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This Side of Paradise

Lot 51
28.09.2023 13:00UTC +00:00
Classic
Sold
£ 25 200
AuctioneerCHRISTIE'S
Event locationUnited Kingdom, London
Buyer Premiumsee on Website%
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ID 1016351
Lot 51 | This Side of Paradise
Estimate value
£ 15 000 – 25 000
This Side of Paradise

F. Scott Fitzgerald

FITZGERALD, F. Scott (1896-1940). This Side of Paradise. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1920.



Fitzgerald’s first novel: presentation copy of the first edition, seventh printing, inscribed by the author and with an autograph letter tipped in. The recipient was Irish author Shane Leslie (1885-1971), who played a pivotal role in the novel being published, firstly by reading through its earliest drafts (when it was still titled ‘The Romantic Egoist’) and then by recommending it to his publisher Scribner’s, alongside a note in which he compares its author to Rupert Brooke. The two men were introduced by Father Sigourney Fay, a trustee of Fitzgerald’s Catholic boarding school in New Jersey, and the present work’s dedicatee. Leslie was subsequently honoured by Fitzgerald as a dedicatee of his second novel, The Beautiful and Damned (1922). A further inscription records the presentation of the volume from Leslie to Margaret Turnbull of Towson, Maryland, from whom Fitzgerald rented a home between May 1932 and November 1933. Its solitude offered the author a more conducive environment to work than his previous residence at Ellerslie and it was during this important period that Fitzgerald was able to complete his second masterpiece, Tender is the Night. Bruccoli A5.1.g.



Octavo. (A few marginal marks.) Original linen-grain green cloth, titled in blind to front board, spine lettered in gilt (a few faint marks, spine a little dulled, spine ends and corners a trifle pushed); original pictorial dust-jacket (dampstain to front panel and spine just encroaching into lower panel, short tear along one fold, a few small tears with minor chips at corners, chip just into Scribner’s seal on lower panel). Provenance: ‘For Shane Leslie / with apologies that this is / not the 1st edition / F. Scott Fitzgerald’ (authorial presentation inscription on front free endpaper, to): – Shane Leslie (1885-1971; bookplate on front pastedown, annotations to dedication leaf and pages 171, 173, and 265, and inscription on front free endpaper, dated 1958, presenting the volume to): – Margaret Turnbull.



[With, tipped into the volume:]



Autograph letter signed (‘F. Scott Fitzgerald’) to [Shane] Leslie, 38 W 59th St, New York, 16 November 1920.

1½ pages, 280 x 191mm, laid in (blank lower margin removed from f.2, a few tears at right margin of f.1, some minor paste-stains and creases).



On Father Cyril Sigourney Fay, the dedicatee and inspiration for Monsignor Darcy in This Side of Paradise. Fitzgerald opens by thanking Leslie for an article about Fay: ‘It seems a pity that something even more exhaustive can’t be written about Dr Fay. He always told me to save his letters’, although these were fewer than Fay had thought, so in including three of them in the book, Fitzgerald was obliged to augment them with ‘memories of remarks he’d made to me plus even a few things I thought he might have said’. Fitzgerald apologises ‘most humbly’ for transcribing the whole description of Darcy’s funeral from a letter by Leslie (presumably about Fay’s): ‘I think the influences of your style on me are traceable in various other portions of the book’. The letter concludes with a bitter reflection on the hostile reception given to this work and to the short story ‘Benediction’ by the ‘American Catholic Intelligentsia’: ‘I met Fr Hemmick in the Biltmore and he looked at me as tho he saw the horns already sprouting … It seems that an Englishman like Benson can write anything but an American had better have his works either pious tracts for nuns or else disassociate them from the church as a living issue’.



[Sold with:] first edition, second printing: (a few faint marginal marks), original linen-grain green cloth, titled in blind to front board, spine lettered in gilt (spine lettering dull, a few minor marks, lacking the dust-jacket). Provenance: Shane Leslie (inscription on front pastedown and front free endpaper, dated Christmas 1920, presenting the volume to a ‘Monsignor Barnes’). A5.1.b.

Address of auction CHRISTIE'S
8 King Street, St. James's
SW1Y 6QT London
United Kingdom
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28.09.2023 – 28.09.2023
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