A Princeton undergraduate of enormous vanity and some talent goes through the war, several girls and the remains of an inheritance, and ends by knowing himself and very little else. Fitzgerald rewrote it in his parents' house in St Paul after Scribner's had turned down two earlier versions; it appeared when he was twenty-three, sold out in three days, and got him Zelda. Sixty plates of American painting, from Childe Hassam to Mary Cassatt, catch the same youthful faces, rainy streets and bright hats that surround Amory's long education.
