Swiss Diploma Thesis from the year 2004 in the subject Didactics for the subject English – Literature, Works, grade: summa cum laude, University of Fribourg (Philosophical Faculty), course: Memoire, language: English, abstract: In May 1916, F. Scott Fitzgerald sent the manuscript of his first novel to Charles Scribner’s Sons. The first title Fitzgerald gave to this novel was The Romantic Egotist. Scribner rejected the manuscript, claiming that it was poorly organised and lacked a conclusion. But they encouraged him to revise and resubmit the manuscript of what was later to become This Side of Paradise, a tremendously successful novel. In 1918, Fitzgerald sent a hurriedly revised version of the novel, which he was still calling The Romantic Egotist, back to Scribner’s. He had not taken the trouble to work over it carefully, because he was convinced that he was going to die in the war. The manuscript was again rejected. Nevertheless, Fitzgerald decided to completely rewrite the story of The Romantic Egotist, after being discharged from the army in 1919. He shortened the original manuscript considerably and reorganised the whole novel, which had now acquired the working title The Education of a Personage2. In July 1919, he wrote to Maxwell Perkins, a Scribner’s editor who believed in Fitzgerald’s literary talent, that the new draft was “in no sense a revision of the ill-fated Romantic Egotist” (L 155), although he admitted that it contained much material from the rejected manuscript (L 156). What made the new draft so much better in the eyes of his publisher, who finally accepted the novel and published it as This Side of Paradise in March 1920, was the sum of Fitzgerald’s many, this time careful, revisions. […]
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