Sublime

That winter Fitzgerald expressed his anguish in a long article entitled “The Crack-Up.” It appeared in three monthly installments in Esquire.

There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams—not through her own fault, but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion. It had gone beyond her, beyond everything. He had thrown himself into it with a creative passion, adding to it all the time, decking it out with every bright feather that drifted hi

The things we love the most are the most disfiguring.

Consider our first encounter with Gatsby, that smile he flashes Nick Carraway, which, we are told, “seemed to face the whole eternal world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself,

Hemingway and Fitzgerald each went his own way that summer, 1925. Ernest and his wife Hadley journeyed to Pamplona for the running of the bulls, Scott and Zelda to the south of France.

The latest story concerned Hemingway’s knocking a man down for calling him a big fat slob. “You can call me a slob,” Hemingway had said, “but you can’t call me a big fat slob.” Then he struck him down. The natives of Bimini set the incident to music, and if they were sure Hemingway was not within earshot, they would sing in a calypso beat, “The big

The Fitzgeralds rented a fifth-floor walk-up in Paris that spring, and in May, 1925, he and Ernest Hemingway met.

O’Connor’s “Good Country People,”