younger. Rather than limiting, St. Paul, I've come to learn, has a rich and complex history, and a vibrant, engaging present.

This fine and fascinating article asserts a common notion about Fitzgerald, that he failed abjectly as a screenwriter. The reality is a bit more nuanced, as Charles McGrath reported in the Times in 2004.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/22/us/fitzgerald-as-screenwriter-no-holly...

Like many novelists who came to Hollywood in those days, Fitzgerald struggled to master the form and the mindsets of the studio executives who employed him, but when he worked he was paid well, at one point earning $1,250 a week. (In 1940, his last, the average national income was $1,368.) When he died that December, he had stopped drinking, was involved in the first stable romantic relationship of his life, with the nationally-syndicated gossip columnist Sheila Graham, and writing “The Last Tycoon,” a novel unfinished at his death. In the end, his ambitions were reviving and his notorious debts were largely paid off. He was short on cash, knew his heart was frail, but his hopes for the future, like many of the resolute characters he created, were reviving, bright in spite of all.

Fitzgerald loved a weathly Protestant women (he was Catholic and poorer). Her mother told him quite plainly that he was not to see her daughter. He always felt the sting of being poor as a youth, not to mention Catholic.

At White Bear Lake, north of St. Paul, F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda rented a room at the White Bear Yacht Club. Their stay there not only inspired his story "Winter Dreams," but is also notable because Scott and Zelda were thrown out of the club for their drunken behavior.

Fitzgerald's roots mirror the humble background of the fictional Jay Gatz before he became The Great Gatsby. And the Judy mentioned could be Golden Girl Daisy.

I imagine this article being used in high school English classes all over the nation.

Fitzgerald put himself in both Nick Carraway and Gatsby.

Great story. Our family owned 601 Summit ave from 1954 to 1991 and we frequently had visitors from all over the world stopping and looking at 599 Summit Ave. Scottie Fitzgerald stopped by a couple of times to see her old family home that I can remember. I also attended St. Paul Academy, graduating in 1963, and the school was very proud that his first published articles where during his time there. One should also look at the homes in the Crocus Hill area, the next neighborhood south of Summit ave which has many attractive and large homes.

Lovely piece. I'm a huge Fitzgerald admirer, and knew some but not all of the info this article reveals. Seems F. Scott always retained that Mid-Western boy he was, in spite of his best intentions to leave it far, far behind. He died way too young, and in a fashion far below his talent and aspiration. Such a sad end to a bright light.

Thank you for writing this article. Not much is ever written about St. Paul, Minnesota, or much of the North Midwest and yet theres a fascinating history there that had a significant influence on our country.
It's also a beautiful place to call home.

When I was a student at Hamline University (down the road on Snelling Avenue) in the 70's we discussed the Great Gatsby at the Commodore (for my Modern Novel class). Fun discussion. Great article.

Thank you for the story. I have long wondered about Fitzgerald's time in my home town. It evoked memories of the city.