When F. Scott Fitzgerald was fourteen and living in the Crocus Hill neighborhood of St. Paul, he began keeping a short diary of his exploits among his friends, friendly rivals, and crushes. He gave the journal a title page— Thoughtbook of Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald of St. Paul Minn. U.S.A. —and kept it securely locked in a box under his bed. He would later use The Thoughtbook as the basis for “The Book of Scandal” in his Basil Lee Duke stories, and brief sections were copied over the years for use by scholars and even published in Life magazine. “Are you going to the Ordways’? the Herseys’? the Schultzes’?” Here, for the first time, is a complete transcription of this charming, twenty-seven-page diary highlighting Fitzgerald’s escapades among the children of some of St. Paul’s most influential families—models for the families described in The Great Gatsby . Presented in a simple format for both scholars and general readers alike, The Thoughtbook of F. Scott Fitzgerald includes a new introduction by Dave Page that covers the history and provenance of the diary, its place and meaning in Fitzgerald’s literary development, and its revelations about his life and writing process. One of the earliest known works by F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Thoughtbook provides a unique glimpse of Fitzgerald as a young boy and his social circle as they played among the grand homes of Summit Avenue, making up games, starting secret societies, competing with rivals, and (at all times) staying up-to-date on who exactly is vying for whose attention. The Thoughtbook is a fascinating document. You can see the social analyst, the novelist of manners, just beginning to develop. —James L. W. West III, General Editor, Cambridge Fitzgerald Edition F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, and spent much of his youth living in the Crocus Hill neighborhood. He went on to become one of the most famous American novelists of the twentieth century, often drawing on his youthful experiences in St. Paul in his stories and novels. The Thoughtbook of F. Scott Fitzgerald A Secret Boyhood Diary By F. Scott Fitzgerald, Dave Page University of Minnesota Press Copyright © 2013 Regents of the University of Minnesota All rights reserved. ISBN: 978-0-8166-7977-5 Contents Introduction - Dave Page, The Thoughtbook of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Photographs, Afterword - Dave Page, INTRODUCTION Dave Page In the summer of 1910, just before his fourteenth birthday, F. Scott Fitzgerald began keeping a memoir that he titled Thoughtbook of Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald of St Paul Minn U.S.A. Perhaps inspired by Violet Stockton, whose "Flirting by Sighns" (the misspelling is Fitzgerald's) figures prominently in the Thoughtbook , Fitzgerald penned a somewhat haphazardly organized series of observations until February the following year. Although most of the vignettes in the Thoughtbook are set in St. Paul, where Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was born on September 24, 1896, several occur in Buffalo, New York, where his family resided for a decade after repercussions from the financial panic of 1893 caused the failure in 1898 of the wicker furniture business run by Scott's father, Edward. In consequence, Edward was forced to take a sales job for Proctor & Gamble in Buffalo. Bouncing between Buffalo and Syracuse, New York, Edward managed to hold his position until 1908, when the family returned to St. Paul. Having developed an early propensity for writing, Scott Fitzgerald set down in pencil snippets of dialogue, lists, and narrative threads from and about his old life in Buffalo and his new one in St. Paul. He complained later that his mother, Molly, had tossed some of his juvenilia, but the Thoughtbook was saved. When Scott and Zelda's daughter Frances (better known as Scottie) donated her father's papers to Princeton University in 1950, the Thoughtbook was not included with the original gift, perhaps because it was on loan at the time to Arthur Mizener, a professor at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota, who was completing research for his immensely influential 1951 biography of Fitzgerald. Due to his proximity to his subject's home town, Mizener made frequent trips to St. Paul to interview friends and acquaintances of Fitzgerald. It was "widely known" in those circles, Mizener wrote in The Far Side of Paradise , "that Scott kept, locked in a box under his bed, a manuscript known as the 'Thoughtbook,' which was believed to contain candid and destructive accounts of all his contemporaries. This document still exists, fourteen pages torn from a notebook and covered with Fitzgerald's boyish scrawl. It was the source for the 'Book of Scandal' Basil kept." This last sentence refers to a series of Saturday Evening Post stories penned by Fitzgerald; known as the Basil stories, some are set at the same time as events described in the Thoughtbook . Because Mizener transcribed sample passages from the