Beschreibung:

[FITZGERALD, F. SCOTT] — WILLA CATHERMy Ántonia. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1918 8vo. Illustrations by W.T. Bendan; a few marginal pencil marks. Original brown cloth, cover and spine stamped in taupe, inscribed by Fitzgerald on the front free endpaper; extremities just rubbed, edges toned, upper joint starting. Lacking jacket. First edition, second state with illustrations printed on text paper, inscribed by Fitzgerald: "Dear Aunt A. | This is a rarely | beautiful book, I | think. Hope you'll | like it | Scott" This copy of My Ántonia was presumably given to Fitzgerald's maternal aunt, Annabel McQuillan. It was McQuillan who paid for him to attend the exclusive Newman School near Hackensack, New Jersey. It was during Fitzgerald's tenure at the Newman School that he began to pay more attention to his studies, publishing several stories in the student newspaper, and set his sights on Princeton University. Fitzgerald was greatly influenced by Willa Cather, consciously emulating her style and techniques, and prior to the publication of The Great Gatsby, he wrote to his literary idol, stating: "As one of your greatest admirers—an admirer particularly of My Ántonia, A Lost Lady, Paul's Case and Scandal I want to write and explain an instance of apparent plagiarism..." Fitzgerald had been concerned that a line in Gatsby echoed one of Cather's in A Lost Lady, though he had written his masterpiece before reading the latter. On 28 April 1925, Cather generously replied: "My dear Mr. Fitzgerald: I had read and hugely enjoyed your book before I got your letter, and I honestly had not thought of 'A Lost Lady' when I read that passage to which you now call my attention... I suppose everybody who has ever been swept away by personal charm tries in some way to express his wonder that the effect is so much greater than the cause,—and in the end we all fall back upon an old device and write about the effect and not the lovely creature who produced it. After all, the only thing one can tell about beauty, is just how hard one was hit by it. Isn’t that so?" Fitzgerald was greatly excited by this response, even waking Christian Gausse, a Dean at Princeton, at one o'clock in the morning to tell him of it. It is unclear when the present volume passed back into Fitzgerald's possession, but he gave it to Arthur Musgrave, along with others (see lots XXX) at some point in the 1930s, when the two men became friends. A remarkable association copy, linking two of American literature's most prolific figures PROVENANCE:Arthur Musgrave