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A t one point in my working life I moved from a city in the northeast to a town in the deep South and from teaching American literature to editing a magazine. I hadn’t been in my office at the Georgia Review for more than a week when I received a phone call from the university ’s retired dean of students, a venerable Southern personage who served as a self-designated official greeter and vetter of the Southernness of new faculty members. At one point, our conversation went like this: “Mr. Irwin, where are you from, sir?” “Why, from the South, sir.” (As you can see, we were employing that exaggerated courtesy Southerners often fall into when they sense they may have to do some serious insulting before the conversation is through.) “Where in the South, sir?” asked the dean. “From Texas, sir.” “Well, Mr. Irwin, here in Georgia we don’t consider Texas, Florida, or Virginia as part of the South.” I sometimes wonder if that conversation had been the reason why a few months later, when I was writing the preface to my first book, a book on that most Southern of writers, William Faulkner, I felt it necessary to document my Southern roots at some length. You see, I knew a secret that I hadn’t told the dean: that though I was born and raised in Texas and my mother’s family had been there since the days of the Republic, I was the product of a mixed marriage. My father was from Brooklyn, New York. Worse yet, his father, as a teenager fresh off the boat from Ireland, had served in the Union Navy during the Civil War. Suffice it to say that as a child growing up, there were always at least two opinions at our dinner table about the correctness of the Civil War’s outcome. Perhaps this is one of the reasons I was particularly attracted to Fitzgerald’s fiction, for while I was born and raised in the South with a Southern mother and Northern father, he was born and raised in the North with a Northern mother and a Southern father, and I’ve always felt this symmetry in our parentage and regional upbringings was one of the things c h a p t e r t w o Fitzgerald as a Southern Writer Fitzgerald as a Southern Writer 11 that made his fiction speak to me in a more personal way and that gave me, so I felt, a special insight into his work. Recall for a moment Fitzgerald’s family background. His maternal grandfather , Philip McQuillan, had been born in Ireland and had moved in 1857 from Galena, Illinois (where U. S. Grant had been an unsuccessful storekeeper before the Civil War), to St. Paul, Minnesota, ultimately making his fortune there in the wholesale grocery business and becoming a respected figure in the community. McQuillan’s wholesale grocery business gets translated in his grandson’s fiction into the wholesale hardware business of Nick Carraway’s family, a business founded by Nick’s great-uncle, who had come to their unnamed Midwestern city in 1851 and who had, like J. P. Morgan, sent a substitute to the Civil War. Philip McQuillan’s daughter Mollie married Edward Fitzgerald in 1890, and their son was born six years later. Edward Fitzgerald was from Rockville, Maryland, and was related on his mother’s side to some of Maryland’s oldest families—the Scotts, Ridgelys, Dorseys, and Keys. Francis Scott Key was the brother of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s great-great-grandfather. To say that Edward Fitzgerald and his family were Southern sympathizers during the Civil War would be an understatement. As a boy, Edward, who was born in 1853, guided Confederate “spies across the Potomac,” helped “a sniper with Mosby’s guerrillas to escape,” and watched “General Jubal Early’s troops march past” the family farm in Montgomery County “on their final attempt to seize the Federal capital,” as André Le Vot notes (5). Add to that the fact that Edward’s first cousin was Mary Suratt, and I think you’ll admit you don’t get more Southern than that unless you’re related to Traveler. Edward Fitzgerald filled young Scott’s head with tales of his boyhood adventures in the war, and one of Scott’s first stories, “The Room with the Green Blinds,” written when he was fourteen and published in his school magazine, imagines, as Fitzgerald’s...

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