The Princeton University Library is very pleased to announce the digitization of the autograph manuscript and corrected galleys of F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940), The Great Gatsby (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1925), which were donated to the Princeton University Library in 1950 by Scottie Fitzgerald Lanahan, the daughter of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda Fitzgerald. These manuscripts are part of the F. Scott Fitzgerald Papers (C0187), the best-known, comprehensive author archive in the Manuscripts Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections. We can see Fitzgerald at work on his third novel over a four-year period: (1) Ur-Gatsby (2-page fragment), the author’s abandoned effort, conceived in 1922 and written in 1923; (2) The Great Gatsby autograph manuscript (302 pages), which he largely wrote in France and completed by September 1924; and (3) corrected galleys of “Trimalchio,” the novel’s working title when it was typeset by Charles Scribner’s Sons in 1924, only to be much reworked by the author early in 1925. The digital images are online in the Princeton University Digital Library (PUDL): with the permission of the F. Scott Fitzgerald Literary Trust (copyright holder), acting in consultation with Harold Ober Associates (literary agency representing the Fitzgerald Literary Trust) and Simon & Schuster (owner of the Scribner imprint). The digitized manuscript and galleys are online in time for Princeton University’s Commencement 2013, a century after F. Scott Fitzgerald (Class of 1917) became a freshman at Princeton in 1913. Digitization is particularly timely because of intense popular interest in the author and his great novel as a result of Australian movie director Baz Luhrmann’s new film version of The Great Gatsby, released on May 10.

Fitzgerald conceived and crafted his novel in layers over a three-year period. In June 1922, living at White Bear Lake, Minnesota, he began planning his new book, which Fitzgerald specialists now refer to as the Ur-Gatsby. He started writing this novel in June 1923 and produced some 18,000 words. It was set in the Midwest around 1885 and did not have Nick Carraway as its narrator. Two pages of this manuscript survive at Princeton quite by chance, since Fitzgerald attached them to a letter that he sent to Willa Cather. But much of the Ur-Gatsby text was discarded or published elsewhere, such as the short story “Absolution” (June 1924). By April 1924, now living in Great Neck, New York, Fitzgerald began working on the novel again, but now set in 1922. Fitzgerald completed the autograph manuscript in France by September 1924. The draft was just over 250 pages, almost always only on rectos. Fitzgerald customarily wrote in pencil, as we can see in a brief bit of grainy 1920s film footage showing him writing in a garden. He did not type and therefore had a secretary prepare a typescript from the manuscript.

In November 1924, Fitzgerald sent the typescript to his legendary Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins, who had galleys set from them. Unfortunately, this typescript and subsequent typescripts and carbon copies do not survive. The “Trimalchio” galleys were sent to Fitzgerald in Rome, where he corrected and revised them during the first two months of 1925. The author corrected the galleys in pencil but also pasted on long typed additions of text. As James L.W. West III has noted in his edition of Trimalchio, the book in the original galleys was not the same novel as The Great Gatsby as finally published. Despite similarities, there are crucial differences. Fitzgerald conveyed or recommended additional corrections and changes to Maxwell Perkins by letter and telegram. Among other things, the author considered alternative titles, such as “Among the Ash Heaps and Millionaires” and “Gold-Hatted Gatsby.” By spring 1925, Fitzgerald settled on “Under the Red, White and Blue.” However, by the time he had communicated this to Maxwell Perkins, the book had already been published (April 10, 1925) as The Great Gatsby, the title Perkins liked best. Fitzgerald had hesitated about the title because he said there was nothing great about Jay Gatsby and felt that the title, using a surname, might remind people of Sinclair Lewis’s novel Babbitt (1922).

Matthew J. Bruccoli suggested that some portions in a smaller hand were copied from the earlier manuscript draft, while others in a larger hand were first draft. Fitzgerald made innumerable changes in the story line and inserted new text at many points. Clearly visible on nearly every page of the autograph manuscript are his corrections (from entire passages and paragraphs to cross outs with interlinear replacements of a word or phrase), erasures (some decipherable, others not, leaving gaps in the text), instructions (with arrows), handwritten additions on additional sheets of paper, and other changes. The creative process is also much in evidence with the galleys, which the author corrected in pencil, as well as adding typed sheets of revised text tipped onto particular galleys. Bruccoli argued that the author “regarded galleys as a special kind of typescript or trial edition in which to rewrite whole scenes as necessary.” Fitzgerald sent innumerable letters and telegrams to his legendary editor Maxwell Perkins, preserved at Princeton in the Archives of Charles Scribner’s Sons (C0101). Most of them relate to progress on the book, but some sent from Rome and Capri list corrections. Even after publication, Fitzgerald continued to think of making more changes in later printings or additions, and for this reason corrected a personal copy of the first edition, which is preserved in his papers.

