First edition, signed and inscribed by Fitzgerald

F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby
New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1925
First edition, first printing, second-state dust jacket

Inscribed by Fitzgerald on the front free endpaper

"For Tatnall Brown / from one, who / is flattered at / being remembered / F Scott Fitzgerald / Hollywood, 1939."

A resonant presentation copy, inscribed in Hollywood during the final, uncertain year of Fitzgerald’s life.

Dismissed by MGM in 1939 after years of frustrating screenwriting work, Fitzgerald had seen only one credit to his name—Three Comrades, which he privately loathed. “It was entirely rewritten by the producer,” he wrote to his sister-in-law. By then, the man who had defined the Jazz Age felt his legacy slipping. “Isn’t my reputation being allowed to slip away?” he asked Maxwell Perkins in a letter that Christmas Eve. “I mean what’s left of it.”

It’s in that bleak context that he inscribed this copy of The Great Gatsby, to Tatnall Brown, a Philadelphia banker and former dean of Haverford College. The note—"flattered at being remembered"—reads as both a gentle deflection and a quiet admission of how far he had fallen. Within a year, Fitzgerald would be dead at forty-four, his books forgotten by all but a few loyal friends and collectors.

A powerful association copy, rich in narrative resonance.

Provenance:

James C. Seacrest Collection (Heritage Auctions, 2018)
Previously in the collection of Maurice Neville (Sotheby’s, 2004, Part I, lot 61).

Bruccoli A11.1.a; Connolly 48.