“All was quiet on the Riviera, and then the Fitzgeralds arrived.” That’s how John Chapin Mosher begins “That Sad Young Man,” his Profile of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, published in The New Yorker in 1926 (just after the appearance of “The Great Gatsby”). Fitzgerald didn’t live “that amorphous affair known as the literary life,” Mosher observes. He was a raconteur, dancer, and drinker, a wellspring of mental and physical energy. That’s often how it is with the best writers. Their books may be read in the library, but they weren’t created there. They were the products of lives so full that they spilled over into novels and stories.
This week, we bring you pieces about the dynamic lives behind literary masterworks. In an article published during her famous sojourn in Paris, Janet Flanner chronicles the early writing career of Edith Wharton, and notes that, as a child, the novelist was known as “handsome, disagreeable little Pussy Jones, always scribbling.” W. H. Auden explores the revolutionary nature of Virginia Woolf’s essays and novels, while James Thurber traces the inspiration for Henry James’s “The Wings of the Dove.” Hilton Als considers the evolution of Flannery O’Connor’s literary vision; David Remnick visits with Ralph Ellison at his home in Washington Heights and recounts the novelist’s thoughts on his third book, “Juneteenth”; and Claudia Roth Pierpont examines the work of Zora Neale Hurston, a leader of the Harlem Renaissance who skillfully transformed folk culture into art. Finally, Joan Didion reflects on the significance of Ernest Hemingway’s minimalist prose. Taken together, all of these pieces share a common goal: they reveal literary life as it really is, in all its ardency and struggle.
—Erin Overbey and Joshua Rothman, archivists
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