On Tuesday, Sept. 23, the English Department hosted a talk titled “F. Scott Fitzgerald: Carleton Connections” by Lloyd McBride Professor of English and Environmental Studies Michael Kowalewski. The talk was held in celebration of the centennial of Fitzgerald’s best-known novel The Great Gatsby and focused on the “fascinating, little-known links between Carleton and F. Scott Fitzgerald,” as the invitation shared by the English Department stated.
“I was really interested to know how our school was connected to such an important figure of American literature,” said Defne Arat ’27, an English major who attended the talk, when asked why she decided to attend.
“I’ve been teaching classes [about Fitzgerald] for the last time this last couple of years,” said Kowalewski, referring to his course ENGL 332: Faulkner, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald, which he taught for the last time in Spring 2024.
“Scholarly talks [such as Kowalewski’s] are crucial at a small college for publicly modeling and enacting for the gathered community the responsible and illuminating work of the scholar, whose hard-won insights can make obscure and unexpected things a notch clearer, more accurate, or even present to us at all,” said Professor and English Department Chair Peter Balaam.
The main purpose of the talk was to share two central and obscure connections between Carleton and Fitzgerald. During the talk, Kowalewski began by speaking about Fitzgerald’s early life in Minnesota.
“Perhaps because his better known works were set in the East Coast and Europe, people forget that Fitzgerald was a Minnesota boy,” said Kowalewski in the talk, emphasizing that many of his characters are associated with the Midwest or Minnesota.
“Although Jay Gatsby went to St. Olaf (for two weeks), Carleton had far more to do with his creator’s life and reputation,” the event’s brochure said, alluding to the best known connection between Fitzgerald and Northfield.
“Lots of readers have gotten a kick out of the fact that Fitzgerald’s protagonist of “The Great Gatsby” spent two weeks at St Olaf as a callow youth before dropping out,” said Balaam. “But Mike argued that there are other Northfield, Minnesota connections to the book and its writer, and that these run through Carleton, not St Olaf.”
These connections came as a surprise to the talk’s attendees.
“Apparently Fitzgerald was delivered by a Carleton graduate who was a doctor in the 1880s,” said Selina Lu ’28, a prospective English major who attended the talk.
Kowalewski introduced Benjamin Harvey Ogden, a Carleton graduate of the Class of 1881, who became an obstetrician and helped deliver Fitzgerald in St. Paul in 1894.
“Without Carleton and Benjamin Ogden, there might not have been an F. Scott Fitzgerald,” Kowalewski said.
Kowalewski then focused on Fitzgerald’s years as a young writer and the publication of “The Great Gatsby” in 1925, which sold a little over 20,000 copies — a stark contrast to his earlier novels “This Side of Paradise” and “The Beautiful and the Damned” which were instant bestsellers during the early 1920s.
“Fitzgerald both invented and critiqued the notion of the ‘American Dream’ before others even knew how to describe it,” Kowalewski said during the talk, but stressed that Fitzgerald’s work became less popular and forgotten during his lifetime.
“He died in Hollywood at the age of 44 thinking he had been a failure as a writer,” said Kowalewski.
Kowalewski then set out to answer how “The Great Gatsby” became an “uber-classic, assigned and read by millions of high school and college students.”
To answer this question, Kowalewski then [spoke about] Arthur Mizener, a professor of English at Carleton during the 1940s and early 1950s, who published the first biography of Fitzgerald titled “The Far Side of Paradise” in 1951, 11 years after Fitzgerald’s death. The book was a New York Times bestseller. After publishing the book, Mizener joined Cornell University’s English department, but his work still contributed to the renowned character of Carleton English’s department.
“The 1940s and 1950s were the golden years of the Carleton English department,” said Kowalewski. “A lot of people do not know that our English department had a national character and faculty were being nominated for national book prizes.”
“Not only did a Carl bring F. Scott Fitzgerald into the world, but the Carleton English department played a significant role in the renewed significance of Fitzgerald’s work that remains today,” said Kowalewski.
Additionally, after the talk, attendees were able to view the original first edition of “The Great Gatsby,” along with an Armed Services Edition version of the book and Mizener’s biography.
“The past is a foreign country,” said Kowalewski during the talk. “It takes a real effort of historical imagination to understand things happening in the past.”
“Trying to get people to inhabit a historical people and try to sense the immediacy of it is really hard, and I think that the Special Collections and looking at actual first editions really helps give texture to the past, to help people imagine what it would have been like to just see a novel in a bookstore called “The Great Gatsby” back in the 20s,” said Kowalewski.
Students and other attendees observed the first edition of Fitzgerald’s novel which is housed in the Laurence McKinley Gould Library Special Collections.
“I’ve been in touch with somebody from the Minneapolis Institute of Art who said we may have the only first edition in Minnesota,” said Kowalewski.
“It was so interesting to see the first edition book, with the iconic original jacket,” said Arat. “I felt like I was looking at a piece of literary gold.”
“I learned that there’s a typo on the back of that book, a “j” that’s supposed to be capitalized that was lowercase,” said Lu.
Kowalewski hopes that students who attended the talk and viewed the books will feel inspired to revisit Fitzgerald’s work through the frame of the Carleton connections.
“I hope they care about the novel a little bit more and take an interest in Fitzgerald just because of that local kind of connection,” Kowalewski said.