The Paris Review

• In a note to Fitzgerald, Hemingway shows he was better at being aggressive than passive-aggressive. 
• The Nation has launched eBookNation, which will feature digital versions of both new work and items from the archive (dating back to 1865!).
• Notting Hill Editions has announced  the William Hazlitt Essay Prize for nonfiction writing. 
• “Leipzigers read so much, the city’s nickname was ‘Leserland,’ or Readerland. And it does feel, immediately, like a city of bookish cyclists.” Alexander Chee on culture clash. 

Even if, like some of us, you already have Great Gatsby fatigue, you can enjoy playing with this (raven-haired) F. Scott Fitzgerald doll. Send him and Zelda out on the town. Let Hemingway insult him in a rental car. Send him to the south with the Murphys (although you’ll have to use a Barbie and Ken or someone to play them). Bring him to the movies and let him weep into his tiny martini as you watch Baz Luhrmann’s extravaganza.

“Reserving judgements is a matter of infinite hope.” —F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, published on this day in 1925

Conway Farms Golf Club, Lake Forest, IL.

We’re out this week, but we’re re-posting some of our favorite pieces from 2012 while we’re away. We hope you enjoy—and have a happy New Year!

In a 1940 letter to his daughter written six months before his death, F. Scott Fitzgerald said, “Once I thought that Lake Forest was the most glamorous place in the world. Maybe it was.” Sixty-six years later, as I drove through the Illinois suburb that sits thirty-two miles north of the heart of Chicago’s Loop, I kept looking around and wondering to myself what exactly it was that Fitzgerald found so great. I thought about him as I drank a coffee at a Starbucks that wasn’t there the last time I’d visited, and I noticed that the McDonald’s drive-through near the Metra train station seemed to be buzzing. All the suburban trappings I recalled from a childhood spent on the North Shore of Chicago were still there. To me, Lake Forest was a place I’d gotten to know by peeking through frosted car windows on my way to early morning hockey practice as a kid. Cozy, definitely, but not exactly the sort of place I associate with the Roaring Twenties decadence and wild parties conjured by Fitzgerald’s name.

Founded in 1861, Lake Forest, Illinois, was originally built as a college town by Presbyterians. After the Civil War, the city attracted residents whose last names were synonymous with the building (and a decade later, the post–Great Fire rebuilding) of Chicago. Thanks to its tranquility and natural beauty, as well as its isolation from main roads, Lake Forest became the Chicago metropolitan area’s most desirable neighborhood, attracting Rockefellers, Armours, Medills, and Marshall Fields. Lake Forest was the Greenwich of the Midwest: a haven for robber barons and meat packers far from the strikes, riots, and muckrakers that threatened the wealth and safety of the early twentieth century’s 1 percent. By the city’s 150th anniversary, in 2011, Lake Forest had served as the setting for a best-selling novel (A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, by native son Dave Eggers) and Oscar-winning film (Robert Redford’s Ordinary People). But the city’s first true claim to literary fame came in 1925, as a passing mention in the first chapter of The Great Gatsby, in which we learn from narrator Nick Carraway that Tom Buchanan has bought a string of polo ponies from Lake Forest. Carraway is amazed that a man of his own generation is wealthy enough to have done so.

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