James L. W. West, III – författare

The Great Gatsby is often called the great American novel. Emblematic of an entire era, F. Scott Fitzgerald's classic tale of illicit desire, grand illusions, and lost dreams is rendered in a lyrical prose that revives a vanished world of glittering parties and vibrant jazz, where money and deceit walk hand in hand. Rich in humor, sharply observant of status and class, the book tells the story of Jay Gatsby's efforts to keep his faith - in money, in love, in all the promises of America - amid the chaos and conflict of life on Long Island's Gold Coast during the Roaring Twenties. This centennial edition presents the established version of the text in a collector's volume replete with social, cultural, and historical context, and numerous illustrations. The authoritative introduction examines persistent myths about Fitzgerald, his greatest work, and the age he embodies, while offering fresh ways of reading this iconic work.

Making the Archives Talk is a collection of twelve essays by editor, biographer, bibliographer, and book historian James L. W. West III. In these essays, West sets forth his views of editorial theory, archival use, textual emendation, and scholarly annotation. He has published editions of major writings by Theodore Dreiser, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and William Styron. Drawing on these editions for examples, West defends intentionalist editing and the eclectic emendation of texts. He discusses the treatment of both public documents (novels, stories, and nonfiction) and private texts (letters, diaries, journals, and working papers). Highlights of the collection include “The Scholarly Editor as Biographer,” “Editorial Theory and the Act of Submission,” “Double Quotes and Double Meanings in Jennie Gerhardt,” “Annotating Mr. Fitzgerald,” and “The End Is Near.” Two of the essays, “Toxic Words and the Editor” and “Keeper of the Flame: Editing the Literary Remains of William Styron,” are previously unpublished.

Making the Archives Talk is a collection of twelve essays by editor, biographer, bibliographer, and book historian James L. W. West III. In these essays, West sets forth his views of editorial theory, archival use, textual emendation, and scholarly annotation. He has published editions of major writings by Theodore Dreiser, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and William Styron. Drawing on these editions for examples, West defends intentionalist editing and the eclectic emendation of texts. He discusses the treatment of both public documents (novels, stories, and nonfiction) and private texts (letters, diaries, journals, and working papers). Highlights of the collection include “The Scholarly Editor as Biographer,” “Editorial Theory and the Act of Submission,” “Double Quotes and Double Meanings in Jennie Gerhardt,” “Annotating Mr. Fitzgerald,” and “The End Is Near.” Two of the essays, “Toxic Words and the Editor” and “Keeper of the Flame: Editing the Literary Remains of William Styron,” are previously unpublished.

Widely regarded as one of America’s great authors, F. Scott Fitzgerald led a life of drama and extravagance that often overshadowed his writing career. This book refocuses attention on how Fitzgerald viewed and approached the business of writing. Fitzgerald scholar James L. W. West III explores the writer’s professional life through personal letters, manuscripts, his business ledger, editions of his novels, and even a “seven-year plan.” In assessing these diverse materials, West reveals fascinating details about what led Fitzgerald to follow authorship as a calling, why he took on certain projects, how he managed his finances, and what influenced his writing style. Connecting Fitzgerald’s career to his literary texts, West also provides new information on the development and publication history of some of Fitzgerald’s most important works, such as The Great Gatsby and Jacob’s Ladder. Throughout, West pays close attention to the delicate balance in Fitzgerald’s career between money and literary respectability, commerce and art.A keen, engaging, and intimate look at Fitzgerald’s day-to-day work of writing for a living, Business Is Good is a must-have for anyone who wants a better understanding of this American literary giant.

Flappers and Philosophers was F. Scott Fitzgerald's initial encore - his first collection of short fiction, published in 1920 to capitalize on the success of This Side of Paradise, the novel that had made him famous at the age of twenty-three. Some of his best early stories are included here: 'The Offshore Pirate', 'Bernice Bobs Her Hair', 'The Ice Palace' and 'Benediction'. In these narratives Fitzgerald presented his prototypical Jazz-Age heroines, beautiful and wilful young women who later became trademarks of his fiction. Part of the authoritative Cambridge Edition of F. Scott Fitzgerald, this volume now appears in paperback for the first time. It offers detailed explanatory notes, a record of variants and appendices tracing the composition and publication history of the stories.

