Dedication: Ruth M. Prigozy (May 7, 1930–July 16, 2017)

This issue of The F. Scott Fitzgerald Review—our fifteenth—is dedicated to the memory of Ruth M. Prigozy, who served as the executive director of the F. Scott Fitzgerald Society from 1990 to 2013. With Jackson R. Bryer and Alan Margolies, Ruth cofounded the organization, and for the first several years oversaw our biennial conferences, including the 2000 Nice, France, meeting, which set the bar for both setting and attendance. Through Hofstra University, where she taught for more forty years, Ruth was also instrumental in funding the Review in our first iteration. Her own scholarly contributions to Fitzgerald studies, including The Cambridge Companion to F. Scott Fitzgerald, which she edited, are immense. In addition to her professional accomplishments, Ruth was a dear friend and colleague. We asked Ronald Berman to share his reflections on her legacy.

Fig 1.

Ruth M. Prigozy. Photo courtesy of Tom Adams.

Ruth Prigozy was born on the same street that I was, and went through the same kind of education in Brooklyn. We both went through the public schools, and both lived there even after growing up. She thought often of her own teachers and, long after she had graduated, I remember her talking about their books and ideas. She began her work on Fitzgerald with a strong sense of the spirit of place: midtown New York where she lived, and the North Shore of Long Island where The Great Gatsby takes place. Like so many other scholars I admired her knowledge of these places. Although I did not get to know Ruth until late in life, I could see that she knew the essential story: moving on and up to Manhattan and then out of it. We talked often about the enduring city as a place and as an idea. That meant a really discriminating sense on her part of the streets and neighborhoods, and the deep history of Fitzgerald's New York. Simply put, she knew how you got from the Scribner's offices to the Princeton Club to the Village—and what each step in your New York life meant.

I was never really aware of popular culture and its place in the life of Fitzgerald until talking to Ruth about music and movies. No one could have been more helpful in filling out the picture of lyrics and tunes in Fitzgerald's work. But that does not really get at the heart of it: the story is about words, and Ruth had a memorable prose style. There were no air spaces in her sentences. She set really high standards for her own writing and expected other writers to do the same.

Ruth understood what I sometimes think of as the great fact about the 1920s: they began, as she said when covering This Side of Paradise, when the lives of Fitzgerald's characters began. Those lives did not begin with the Boom: as she put it, the thing we had to understand was that the 1920s were rooted in years before the war. She urged scholarship to focus on the period from 1912 on because that was when it all began. Fitzgerald's daughter, Scottie, emphatically agreed, pointing out that while we saw her father as a product of the Jazz Age, many of his references were to music and ideas that he grew up with before the war.

Ruth was a hard critic and knew the difference between talent and effort. Her books are on every serious scholar's shelf. One reason for that is, as when she assigned essays in The Cambridge Companion to F. Scott Fitzgerald, she wrote exhaustive directions to contributors so that their coverage could well and truly be expected to last. Her own essays are designed to the last bolt and brace. No wonder they are being read.

Ronald Berman