F. Scott Fitzgerald Autograph Note Signed.

FITZGERALD, F. Scott.

$9,800.00

Item Number: 142895

Autograph note signed calligraphically (“Scott Fitzgerald“), to Marie Hersey, commemorating his first Christmas home from boarding school. 1 page on cardstock, 5.25 inches by 3.25 inches, adhesive residue to verso where previously pasted down.

A charming note from a lovesick young Fitzgerald to his childhood friend and “first love.”

The card contains Fitzgerald‘s printed signature on the upper left “Scott Fitzgerald” and the inscription “Sacred to the memory of Xmas 1911″ in the center; in the lower left Fitzgerald has drawn three small irregular ovals, with the explanation that they are “Tears.” In the right portion, he had evidently mounted a small piece of mistletoe [no longer present] as he has inscribed “The Misletoe” [sic] with arrows. The item is inscribed to Marie Hersey in the lower right above a brief inventory, “Items 1 Picture 5 Letters” indicating this was sent as part of a larger group.

Fitzgerald met Marie Hersey in his hometown of St. Paul sometime during the spring of 1911, and he at that time experienced “his first faint sex attraction” (Turnbull). Later Hersey appeared as Imogene Bissell in The Scandal Detectives, and in writing to her in 1936, Fitzgerald declared: “I think of you as about my oldest friend, certainly my first love.” The Christmas that occasioned this card presently offered was his first vacation home from boarding school in the East. Turnbull, in his The Letters, publishes no letter to Marie Hersey earlier than 1920, and only on letter known [a note to his mother from camp] written earlier than the present card.

In near fine condition with adhesive residue to verso where previously pasted down.

Born on September 24, 1896, in Saint Paul, Minnesota, to a middle-class Catholic family, Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was named after his distant cousin, Francis Scott Key, who wrote in 1814 the lyrics for the American national anthem "The Star-Spangled Banner." Fitzgerald spent the first decade of his childhood primarily in Buffalo with a brief interlude in Syracuse between January 1901 and September 1903.[10] His parents sent him to two Catholic schools on Buffalo's West Side—first Holy Angels Convent (1903–1904) and then Nardin Academy (1905–1908). As a boy, Fitzgerald was described by his peers as unusually intelligent with a keen interest in literature.