Class of '17

In his first flush of success after the publication of This Side of Paradise, 23-year-old F. Scott Fitzgerald returned to Princeton one day in 1920 for a banquet of former editors of the Nassau Lit. There, as usual, he began to drink, crowned Dean Christian Gauss with a laurel wreath and got so drunk that Cottage Club suspended him. "For seven years," wrote Fitzgerald later, "I didn't go to Princeton. Then a magazine asked me to write an article about it and when I started to write it, I found I really loved the place . . ."

Fitzgerald had always loved the place. As an undergraduate from Minnesota, he was an intense student ("I'm taking naught but Philosophy & English") with a burning desire to become a famous writer ("Do you realize that Shaw is 61, Wells 51, Chesterton 41 ... and I 21?"). He wrote for the Lit, threw himself into the Triangle Club and all the other doings on a "leafy campus" of "Brooke's* clothes, clean ears, and, withall, a lack of mental prigishness."

When Novelist Fitzgerald died in 1941, by then one of Princeton's famous alumni (though he left for World War I before graduating), his family did not quite know what to do with all his manuscripts and papers. Eventually, the family decided to send them to the Princeton Library, where they could be safely stored. Last week, going a step further, his daughter Frances Scott (now Mrs. Samuel J. Lanahan) announced that she had turned the papers over for keeps. With that gift, every major piece of Fitzgeraldiana from Paradise to The Last Tycoon will become permanently available to the students and admirers of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Princeton '17.

*Author Fitzgerald meant Brooks.

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