{"product_id":"the-perfect-hour-isbn-9780812973273","title":"The Perfect Hour","description":"In The Perfect Hour, biographer James L. W. West III reveals the never-before told story of the romance between F. Scott Fitzgerald and his first love, Ginevra King. They met in January 1915, when Scott was nineteen, a Princeton student, and sixteen-year-old Ginevra, socially poised and confident, was a sophomore at Westover School. Their romance flourished in heartfelt letters and quickly ran its course–but Scott never forgot it. Ginevra became the inspiration for Isabelle Borgé in This Side of Paradise and the model for Daisy Buchanan in The Great Gatsby. Scott also wrote short stories inspired by her–including “Babes in the Woods” and “Winter Dreams,” which, along with Ginevra’s own story featuring Scott are reprinted in this volume. With access to Ginevra’s personal diary, love letters, photographs, and Scott’s own scrapbook, West tells the beguiling story of youthful passion that shaped Scott Fitzgerald’s life as a writer.\u003cbr\u003eFor Scott and Ginevra, “the perfect hour” was private code for a fleeting time they almost shared and then yearned after for the rest of their lives. Now West brings that perfect hour back to life in all its freshness, delicacy, and poignant brevity.“Transporting . . . a poignant, captivating book.”\u003cbr\u003e–Janet Maslin, The New York Times\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“A fascinating portrait not only of a first love, but of how a writer used the unspoiled memories of youthful idealism and bittersweet emotion to fuel his career.”\u003cbr\u003e–Entertainment Weekly\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“What is remarkable, as West conveys superbly, are the varied literary forms in which King would surface in Fitzgerald’s fiction.”\u003cbr\u003e–Chicago Tribune\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“[A] charming account . . . a must-read for Fitzgerald aficionados and literature lovers.”\u003cbr\u003e–Booklist\u003cb\u003eJAMES L.W. WEST III\u003c\/b\u003e is Sparks Professor of English at Pennsylvania State University. He has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Humanities Center, and the National Endowment for the Humanities, and has been a Fulbright scholar to England and Belgium. He is the author of \u003ci\u003eWilliam Styron: A Life\u003c\/i\u003e and is general editor of the Cambridge Edition of the Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald.Chapter 1\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eGinevra and Scott\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eGinevra King was the eldest of the three daughters of Charles Garfield  King, a wealthy Chicago stockbroker, and Ginevra Fuller King, his wife.  There was money on both sides of the family, earned by Ginevra’s  grandfathers, both of whom were self-made men. Her paternal  grandfather, Charles Bohan King, had come to Chicago from upstate New  York in 1863. At first he worked as a wholesale grocer, then as a  jobber in hats, caps, and furs. He eventually moved into banking and  prospered, retiring in 1885 as president of the Commercial Safe Deposit  Co. He was a Republican and a Presbyterian; he sent his older son,  Rockwell King, to Harvard and his younger son (Ginevra’s father) to  Yale.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eGinevra’s maternal grandfather, William Alden Fuller, was a native of  Massachusetts. He began his working life in 1852 as a station agent for  the Worcester \u0026amp; Nashua Railroad; in 1854 he came to Chicago and entered  the lumber trade as a bookkeeper. Twelve years later, with backing from  Potter Palmer, the dry goods magnate, he struck out as a dealer in  building materials. He formed the corporation of Palmer, Fuller \u0026amp; Co.;  the business was a success, and he became wealthy during the commercial  boom that followed the Civil War. He belonged to the Episcopal Church  and the Union League. Ginevra, as a teenager, knew him as a widower who  lived in a large house at 2913 Michigan Avenue.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eGinevra’s mother and father had married in January 1898, four years  after he had taken his degree at Yale. When he wed Ginevra Fuller,  Charles King was still a mortgage banker at Shanklin \u0026amp; King, a business  backed by his father’s money, but in 1900, when Ginevra turned two, he  began working on the side as a stockbroker. In 1906 he became a  full-time broker, organizing the firm of King, Farnum \u0026amp; Co., of which  he was senior member. The brokerage prospered, operating from seats on  both the Chicago and the New York exchanges. He and his wife and  children were still living with her father in the house on Michigan  Avenue when Ginevra met Scott, but Charles King had already acquired a  large summer residence (which he called “Kingdom Come Farm”) in Lake  Forest, and he was building an elegant four-story mansion in the city  at the corner of Astor and Burton.