May 7, 2013 | 37 notes

Will the Real Great Gatsby Please Stand Up? As he was beginning to start work on the novel that would become The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald had written to his editor, Max Perkins, complaining that, at 27, he had dumped more of his personal experiences into his fiction than anyone else he knew of. This next novel, his new novel, would be different. “In my new novel I’m thrown directly on purely creative work,“ he wrote, “not trashy imaginings as in my stories but the sustained imagination of a sincere and yet radiant world.”  But as he wrote, he ended up drawing on the rowdy elegance of the Roaring Twenties milieu in which he lived to create that radiant world—and devotees have been trying to pin down his real-life inspirations ever since. - Continue reading at Smithsonian.com. Photo: © Warner Bros / courtesy Everett Collection / Everett Collection

Will the Real Great Gatsby Please Stand Up?

As he was beginning to start work on the novel that would become The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald had written to his editor, Max Perkins, complaining that, at 27, he had dumped more of his personal experiences into his fiction than anyone else he knew of. This next novel, his new novel, would be different. “In my new novel I’m thrown directly on purely creative work,“ he wrote, “not trashy imaginings as in my stories but the sustained imagination of a sincere and yet radiant world.” 

But as he wrote, he ended up drawing on the rowdy elegance of the Roaring Twenties milieu in which he lived to create that radiant world—and devotees have been trying to pin down his real-life inspirations ever since. - Continue reading at Smithsonian.com.

Photo: © Warner Bros / courtesy Everett Collection / Everett Collection

March 1, 2013 | 126 notes

The True-Life Horror That Inspired Moby DickThe whaler Essex was indeed sunk by a whale—and that’s only the beginning. In July of 1852, a 32-year-old novelist named Herman Melville had high hopes for his new novel, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, despite the book’s mixed reviews and tepid sales. That month he took a steamer to Nantucket for his first visit to the Massachusetts island, home port of his novel’s mythic protagonist, Captain Ahab, and his ship, the Pequod. Like a tourist, Melville met local dignitaries, dined out and took in the sights of the village he had previously only imagined. And on his last day on Nantucket he met the broken-down 60-year-old man who had captained the Essex, the ship that had been attacked and sunk by a sperm whale in an 1820 incident that had inspired Melville’s novel. Captain George Pollard Jr. was just 29 years old when the Essex went down, and he survived and returned to Nantucket to captain a second whaling ship, Two Brothers. But when that ship wrecked on a coral reef two years later, the captain was marked as unlucky at sea—a “Jonah”—and no owner would trust a ship to him again. Continue reading at Smithsonian.com. Illustration by A. Burnham Shute, 1892

The True-Life Horror That Inspired Moby Dick

The whaler Essex was indeed sunk by a whale—and that’s only the beginning.

In July of 1852, a 32-year-old novelist named Herman Melville had high hopes for his new novel, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, despite the book’s mixed reviews and tepid sales. That month he took a steamer to Nantucket for his first visit to the Massachusetts island, home port of his novel’s mythic protagonist, Captain Ahab, and his ship, the Pequod. Like a tourist, Melville met local dignitaries, dined out and took in the sights of the village he had previously only imagined.

And on his last day on Nantucket he met the broken-down 60-year-old man who had captained the Essex, the ship that had been attacked and sunk by a sperm whale in an 1820 incident that had inspired Melville’s novel. Captain George Pollard Jr. was just 29 years old when the Essex went down, and he survived and returned to Nantucket to captain a second whaling ship, Two Brothers. But when that ship wrecked on a coral reef two years later, the captain was marked as unlucky at sea—a “Jonah”—and no owner would trust a ship to him again. Continue reading at Smithsonian.com.

Illustration by A. Burnham Shute, 1892

October 31, 2012 | 22 notes

Lewis Lapham’s Antidote to the Age of BuzzFeed [Lewis] Lapham, the legendary former editor of Harper’s, who, beginning in the 1970s, helped change the face of American nonfiction, has a new mission: taking on the Great Paradox of the digital age. Suddenly, thanks to Google Books, JSTOR and the like, all the great thinkers of all civilizations past and present are one or two clicks away. The great library of Alexandria, nexss of all the learning of the ancient world that burned to the ground, has risen from the ashes online. And yet—here is the paradox—the wisdom of the ages is in some ways more distant and difficult to find than ever, buried like lost treasure beneath a fathomless ocean of online ignorance and trivia that makes what is worthy and timeless more inaccessible than ever. There has been no great librarian of Alexandria, no accessible finder’s guide, until Lapham created his quarterly five years ago with the quixotic mission of serving as a highly selective search engine for the wisdom of the past. - Continue reading at Smithsonian.com. Photo by: Neville Elder / Corbis Article by: Ron Rosenbaum

Lewis Lapham’s Antidote to the Age of BuzzFeed

[Lewis] Lapham, the legendary former editor of Harper’s, who, beginning in the 1970s, helped change the face of American nonfiction, has a new mission: taking on the Great Paradox of the digital age. Suddenly, thanks to Google Books, JSTOR and the like, all the great thinkers of all civilizations past and present are one or two clicks away. The great library of Alexandria, nexss of all the learning of the ancient world that burned to the ground, has risen from the ashes online. And yet—here is the paradox—the wisdom of the ages is in some ways more distant and difficult to find than ever, buried like lost treasure beneath a fathomless ocean of online ignorance and trivia that makes what is worthy and timeless more inaccessible than ever. There has been no great librarian of Alexandria, no accessible finder’s guide, until Lapham created his quarterly five years ago with the quixotic mission of serving as a highly selective search engine for the wisdom of the past. - Continue reading at Smithsonian.com.

Photo by: Neville Elder / Corbis

Article by: Ron Rosenbaum