Fitzgerald's second collection of short stories, Tales of the Jazz Age (1922), includes two masterpieces - 'May Day' and 'The Diamond as Big as the Ritz' - as well as other stories from his earlier career. Tales of the Jazz Age reproduces the original collection in full, along with several uncollected stories from the early 1920s, including 'Dice, Brassknuckles and Guitar', a 1923 narrative which closely anticipates the themes and characters of The Great Gatsby. In his introduction James L. W. West, III offers an account of the textual history of the stories, reconstructs Fitzgerald's decisions about which stories to include and exclude, and examines reproductions of surviving manuscripts and typescripts. He supplies a full record of variants, tracing Fitzgerald's extensive revisions to the stories, and he provides detailed historical notes, references and glosses.

F. Scott Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise is the opening statement of his literary career. Published originally in 1920, the novel captures the rhythm and feel of the gaudy decade that was to follow in America. This Side of Paradise made Fitzgerald simultaneously famous and infamous: famous for the stylish exuberance of his writing and infamous for the errors - in spelling, fact, grammar and chronology - that peppered his text. This authoritative critical edition offers an accurate, fully annotated text based on Fitzgerald's original manuscript, explanatory notes, textual apparatus and appendices.

F. Scott Fitzgerald began composing Tender Is the Night in the summer of 1925, but he struggled with the novel and reworked it intensively over the next nine years. A study of the disintegration of a talented young American psychiatrist, set among wealthy American expatriates living in Europe after the First World War, the novel, finally published in 1934, is now considered one of his major works. Fitzgerald saved a great many of his working materials - notes, diagrams, holographs, typescripts, proofs and correspondence - making it possible to reconstruct in detail the passage of Tender Is the Night from manuscript to print. The Cambridge edition follows the order of the first edition; it includes a history of composition, an analysis of Fitzgerald's plan for republication and an explanation of the chronology of the narrative. The edition also contains full historical annotations, facsimiles of surviving drafts and a record of emendations.

The twenty short stories in A Change of Class were published by F. Scott Fitzgerald between September 1931 and March 1937. Fitzgerald wrote these stories for money, which he badly needed. His wife was being treated at expensive sanitariums and he was heavily in debt to his publisher and literary agent. The stories in A Change of Class are not all among Fitzgerald's best, but they are important in his career. They concern the Great Depression, social striving, class divisions, and professionalism. Several are set in the world of medicine and depict the lives of doctors, nurses, and their patients. The writing is strong, with vivid descriptions and sharp dialogue. A Change of Class provides freshly edited texts, based on surviving manuscripts and typescripts. Important readings, edited out or censored by magazine publishers, have been restored. The volume includes facsimiles, historical annotations, and a full record of emendation.

Twice during the last decade of his life, in 1934 and 1936, F. Scott Fitzgerald proposed a collection of his personal essays to Maxwell Perkins, his editor at Charles Scribner's Sons. Perkins was unenthusiastic on both occasions, and Fitzgerald died in 1940 without having put his best essays between hard covers. Fortunately Fitzgerald left behind a table of contents, and with this list as a guide it has been possible to publish here the collection that he envisioned, under the title My Lost City. This volume also includes several of Fitzgerald's autobiographical writings. My Lost City, like the other volumes in the Cambridge Edition, provides accurate texts based on Fitzgerald's surviving manuscripts and typescripts. Words and passages cut by magazine editors have been restored to several of the essays. A textual apparatus has been included, along with full explanatory notes identifying people, places, books, historical events, and other details.