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eCharles King and his wife belonged to Onwentsia, an exclusive country  club in Lake Forest, where he played golf and polo. He built his own  string of polo ponies, which he stabled on his Lake Forest property,  and he played for the club in competitions against other teams during  the 1890s and early 1900s. The Kings socialized with the other  prominent families in Chicago—the Swifts, Armours, Cudahys, Palmers,  McCormicks, and Chatfield-Taylors. The children of these families went  to schools and churches together and played with one another in Lake  Forest during the summers. Their parents sent them to fashionable New  England prep schools; the sons usually stayed in the East to attend  Harvard or Yale. This was a tightly knit community: its members were  held together by money, property, shared values, and high social  status.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe Chicago of the early twentieth century, their Chicago, had been  defined by three important events in the last third of the nineteenth  century: the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, the Haymarket Square Bombing  of 1886, and the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893. The fire had  destroyed the old city, a prosperous but poorly laid-out center of  railroading, meatpacking, and shipping, and had given Chicago’s  entrepreneurs an opportunity to erect a modern metropolis, with a  transportation loop and with some of the world’s first skyscrapers. The  Haymarket Square Bombing and the riots that followed had set unions and  laborers against capitalists in bitter conflicts that lasted well into  the twentieth century. Most of the workers were immigrants (many were  Irish), and virtually all of them belonged to the Catholic Church,  which was thought to have fomented much of the labor agitation. The  Columbian Exposition with its famous “White City”—a collection of  fanciful, alabaster-colored buildings covering forty-four square  acres—was an announcement to the world that Chicago had arrived. The  exposition featured an Electricity Building, a Ferris wheel, a  reproduction of one of Columbus’s ships, a prototype of the movie  projector, and a sixty-foot cannon that could fire a shell over sixteen  miles. More than twenty-seven million people came to Chicago to visit  this exposition; most of them went away convinced that the city was a  wonderful example of American hustle, ambition, and commercial power.  This was the city in which Ginevra King’s family, and other families of  the Chicago haute bourgeoisie, were prospering.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eGinevra was the third woman in her family to bear that given name.*  Like her mother and grandmother, she was named for Ginevra de Benci,  the pensive young Florentine noblewoman of Leonardo da Vinci’s famous  portrait, painted in 1474 and familiar to nineteenth-century art  students and connoisseurs from etchings and oil reproductions.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eGinevra King had a clear sense of her family’s wealth and position and,  from an early age, a highly developed understanding of how social  status worked. During the summer of 1914, in an act of arrogance that  could probably only be managed by a group of pretty fifteen-year-old  girls, Ginevra and three of her friends had declared themselves to be  the “Big Four”—the four most attractive and socially desirable young  women in Chicago. They had not consulted anyone about this; they had  simply anointed themselves. The other three girls were Edith Cummings,  Courtney Letts, and Margaret (“Peg”) Carry. The girls had four  identical pinky rings made of rose gold; engraved inside each ring, in  script letters, was “The Big Four 1914.” (Ginevra’s ring can be seen on  her right hand, next to a signet ring, in the frontispiece of this  book.) The girls went to dances and house parties together, and they  were seen as a foursome on the golf links and tennis courts at  Onwentsia. If other girls were jealous, Ginevra and her three friends  did not care. The Big Four was complete; it would admit no further  members.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eGinevra herself was lovely. She was small, about five feet four inches  in height, with refined features and a good profile. She had a slim  figure, pretty legs and ankles, and small, graceful hands. Her hair was  dark and curly; her eyes, deep brown in color, were lively and  sparkling. Ginevra’s voice was her most unusual attribute—low and  expressive, with a slight roughness of texture. She liked to sing and  laugh: if something truly amused her she would produce a snort. She  loved parties, adored dancing, and was adept in social situations,  relying on her looks and instincts to see her through.