Dear Scott/Dear Max The Fitzgerald-Perkins Correspondence

Many writers profited from Maxwell Perkins’s ministrations. Most famously, the saintly editor hacked almost 300 pages out of Look Homeward, Angel , reducing Thomas Wolfe’s debut to a (relatively) readable form. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s work required much less in the way of major surgery. Yet as these letters reveal, the novelist and his editor had a highly productive correspondence, allowing Fitzgerald to bounce big-picture ideas off Perkins and exchange reams of literary gossip. Fitzgerald tends toward the earnest and “If I ever win the right to any liesure [ sic ] again I will assuredly not waste it as I wasted this past time. Please believe me when I say that now I’m doing the best I can.” And Perkins tends toward the downright “At any rate, one thing I think, we can be sure that when the tumult and shouting of the rabble of reviewers and gossipers dies, ‘The Great Gatsby’ will stand out as a very extraordinary book.”