F. Scott Fitzgerald's Taps at Reveille is one of the author's strongest collections of short fiction. It brings together several of his best stories from the late 1920s and early 1930s, including 'Crazy Sunday', and 'Babylon Revisited', a story considered by many to be his masterpiece in the genre. Fitzgerald assembled the collection in a time of debt and personal difficulty, working with texts that had, in many cases, been censored by the Saturday Evening Post and other magazines. Using evidence from the drafts that bear Fitzgerald's final revisions, this edition presents for the first time restored texts of the stories, with censored material reinstated and sexual innuendo as Fitzgerald originally intended. This volume offers as well an extended historical introduction, explanatory notes, textual apparatus, and, in an appendix, 'Thank You for the Light', a vignette recently discovered among Fitzgerald's literary remains and published for the first time in 2012.

Last Kiss brings together some of the most interesting and idiosyncratic of F. Scott Fitzgerald's writings from throughout his career. Included in this volume are Fitzgerald's Thoughtbook, a revealing adolescent diary; an amusing self-interview, written in the early days of his initial fame; The Vegetable, his only published play; the five poems that he published after becoming a full-time author; twelve early book reviews, published between 1921 and 1923; seven short stories from the last decade of his career; seventeen public letters; six items of journalism, four of which attempt to explain the 'flapper' phenomenon; and unusual miscellaneous pieces. The texts, many of which are based on surviving manuscripts and typescripts, are fully annotated and are supported by an apparatus that records all emendations and editorial adjustments.

This eighteenth and final volume in the Cambridge Edition of the Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald is a variorum edition of The Great Gatsby (1925), the author's masterpiece. The variorum text is based on multiple witnesses including the extant holograph of the novel and Fitzgerald's revised galley proofs; the first edition and later impressions from the first-edition plates; and importantly, Fitzgerald's personal copy of the novel, which bears corrections and revisions in his hand. This edition removes instances of over-correction in later editions of the novel, where there are numerous examples of textual corruption, thus giving control of the text back to Fitzgerald. This critical edition includes an introduction, tracing the history of the novel, an emended text, emendation tables, Fitzgerald's 1935 introduction, and fourteen illustrations. Historical annotations provide identifications of persons, places, events, popular songs, and literary works - all now made available to readers, teachers, critics, and scholars.

This volume brings together three series of short stories by F. Scott Fitzgerald - the Basil Duke Lee stories of 1928-29, the Josephine Perry stories of 1930-31, and the Gwen Bowers stories of 1936. The texts published here are based on surviving typescripts that preserve Fitzgerald's final revisions for their first publication in the Saturday Evening Post. Collations have revealed cuts and revisions by the Post editors aimed at removing profanity and blasphemy, sexual innuendo, real names of people and places, and references to racial prejudice. These passages have been restored to the Cambridge texts. This volume includes a scholarly introduction, a record of variants, facsimiles and other illustrations, and an appendix that presents early endings for the stories 'The Captured Shadow' and 'Basil and Cleopatra'. Full historical notes identify popular songs, sports heroes, literary works, Broadway shows, and sources for the stories.

This first edition ever published of Trimalchio, an early and complete version of F. Scott Fitzgerald's classic novel The Great Gatsby now appears in paperback. Fitzgerald wrote the novel as Trimalchio and submitted it to Maxwell Perkins, his editor at Scribner's, who had the novel set in type and the galleys sent to Fitzgerald in France. Fitzgerald then virtually rewrote the novel in galleys, producing the book we know as The Great Gatsby. This ur-version, Trimalchio, has never been published and is markedly different from The Great Gatsby: two chapters were completely rewritten for the published novel, and the rest of the book was heavily revised. Characterization is different, the narrative voice of Nick Carraway is altered and, most importantly, the revelation of Jay Gatsby's past is handled in a wholly different way.

This book examines literary authorship in the twentieth century and covers such topics as publishing, book distribution, the trade editor, the literary agent, the magazine market, subsidiary rights, and the blockbuster mentality.

