From sexual innuendo to antisemitism, a wealth of censored material that was sliced out of F Scott Fitzgerald's short stories by newspaper editors is being restored in a new edition of the author's work which presents the stories in their unbowdlerised form for the first time in almost 80 years.
The stories in his fourth collection, Taps at Reveille, were written by Fitzgerald for publication in the Saturday Evening Post during the late 1920s and early 1930s a time of debt and personal difficulty for the author, who would die in 1940 at the age of 44. Close study of the final, messy typescripts, complete with handwritten revisions, that Fitzgerald sent to his literary agent Harold Ober show significant differences between what The Great Gatsby author intended to be published, and what the Post keen not to offend its middle-class readership actually released, with any sexual innuendo eliminated, almost all profanity cut out, as well as any passages touching on racial or ethnic prejudice, drunkenness or reference to drug-taking.
Continue reading...
0 comments:
Post a Comment