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eGinevra’s diary reveals other things about her. She was intensely  competitive and did not like to lose at anything—golf, tennis, or even  basketball (for which she was undersized). She loved athletics and was  a good enough golfer to hold her own against Edith Cummings, who later  won two national titles in the sport. Ginevra was reasonably diligent  about her schoolwork but wasn’t terribly interested in it. She  preferred athletics and parties, and she liked to sit up late talking  with her friends. She was direct in speech and self-confident in  behavior; there was little that was studied or calculated about what  she did or said. She was not especially interested in discussing the  shortcomings of others and was not much inclined toward introspection  or self-analysis.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhen Scott Fitzgerald met her, Ginevra was halfway through her  sophomore year at Westover School in Middlebury, Connecticut. Westover,  a country boarding school, was a relatively new institution. It had  been founded in 1910 by Miss Mary Robbins Hillard and her associate  Miss Theodate Pope. Miss Hillard had taught from 1885–91 at Miss  Porter’s School in Farmington, Connecticut (where Miss Pope had been  her student), and had been principal of St. Margaret’s in Waterbury for  the eighteen years following.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWestover was a small, exclusive finishing school: about 150 girls were  enrolled, and their training was focused on languages, literature,  history, art, and music. Occasionally Miss Hillard would read aloud  from the newspaper to the girls at assembly, but otherwise the outside  world did not intrude. Only five or six of the forty or so graduates  each year went on to college. Most of the girls were destined to be the  wives of wealthy men; they would find fulfillment in social activities,  in child-rearing, and, if they wished to, in helping the needy. This  was a point much stressed at Westover; the girls were given a strong  sense of social responsibility and American-style noblesse oblige.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAccommodations at Westover were relatively spartan; the emphasis was on  character-building. The girls were required to take daily exercise,  either in sports or in “jogging,” a rapid trotting that was encouraged  in the afternoons. Westover had no religious affiliation; most of the  students belonged to Protestant denominations and attended churches in  Middlebury. Much energy went into singing, plays, picnics, and  single-sex dances, which were called “Germans” and were held each  Saturday night. Girls attended these dances as couples; crushes between  younger and older girls were common.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe dormitory rooms were large and commodious. Maids (all from Trinidad  and the Virgin Islands) looked after the laundry and housekeeping  chores. Girls often spent the night with one another and stayed awake  after lights-out to gossip and talk. Uniforms were required: a khaki  skirt with a black patent-leather belt and a white blouse during the  day; a white dress with black silk stockings and low-heeled shoes in  the evenings. For sports the girls wore black alpaca bloomers, thick  black stockings, and Peter Pan blouses. On the coldest days, corduroy  deerstalker hats were issued, with flaps to keep one’s ears warm. As  for cosmetics, only a little face powder was permitted—no lip rouge.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eGinevra did not much like Westover. She was not truly unhappy there,  but the close supervision of her academic performance and her behavior  seems to have rankled her. She had no special aspirations to excel in  her classes; she studied with fair diligence and maintained a B  average, but much of the assigned work bored her. The fun outside  classes at Westover was not really to her taste. She would have  preferred more opportunities to see other teenagers and to go into New  York City for plays and amusements. Ginevra had a disobedient streak:  she had managed to get herself crosswise with Miss Hillard, who  criticized her behavior and summoned her to the office from time to  time for lectures on deportment. It’s likely that Ginevra, who was as  strong-willed as Miss Hillard, rather enjoyed testing the school rules  and getting under the skin of its headmistress. Perhaps she told these  things to Scott Fitzgerald on the night she met him.