"The Scandal Detectives": Town Topics and F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1916–23

Scholars have long known that when F. Scott Fitzgerald describes Myrtle Wilson in The Great Gatsby as a consumer of a gossip magazine called "Town Tattle," he was making a thinly veiled reference to a real magazine called Town Topics. Perhaps the most infamous scandal sheet in the history of American periodicals, this forerunner of contemporary tabloids ran for nearly fifty years (1879–1937). Especially under the 1891–1920 editorship of its colorful owner, Colonel William d'Alton Mann, Town Topics blackmailed members of the Four Hundred, the wealthiest of American families, to keep embarrassing insinuations about sexual identity, adultery, parentage, and abortion (among other "unmentionable" aspects of social life) off of its pages. In 1905, the magazine's modus operandi became a national sensation when Emily Post's husband, Edwin, refused an extortion demand, resulting in a headline-grabbing court case. Mann also founded The Smart Set, the magazine that eventually, after the Colonel sold it off, published Fitzgerald's earliest stories. Fitzgerald himself made fourteen appearances in Town Topics between 1916 and 1923, the most significant of which involve the celebrity that he and his wife, Zelda Sayre, acquired amid the success of This Side of Paradise in 1920. These references, along with the history of Town Topics, expand our understanding of the significance of "Town Tattle" in Gatsby, revealing that Mann's notorious publication was not just a "New York gossip magazine," as critics have suggested, but one with national reach, whose propensity for travestying its subjects provided an agency essential to self-making in the social economy of a rapidly transforming United States and renders its appearance in The Great Gatsby far more meaningful than scholars have yet appreciated.