For information about the digital edition of The Great Gatsby autograph manuscript and corrected galleys, contact Don C. Skemer, Curator of Manuscripts,  For a recent interview, see Princeton Alumni Weekly (June 5, 2013): http://paw.princeton.edu/issues/2013/06/05/pages/5800/index.xml  Concerning the Fitzgerald Papers and photoduplication, email Gabriel Swift, Reference Librarian, ;   Essential bibliography about the manuscript and galleys includes F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Facsimile of the Manuscript, edited with an introduction by Matthew J. Bruccoli (Washington, D.C.: Microcard Editions Books, 1973); Matthew J. Bruccoli, “An Instance of Apparent Plagiarism: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Willa Cather, and the First Gatsby Manuscript,” Princeton University Library Chronicle, vol. 39 (Spring 1978), pp. 171–78; Trimalchio: A Facsimile Edition of the Original Galley Proofs for The Great Gatsby, afterword by Matthew J. Bruccoli (Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press, in cooperation with the Thomas Cooper Library, 2000); F. Scott Fitzgerald, Trimalchio: An Early Version of The Great Gatsby, edited by James L.W. West III, Cambridge Edition of the Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

Autograph manuscript of The Great Gatsby, first page. Not to be reproduced without permission of the Princeton University Library.

The exhibition “George Segal: Sculptor as Photographer” opens at the Princeton University Library on July 25. It focuses on the American artist George Segal (1924–2000), who spent most of his creative life in nearby North Brunswick, N.J. He is best known as a sculptor of distinctive plaster figures cast from life and placed, sometimes with other figures and objects, in tableaux or “environments.” But Segal worked in other mediums as well, including photography, especially in the 1980s and 1990s. Photography complemented Segal’s interest in the built environments of New York and New Jersey. Often accompanied by his friend, photographer Donald Lokuta, Segal began taking day trips through the streets of New York, especially the East Village and Lower East Side, as well as Newark’s Ironbound district. He was fascinated by Coney Island and Jersey Shore towns, such as Asbury Park, Keansburg, and Seaside Heights.

Segal selected 26 of his photographs for the portfolio Sequence: New York/New Jersey, 1990–1993. But most of his nearly 7,000 surviving photographs, donated to Princeton in 2009 by the George and Helen Segal Foundation, are unknown. They are preserved as part of the George Segal Papers, comprising nearly 80 linear feet of correspondence, business files, and original art, in the Manuscripts Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections. The Segal exhibition, curated by Valerie Addonizio and Don Skemer, aims to make Segal’s photography better known and to show how his sculpture and photography were related. Like his sculptures, Segal’s photographs capture ordinary people and the mundane details of life. People often seem lost in thought, alone despite being in public places. Segal also photographed mannequins in store windows and other plaster-cast figures, perhaps because his own sculpture was based on life casts. But beyond any connection with his own sculpture, Segal was interested in photography as art.

George Segal was born in New York City and came of age as an artist at a time when Avant-Garde art and Abstract Expressionism were most influential. He began his working life as a New Jersey poultry farmer in North Brunswick, yet continued to paint, sculpt, and exhibit his work through the 1950s. In 1957 his farm was the setting for the first outdoor “Happening,” organized by the American painter and performance artist Allan Kaprow. This arts event was a harbinger of the 1960s, when Segal became a full-time artist and played an important part in the Pop Art movement, along with artists such as Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol. In 1961, Segal pioneered his signature technique of sculpting people, sometimes family and friends, by means of applying plaster bandages.

Segal’s works are found in New York City at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of Art, and the Guggenheim Museum; Smithsonian Institution, and in many other American and international museums, including the Centre National d’Art Contemporain (Paris), the Musée des Beaux-Arts (Montreal), and the National Museuum of Art (Osaka, Japan). His “Bread Line” (1991), vividly recalling life during the Great Depression, and two other bronze sculptures were commissioned for the FDR Memorial, in Washington, D.C. Segal donated his “Abraham and Isaac—In Memory of May 4, 1970” (1979) to Princeton University, and the Segal Foundation recently donated “Circus Acrobats” (1981) to the Princeton University Art Museum.

Exhibition in the Milberg Gallery, Firestone Library

Gallery hours: September 5–February 12, Monday–Friday, 9:00 am–5:00 pm

Saturday–Sunday, 12:00–5:00 pm

Public Program in McCormick 101

Sunday, November 6, 2011, 3:00–4:00 pm

Art historian Phyllis Tuchman will give an illustrated public lecture, “George Segal: Sculptor, Painter, Photographer.”

For more information about the George Segal exhibition or his papers, please contact Don C. Skemer, Curator of Manuscripts, .  A description of Segal’s papers is available online at http://diglib.princeton.edu/ead/pdf?id=ark:/88435/tx31qh77q.

George Segal, Manhattan at Night, 1986. © George and Helen Segal Foundation/Licensed by VAGA, New York, N.Y. Not to be reproduced without permission of VAGA.