Homes for Outsiders Yearning to Look in

Although the F. Scott Fitzgerald in St. Paul organization is still in its infancy, the nonprofit group has just published its first book, F. Scott Fitzgerald in Minnesota: The Writer and His Friends at Home—and the final product is, quite simply, excellent. The St. Paul organization was created in 2012 at the behest of Richard McDermott, who had long lived in the apartment in which Fitzgerald was born. The experience, he once said, had "transformed" his life. Talking with the Fitzgerald scholars and fans who came to his door from around the world convinced him it was important to keep the author's works alive for future generations. Consequently, at his death, McDermott left a legacy to establish F. Scott Fitzgerald in St. Paul.

"Dick's vision rested on his firmly held belief that further exposure to Fitzgerald's work would transform our view of ourselves and our City," writes organization president Stu Wilson in his foreword to this book. To realize its founder's charge, the organization has been sponsoring monthly educational programs on Fitzgerald's works for the last three years. Now, the publication of this book "is a major step forward in realizing Dick's vision" (ix).

Dave Page, the book's author, built the concept of the volume around the prevailing thought, partly encouraged by Fitzgerald himself, that the author was an outsider among St. Paul's elite. Page became interested in Fitzgerald after he moved to the city in 1981. As he researched the author, he discovered a dichotomy between how the local press portrayed Fitzgerald and how the friends of his youth felt about him. The more he explored the author's life, the more Page came to disbelieve the notion that Fitzgerald was a poor outsider and to feel it was a point worth addressing in a scholarly fashion. Hence, this book. By illustrating the different places "associated with Fitzgerald's Minnesota," Page writes in his introduction, "we hope [to] show how well woven the author of The Great Gatsby was into the fabric of the Summit Avenue gentry" (3).

The book is organized into four geographical sections: Summit Hill, downtown St. Paul, White Bear Lake, and Old Frontenac. "Selecting which locations should go into the book was not an easy task," Page admits (4). Including the homes, apartments, hotels, and buildings where Fitzgerald himself lived, worked, or played was only the beginning. Page also chose to add the homes in which the author's family or friends lived. Then he incorporated the homes of several of those whom Fitzgerald parodied in his infamous Daily Dirge mock newspaper headlined "Cotillion is Sad Failure." (This unexpected decision delights the reader who is familiar with The Dirge; see Bruccoli, Smith, and Kerr 88.) Finally, he notes places to which Fitzgerald refers in his stories, such as the statue of Nathan Hale at 401 Summit Avenue, which the author describes in "The Popular Girl," a gorgeous if sometimes unfairly dismissed romance published in two parts in 11 and 18 February 1922, issues of the Saturday Evening Post (F&P 263–308).

Page illuminates each site in the book with an interesting yet succinct gloss that deftly points out the history of the property and its owners, its Fitzgerald connection, and how Fitzgerald subsequently used some of these associations in his writing. It is a complex interweaving of relationships that contributes to the reader's understanding of just how full Fitzgerald's life was—and how integral a part of Saint Paul's gentry he was.

772 Linwood Avenue provides a good example. This is where Fitzgerald's friend "Billy" Webster lived. Noting how the boys met when they were twelve, Page quickly explains that Billy's father, William Byron Webster, was the proprietor of Saint Paul Steam Laundry. Webster built his seven-bedroom home in 1909 with "the kitchen in front so the entertainment rooms [in the back] overlooked the bluffs of the Mississippi River...