Free Careless People by Sarah Churchwell

inevitable offspring of that type. It is the Yankee push to its last degree, a sublimation of the sort of Jay Gould who began by peddling buttons to a county and ended with the same system of peddler’s morals by peddling railroads to a nation.” Fitzgerald later claimed that he “would always cherish an abiding distrust, an animosity, toward the leisure class—not the conviction of a revolutionist but the smoldering hatred of a peasant . . . I have never been able to stop wondering where my friends’ money came from.”
    Knowing where their money comes from tells a great deal more about their character than knowing where their families come from. The American East Coast aristocracy saw itself as fitting into the mold of European aristocracy. But what it took the Europeans centuries to accrue, families like the Morgans and the Harrimans did in a generation, sufficient time in America’s rapidly cycling class system. The difference between old and new money is, after all, purely relative: it just depends on when you start counting.
    After Pad Rumsey’s death Mary Harriman bought an estate on Sands Point, at the tip of Manhasset, Long Island, and spent several years building a replica of a Norman castle. In April 1923 Scott and Zelda would attend lavish parties at Mrs. Rumsey’s estate, where they also met Tommy Hitchcock. When he was transposed into fiction Hitchcock would retain his first name and his skill at polo but not his honor, becoming a frequently acknowledged model for the dishonorable and malicious Tom Buchanan. “The Rumseys and Hitchcocks” are a frequent footnote to the genesis of
The Great Gatsby
(although many erroneously say that the Fitzgeralds knew Charles Rumsey, when they knew only his widow), but merely explaining who these people were overlooks a gleam in history: that two days after his return to New York, on the very day
Tales of the Jazz Age
was published, Fitzgerald was reading of Charles Rumsey’s death in one of the car crashes that were becoming all too common on Long Island in 1922.

    S unday, September 24, was a sudden bright, hot, humid day in the midst of two weeks of mild weather. Cecil B. DeMille released a film called
Manslaughter
, about a reckless society woman who runs over a man with her car, which would become one of the biggest cinematic hits of 1922. That Sunday was also Scott Fitzgerald’s twenty-sixth birthday, and although the Fitzgeralds left no clues as to their activities on this day, a friend of theirs did.
    Burton Rascoe was the literary editor of the New York
Tribune
,
one of the two newspapers that Fitzgerald names in
The Great Gatsby
.
(The
Tribune
was founded by Horace Greeley, remembered in American history for four famous words, “Go west, young man,” a catchphrase that symbolizes much of Jay Gatsby’s life.) Rascoe was one of the Fitzgeralds’ most enthusiastic supporters, writing that
This Side of Paradise
“bears the impress, it seems to me, of genius,” andhiring Zelda to add some “sparkle” to his pages by reviewing
The Beautiful and Damned
.Rascoe also wrote a weeklySunday column called “A Bookman’s Day Book,” in which he listed notable literary happenings of the previous week: mostly they involved the authors with whom he had partied. Just four years older than Fitzgerald, Rascoe had a fine critical intelligence, and an inclination toward name-dropping. In fact, Burton Rascoe was an inveterate gossip.
    Rascoe’s column that Sunday opened, as current literary conversations often did, with a reflection on the state of American letters in 1922: “Aspiration and discontent are the parents—if not of paradise, then—of change . . . No serious book is written in America nowadays which does not carry its implied or direct criticism of our ideals, our scheme of life, our cultural attainments.” That night, Rascoe reported in his next