A Love Letter To F. Scott Fitzgerald

My Dear Francis,

I recently reread the “Great Gatsby” after watching the 1978 adaptation starring Robert Redford. After watching so many different adaptations, I had lost sight of what was your book and what was the directors/writers artistic license. After reading the first pages of the “Great Gatsby” again, I realized I missed so much the first time around. How did you write something so poetic, profound, and so brilliantly wrapped up in a, dare I say, “easy read?” I am diving into your other books and am currently reading “The Beautiful and The Damned” set in New York City. You can only imagine how utterly romantic I felt reading my new book in New York last week. The crazy thing is the world did not understand how important you were as a writer until many years after your death. Isn’t that the way it always is?

I did not fall in love with you until I heard you read John Keats, and now as I read your books I hear that same low, kind voice. I know, had we met, I would have told you how we were the same souls, reckless with desperate illusions, and it would have only been an unrequited love story on my part. For your heart has always been Zelda’s. Still, I hear your last lines of the “Great Gatsby” as written only to me:

“tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning— So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

We are the same somehow.

Yours,

Marie