Fitzgerald in Saint Paul

Fitzgerald in Saint Paul - Autobumming

Kick off summer travel with a window into early 20th century road trips with two of Minnesota’s classics. Travel west with Sinclair Lewis’s protagonists in Free Air and south with F. Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda Sayre in “Cruise of the Rolling Junk.” Join historians Mark Taylor and Patrick Coleman as they chat about what these 20th century road trips reveal about our country, their authors, and the enduring American tradition of lengthy road travel.

Fitz Bits

Fitz Bits is a series of short video lectures on the work, life, and world of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Fitz Bits is presented by The Friends of the Saint Paul Public Library and made possible by Baird, and by the Minnesota Department of Education through a grant from the State of Minnesota.

In the first episode in this series, Fitzgerald scholar Dave Page draws connections between Saint Paul and Princeton University that inspired Fitzgerald’s seminal novel This Side of Paradise.

Dave Page is a Fitzgerald scholar and the author of F. Scott Fitzgerald in Minnesota: The Writer and His Friends at Home – as well as numerous other works on Fitzgerald. Fitz Bits is presented by The Friends of the Saint Paul Public Library and made possible by Baird, and by the Minnesota Department of Education through a grant from the State of Minnesota.

In this chat, Fitzgerald scholar Dave Page lists and contextualizes mentions of tobacco usage throughout Fitzgerald’s corpus. As is so often the case with Fitzgerald’s work, there are rich stories behind the stories!

In this Fitz Bits installment, Dave Page explores the novelist’s connections – both literary and personal – to the American Civil War.

Mark Taylor is a Fitzgerald scholar and site tour guide. In this chat, Mark overviews the mutually beneficial relationship between the famous author and his accomplished editor, Maxwell Perkins.

Stu Wilson is former board chair of Fitzgerald in Saint Paul. In this Fitz Bits installment, Wilson details a weeks-long trip that the novelist spent in Montana and the impact that this summer had on his fiction.

Sister Mary Paula, the long-time historian of Visitation School in Saint Paul (currently at Visitation Monastery of Minneapolis), illuminates the McQuillan-Fitzgerald family’s long-standing association with the school...as well as a surprise Minnesota literary connection! Excerpts are from an interview given to Melissa Barker and Gail Shea.