FITZGERALD FRANCIS SCOTT (1896-1940).

Lot 85
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10000 - 15000 EUR
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Result : 54 600EUR
FITZGERALD FRANCIS SCOTT (1896-1940).
TYPSCRIPT with autograph ADDITIONS and CORRECTIONS, At Your Age by F. Scott Fitzgerald, [Paris June 1929]; a working draft entitled “At Your Age”, with the original title “The Old Beau” visible beneath the new; 30 pages in-fol., with pencil additions and corrections (rust stains due to a paper clip on the first page); in English; in a brown morocco box, gilt lettering on the front board Original working typescript of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s short story “At Your Age” for which he was paid a high price. His agent Harold Ober was especially enthusiastic, calling it “the finest story you have ever written-and the finest I have ever read.” At Your Age was published in the Saturday Evening Post of 17 August 1929, and made its way as early as 1930 in Great Modern Short Stories published by Grant Overton (New York, Modern Library). Except for this appearance in the Great Modern Short Stories in 1930, it was not reprinted during the author’s lifetime. The present version of the short story is shorter than the published version, excluding a number of episodes such as a trip to Mexico, the engagement etc. Fitzgerald’s story, set in Minneapolis, is about a well-off man of fifty attempting to recapture his lost youth in a romance (and a planned marriage) with a young woman Annie, and his discovery that while he had lost the battle against youth, “Conflict itself has a value beyond victory and defeat”: “Tom Squires came into the drug store to buy a toothbrush, a can of talcum, aspirin, a gargle, castile soap, epsom salis and a box of cigars. Having lived alone for many years he was methodical, and while waiting to be served he held the list in his hand. It was Christmas week and Minneapolis was under two feet of exhilarating, constantly refreshed snow; with his cane Tom knocked two clean crusts of it from his overshoes. Then, looking up, he saw the blonde girl” “She was a rare blonde, even in that Promised Land of Scandinavians, where
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