The Maurice Neville Collection of Modern Literature (Part III)

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Lot 32
  • 32

Fitzgerald, F. Scott

Estimate
25,000 - 35,000 USD
bidding is closed

Description

  • The Great Gatsby. The Modern Library, 1934
  • ink,paper
Small 8vo. Original gilt-stamped flexible blue cloth; spine faded. Publisher's illustrated jacket with reminder stamp; minor wear at spine ends.

Literature

See Herrmann. SJ Perelman A Life. New York: 1986. p.118-119

Catalogue Note

a revealing presentation to his close Hollywood friends, Laura and  SJ Perelman inscribed on the half-title: "For Laura, and for Syd Perelman, who gave me a sense of my existence as a writer in a doubtful time. F. Scott Fitzgerald California 1940."

Author SJ Perelman and his brother-in-law Nathaniel West befriended Fitzgerald and frequently visited him in Encino when he was living on the Everett Horton estate. According to Perelman biographer Dorothy Herrman, of the writers he encountered in Hollywood, it was Fitzgerald that Perelman knew best. They often met to discuss the Screen Writers Guild and if West was present, he often tried to convince the publicly apolitical Fitzgerald to become more active in left-wing causes.

Fitzgerald greatly admired the writing of both Perelman and West, but it seems with the former he felt a particular bond, writing in his notebook: "I feel he and I ... have some early undisclosed experience in common so that at this point in our lives we find each other peculiarly sympathetic. We do not need to talk."

Fitzgerald's death the same year he inscribed the present copy was the culmination of a long, slow personal and professional decline. Living in Hollywood but finding no great success as a screenwriter and with his novels out of print, he would certainly need the encouragement of fellow writers like Perelman during this "doubtful time." (That the jacket on the present copy carries a remainder stamp on top of the author's name seems particularly apt.)