Picture of Dorian Gray, The.
Zelda Fitzgerald’s signed copy
(Fitzgerald, Zelda’s copy) Wilde, Oscar. The Picture of Dorian Gray. New York…: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, [n.d.].
8vo.; red leatherette; gilt stamping; rubbed along joints and extremities.
With Zelda Fitzgerald’s maiden ownership signature to front endpaper: Zelda Sayre Sept 2, 1919.
After several years of courtship, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda Sayre separated during the summer of 1919, and Fitzgerald returned to his home in St. Paul, Minnesota. Biographer Matthew Bruccoli writes that the following autumn found Fitzgerald with “two connected ambitions: to get his girl back and to make money on the strength of his novel” (Some Sort of Epic Grandeur: The Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald, New York: Harcourt, 1981; 106). On September 4, 1919 – two days after Zelda dated this copy of Dorian Gray – Fitzgerald would send the typescript of his first novel, This Side of Paradise, to New York for submission to his editor, Maxwell Perkins at Scribner’s. The following year the book was published and the couple was married.
Oscar Wilde notably held a prominent place in the lives of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. According to biographer Nancy Milford, Zelda grew up reading “Wilde and Galsworthy and Kipling” (Zelda: A Biography, New York: Harper & Row, 1970; 12), and F. Scott’s first short-story collection Flappers and Philosophers (1921) would include “Head and Shoulders,” a story about the marriage of Horace Tarbox and Marcia Meadow, of which Alice Hall Petry observed that its plotline “of an intellectual becoming involved with a chorus girl may owe something to The Picture of Dorian Gray by one of Fitzgerald’s favorite authors, Oscar Wilde” (Fitzgerald’s Craft of Short Fiction: The Collected Stories, 1920-35, University of Alabama Press, 1989; 194). Traces of Dorian Gray were first detected, however, in This Side of Paradise, which critic Frances Newman declared a “desecration” of Compton Mackenzie’s 1913 novel Sinister Street, which prompted Fitzgerald to defend himself in a letter, writing, “You seem to be unconscious that even Mackenzie had his sources such as Dorian Gray and None Other Gods, and that occasionally we may have drunk at the same springs” (qtd. in Bruccoli 120). Later, F. Scott and Zelda also became good friends with Wilde’s niece, Dolly, described by Milford as a woman with “kohl-rimmed eyes and a total lack of discretion,” whom Scott would later portray in his 1934 novel, Tender is the Night (the section was cut from the final manuscript).
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