Dreiser's careful preservation of his papers bears new fruit with the publication of his personal diaries for the years 1902-26. This volume presents all seven of Dreiser's hitherto unpublished American diaries, the intermittent journals he kept during the most productive years of his literary career. Together they constitute a revealing self-portrait as well as a valuable commentary on the American scene during the first quarter of the twentieth century. They offer reflections on turn-of-the-century Philadelphia, the American South and Mid-West, Greenwich Village of the nineteen-teens, and Hollywood of the twenties. The diaries begin in 1902, when Dreiser was at a low point after the "suppression" of Sister Carrie, and continue until 1926, when he was enjoying the greatest success of his career with An American Tragedy.This publication constitutes in its entirety a new source for biographical and critical study. This is particularly true of the diaries covering Dreiser's experience in Philadelphia, Greenwich Village, and with Helen Richardson-all of which were not available to previous biographers. The present Introduction by Professor Riggio is the first biographical narrative to make use of these materials. Future biographers will now be able to speak with more assurance of Dreiser's whereabouts, the people he knew, what he was reading, which writings were in progress, and of his fascinating private affairs in general. In addition, these diaries will be of interest to students of Dreiser's literary art, as they reveal subtle aspects of how Dreiser viewed the external world and transmuted it in his daily creative efforts.

This book examines literary authorship in the twentieth century and covers such topics as publishing, book distribution, the trade editor, the literary agent, the magazine market, subsidiary rights, and the blockbuster mentality.

In 1992 the University of Pennsylvania Press published a new edition of Theodore Dreiser's second novel, Jennie Gerhardt. The original published text was altered significantly from the author's intentions: its sexual energy was short-circuited, its criticisms of organized religion were blunted, its language was smoothed and sentimentalized, and, most important, Jennie Gerhardt was reduced to a less thoughtful, less womanly character. The restored edition brings back the sexual charge, reinstates the social and religious criticism, and makes the language Dreiser's again.This volume brings together 19 fresh readings, together with an introduction, of the Pennsylvania edition by three generations of Dreiser critics. The volume includes general assessments, analysis of main characters, treatments of the autobiographical roots of the narrative, views of various traditions (realistic, sentimental, ethnic) on which Dreiser drew, and investigations of historical contexts that inform his story.

The Sister Carrie edition that was published in 1900, long regarded as a watershed work in American fiction, was actually a censored misrepresentation of Drieser's original story. When, 80 years later, the Pennsylvania Edition first appeared, replete with scholarly apparatus, it was hailed from coast to coast as a literary event of major importance. The Pennsylvania Edition restored the 36,000 words that had been excised at the insistence of the author's wife, his publisher, and a friend.This edition contains the complete, unexpurgated text, without the scholarly apparatus, plus a new introductory essay by Thomas P. Riggio.

Regarded as one of Dreiser's best novels, Jennie Gerhardt is here recaptured as it was originally written, restoring it to its complete, unexpurgated form.

Hidden under layers of error and corruption, the original version of Sister Carrie has finally emerged. The American classic that has been read in English courses for many decades is not the text as Dreiser wrote it. Even before it was submitted to Doubleday, Page and Company, the manuscript of Sister Carrie had been cut and censored. Dreiser's wife Sara-­-nicknamed "Jug"-and his friend Arthur Henry persuaded the author to make many changes. Both Jug and Henry felt that the novel was too bleak, the sexuality too explicit, the philosophy too intense.In a description of Carrie, for instance, Dreiser had written, "Her dresses draped her becomingly, for she wore excellent corsets and laced herself with care. . . . She had always been of cleanly instincts and now that opportunity afforded, she kept her body sweet." Apparently this passage was too intimate for Jug, for she revised it to: "Her dresses draped her becomingly. . . . She had always been of cleanly instincts. Her teeth were white, her nails rosy." Jug and Henry urged Dreiser to make his bleak ending more equivocal. He changed it, but Jug, still dissatisfied, rewrote his second ending. Her version was published with the first edition and has appeared with every edition since printed. Doubleday, Page and Company further insisted that all real names-of theaters, bars, streets, actors, etc.-be changed to fictitious ones.The editors of this new edition have gone back to the original handwritten manuscript as well as to the typescript that went to the publisher and have restored the text of Sister Carrie to its original purity. Errors of typists and printers have been corrected; cut and censored passages have been reinstated. Not only have original names been restored, but the Pennsylvania edition includes maps, illustrations, and historical notes that further identify these people and places. The edition also includes a selected textual apparatus for the scholar. The characters are significantly altered in this new text: Carrie has more emotional depth, conscience, and sexuality; Hurstwood shows more passion; Drouet is a bit less likable; Ames is a bit more vulnerable. With the inclusion of the original ending, Dreiser's vision becomes- more bleak and deterministic: In its expanded and purified form, Sister Carrie is more tragic and infinitely richer; in effect it is a new work of art by one of the major American novelists of this century.