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eF. Scott Fitzgerald was the only son of Edward Fitzgerald, a marginally  successful wholesale grocery salesman in St. Paul, and Mollie McQuillan  Fitzgerald, his wife. There was money in Scott’s family, but only on  his mother’s side and only in the previous generation. Mollie’s father,  Philip F. McQuillan, had immigrated to America in 1843, at the age of  nine, from County Fermanagh in Ireland. He and his parents had settled  in Galena, Illinois. His success story resembles the  “up-by-the-bootstraps” stories of Ginevra’s grandfathers. At the age of  twenty-three, Philip moved to St. Paul and took a position as a  bookkeeper with Beaupre \u0026amp; Temple, a wholesale grocery house. In 1858 he  ventured out on his own in the same business and prospered in the years  following the Civil War. Philip McQuillan merged his firm with that of  his former employer in 1875 to form McQuillan, Beaupre \u0026amp; Co. Philip was  an energetic man with considerable business acumen. He became a  respected citizen of St. Paul (a member of the “lace-curtain” Irish,  not the “pig-in-the-parlor” Irish) and a generous benefactor of the  local Catholic church.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003ePhilip, however, contracted Bright’s disease in his late thirties and  died in 1878 at the age of forty-four. He left an estate of more than  $266,000—a substantial amount at the time. It was enough to support his  widow, Louisa McQuillan, for the rest of her life and to keep their  children in relative comfort, even as adults. The money, however, did  not beget more money as it had in Ginevra’s family. The five surviving  McQuillan children seemed content to live on the proceeds of their  father’s estate.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMollie, the eldest daughter, married Edward Fitzgerald in 1890. Edward  was a small, dapper man who had moved to St. Paul in the mid-1870s from  Rockville, Maryland. He too was a Catholic, though not a devout one. He  was descended from Maryland ancestors who had settled in the colony  sometime during the seventeenth century. Edward was a “well-bred” man  with excellent Southern manners, but he was short on ambition and  business savvy.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eCertainly there were opportunities in St. Paul for him to be  successful. The city, situated at the navigational head of the  Mississippi River, was a prosperous center of commerce, manufacturing,  banking, railroading, and insurance. As the state capital, St. Paul  boasted handsome government buildings and large hotels, impressive  museums and restaurants and theaters. The chief drawback to life there  was the frigid winter weather, though St. Paul residents made the most  of it, building ice palaces and organizing winter carnivals to break up  the monotony of the long cold season.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn the early 1890s, shortly after marrying Mollie McQuillan, Edward  Fitzgerald organized the American Rattan \u0026amp; Willow Works, which  manufactured wicker furniture. This business (ill-suited, one would  think, to the Minnesota climate) failed in 1898. Edward moved with his  family to Buffalo, New York, where he took a job as a salesman for  Procter \u0026amp; Gamble. He was transferred by the company to Syracuse in  1900, then back to Buffalo in 1903; but in 1908, at the age of  fifty-five, he was cut loose permanently and had to return to St. Paul.  There he earned a small livelihood as a wholesale grocery salesman,  working from a desk in his brother-in-law’s real estate firm, making a  little money on his own but relying for support primarily on his wife’s  family. As a boy Scott often heard his mother say, “If it weren’t for  your Grandfather McQuillan, where would we be now?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMollie McQuillan Fitzgerald was a mildly eccentric woman who doted on  her son. Her first two children, both daughters, had died in infancy,  shortly before Scott’s birth in 1896, and she had focused much  attention on him when he was young. He had been named Francis Scott Key  Fitzgerald after the author of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” who was a  distant relative on his father’s side. Scott was a beautiful boy, with  blond hair and arrestingly bright blue-green eyes. He excelled in  school plays and at local dramatics, and he showed some literary  ability in his early teens, but he was a mediocre athlete and a  thoroughly indifferent student.[quote] --Janet Maslin, The New York Times","brand":"Random House Trade Paperbacks","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46301896868069,"sku":"NP9780812973273","price":20.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780812973273.jpg?v=1767740923","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/the-perfect-hour-isbn-9780812973273","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}