More New Orleans

I read with great enthusiasm Sergio Ortiz’s article, “New Orleans, They Wrote” (Sept. 24), particularly a five-paragraph reference to F. Scott Fitzgerald. As both a writer of New Orleans and ardent scholar of Fitzgerald, I thought that in Ortiz I had somehow run across an undiscovered gem of “Fitzgeraldia.”

However, upon returning to my sources, I find no mention of any stint in New Orleans “while revising the galleys of his first novel ‘This Side of Paradise.’ ” The entire affair is placed by all sources (including Fitzgerald’s own essay “Early Success”) in St. Paul, Minn. The trips to Montgomery, Ala., to woo a reluctant Zelda Sayre similarly seem to originate in St. Paul despite Oritz’s claim that “New Orleans offered convenient proximity to Montgomery.” That is certainly a geographical fact, but I am curious what elevates it beyond lofty historical fiction. In short, what is Ortiz’s source for this information. I was disappointed to note Ortiz’s reference to Fitzgerald’s “native Minneapolis,” which is patently wrong. The distinction between St. Paul and Minneapolis may seem a subtle nuance to some, but for scholars of Fitzgerald (and, no doubt, residents of St. Paul) it is certainly more important.

T. ROBERT BUCHANAN

Laguna Niguel

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Ortiz replies: While F. Scott Fitzgerald’s stay in New Orleans is not as widely known as his tenure in Paris or Hollywood, his residence at 2900 Prytania, where he lived while revising “This Side of Paradise,” is well documented in “Some Sort of Epic Grandeur: The Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald” by Matthew J. Bruccoli, “Zelda: A Biography” by Nancy Milford and “The Far Side of Paradise” by Arthur Mizener. Mr. Buchanan is correct when he says that Fitzgerald was born in St. Paul. However, according to reliable biographers, the author liked to claim Minneapolis as his place of birth because he felt that city’s name sounded more cosmopolitan than St. Paul’s.