"To write it took three months; to conceive it-three minutes; to collect the data in it-all my life." So said F. Scott Fitzgerald regarding This Side of Paradise, the novel he began writing in November 1917 and published on March 26, 1920. This Side of Paradise launched Fitzgerald as the "Prophet of the Jazz Age" and the spokesman for his generation. It is still one of the major reasons for his fame today.The story of how Fitzgerald wrote and published the book is fascinating. In The Making of "This Side of Paradise", James West studies the inception, composition, publication, and textual history of the novel. He traces its growth from its earliest version, entitled "The Romantic Egotist," to its final published form.Based on preserved documentary evidence-fragments of "The Romantic Egotist," the manuscript of This Side of Paradise, surviving correspondence, and other papers-this volume blends the techniques of biographical, critical, and textual scholarship to tell the story of the making of the quintessential novel of the twenties.

This book is a volume in the Penn Press Anniversary Collection. To mark its 125th anniversary in 2015, the University of Pennsylvania Press rereleased more than 1,100 titles from Penn Press's distinguished backlist from 1899-1999 that had fallen out of print. Spanning an entire century, the Anniversary Collection offers peer-reviewed scholarship in a wide range of subject areas.

Theodore Dreiser's Russian Diary is an extended record of the American writer's travels throughout the Soviet Union in 1927-28. Dreiser was initially invited to Moscow for a week-long observance of the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution. He asked, and was granted, permission to make an extended tour of the country.This previously unpublished diary is a firsthand record of life in the USSR during the 1920s as seen by a leading American cultural figure. It is a valuable primary source, surely among the last from this period of modern history.

"For Dreiser, Jennie Gerhardt was a good career move. Now, with this Pennsylvania edition, we know that it is also a great novel."—New York Times

In 1992 the University of Pennsylvania Press published a new edition of Theodore Dreiser's second novel, Jennie Gerhardt. The original published text was altered significantly from the author's intentions: its sexual energy was short-circuited, its criticisms of organized religion were blunted, its language was smoothed and sentimentalized, and, most important, Jennie Gerhardt was reduced to a less thoughtful, less womanly character. The restored edition brings back the sexual charge, reinstates the social and religious criticism, and makes the language Dreiser's again.This volume brings together 19 fresh readings, together with an introduction, of the Pennsylvania edition by three generations of Dreiser critics. The volume includes general assessments, analysis of main characters, treatments of the autobiographical roots of the narrative, views of various traditions (realistic, sentimental, ethnic) on which Dreiser drew, and investigations of historical contexts that inform his story.

The Sister Carrie edition that was published in 1900, long regarded as a watershed work in American fiction, was actually a censored misrepresentation of Drieser's original story. When, 80 years later, the Pennsylvania Edition first appeared, replete with scholarly apparatus, it was hailed from coast to coast as a literary event of major importance. The Pennsylvania Edition restored the 36,000 words that had been excised at the insistence of the author's wife, his publisher, and a friend.This edition contains the complete, unexpurgated text, without the scholarly apparatus, plus a new introductory essay by Thomas P. Riggio.

Theodore Dreiser's Russian Diary is an extended record of the American writer's travels throughout the Soviet Union in 1927-28. Dreiser was initially invited to Moscow for a week-long observance of the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution. He asked, and was granted, permission to make an extended tour of the country.This previously unpublished diary is a firsthand record of life in the USSR during the 1920s as seen by a leading American cultural figure. It is a valuable primary source, surely among the last from this period of modern history.