From the The Star-Ledger (Newark, NJ):
Imagine looking over author F. Scott Fitzgerald’s shoulder as he wrote “The Great Gatsby,” one of the 20th century’s best known novels — watching as he developed certain plotlines and abandoned others, cultivated characters from brief sketches into familiar figures and painstakingly wrote and rewrote some of the most famous passages in American literature.
The Princeton University Library has afforded such an opportunity by digitizing the handwritten manuscript and corrected galleys of Fitzgerald’s classic novel and making them available online to anyone who wishes to view them.
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“You’re watching the author at work,” said Don Skemer, the university’s curator of manuscripts. “It shows you how he edited his work and how it became the work we know.”
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The materials were put online as part of long-term plan, not in response to the movie, Skemer said. He noted that the book is still a perennial read, with more than a half-million copies sold each year. It is consistently near the top of most lists of the greatest books of the 20th century.
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The library intends for the newly digitized material to serve as a resource for scholars and anyone interested in learning more about Fitzgerald. A feature on the site allows the images to be enlarged to over 400 times their size, so that viewers can examine the smallest handwritten note in detail.
The materials are part of Princeton University’s F. Scott Fitzgerald Papers, a literary archive containing more than 100 boxes of original manuscripts, working drafts, corrected galleys, correspondence, photographs and other original materials.
Read the Complete Article, Additional Background About What Has Been Digitized
Direct to Digitized Manuscripts (via Princeton University Library)
See Also: Princeton University Digital Library
See Also: University of Chicago Library Digitizes Original Manuscript of Walt Whitman’s “The Bible as Poetry”
January 7, 2013.
About Gary Price
