Great: Gatsby

The Real Jay Gatsby:
Max von Gerlach,

F. Scott Fitzgerald,
and the Compositional History
of The Great Gatsby
HORSTKRUSE
“I was crazy about The Great Gatsby. Old Gatsby. Old

Sport.” Holden Caulfields words in J. D. Salinger‘s Tne Catcher in the
Rye (183), published 26 years after Fitzgeralds novel, testify to the par-
ticular appeal of what Matthew J. Bruccoli, in an explanatory note to
the Cambridge Gatsb has called Gatsby’s “defining expression” ( 189).
Spoken 45 times in the course of the n o v e l 4 2 times by Gatsby him-
self, twice by Tom Buchanan, and once by Nick Carraway in recogni-
tion of Gatsby’s preference for it-“old sport” as used in the text has
been traced to a specific source. According to Bruccoli’s explanatory
note, the expression “was probably taken from Fitzgeralds Great Neck
acquaintance Max Gerlach, an alleged bootlegger.”It occurs in an auto-
graph note on a newspaper clipping showing Fitzgerald with Zelda and
their daughter Scottie, which the author preserved in his scrapbook.’
Dated 7/20/23, the note reads: “Enroute from the coast-Here for a few
days on business-How are you and the family old sport?” and is signed
“Gerlach.”This is the only tangible evidence that an elusive, if not out-
right mysterious, person from Fitzgeralds Great Neck days may have
influenced the portrayal of the protagonist of his third novel.
Curiosity about Max Gerlach has accompanied biographical and
Tne F. Scott Fitzgerald Reuiew 2002 45

46 HORSTKRUSE
critical interest in Fitzgerald and T h e Great Gatsby for over half a cen-
tury, yet we still seem to know little about him. Even as late as 2000,
when Bruccoli reprinted his 1975 article “How Are You and the Family
Old Sport” in E Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby: A Documentary
Volume, he repeated that a “considerable search has failed to reveal little
more” about Gerlach (20). The information that has turned up, more-
over, has accumulated slowly and gradually, and never been seen as a
whole.
Once it is, however, it would seem to suggest that Max Gerlach
played a more significant role than he has been credited with in the
making of The Great Gatsby and the shaping of its protagonist. The fol-
lowing survey of the established biographical details about Gerlach, given
more or less in the order in which they became known, is an important
prerequisite for my search for more information about him and my at-
tempt to rewrite the story of the composition of Fitzgeralds third novel
in the light of such information.
§
In 195 1, Arthur Mizener wrote in T h e Fur Side of Paradise
that Gatsby, in externals, “was based on a Long Island bootlegger whom
Fitzgerald knew only slightly,”adding in a footnote that “Zelda said late
in her life that this was a Teutonic-featured man named von Guerlach”
( 1 71, 336119). As his source Mizener cited Henry Dan Piper, the author
of a subsequent Fitzgerald biography. Tucked away in a footnote, the
name of von Guerlach did not even get listed in the index to Mizener‘s
book. For his 1975 article, Bruccoli went back to the same source. Piper
said that Zelda had told him “near the end of her life” about “a neighbor
named von Guerlach or something who was said to be General Pershings
nephew and was in trouble over bootlegging’ (33). Bruccoli also points
out that since “Zelda Fitzgerald supplied the name ‘von Guerlach in
conversation, Piper‘s spelling is conjectural” (3611 1). The additional evi-
dence adduced by Bruccoli is the 1923 clipping preserved in Fitzgeralds
scrapbook and another clipping of a photograph from the New York
Eveninglounzal of 18January 1930, which shows a certain “‘MaxGerlach,
wealthy yachtsman’ kissing his parrot during a psittacosis scare.”
“Yachtsman,”Bruccoli explains, “was sometimes a euphemism for rum-
runner,” and so he concludes that “it is possible that this Max Gerlach
was the man Fitzgerald knew” (35 ) .
The Real Jay Gatsby 47
Both Mizener and Bruccoli also point to the description of the

showy and tasteless interior of a wealthy bootlegger‘s house-and his
lifestyle, including never wearing a shirt twice-that Edmund Wilson
put into his play The Crime in the Whistler Room, first performed in
October 1924. This play predates The Great Gatsby, and, according to
Fitzgerald, the description was based on his having told Wilson about
such a man and about his plans to use him in his novel (qtd. in Mizener,
The Far Side of Paradise 17 1-72; Bruccoli, “HowAre You and the Family
Old Sport?” 33).2 In 1981, in Some Sort of Epic Grandeur, Bruccoli
stressed once more that “[alttempts to fill in the history of Max Gerlach”
had shown no success (183). But a decade later, though still maintain-
ing in his explanatory note to the Cambridge Gatsby that “[a]lmost noth-
ing is known about Gerlach,” Bruccoli was able to add that Gerlach had
“shot himself in 1939, when he was in the used-car business in Flush-
i n g (189). This seemingly abrupt conclusion to the story of Gatsby’s
possible prototype appears less final, however, in light of the “Gerlach
entry in E Scott Fitzgerald A to Z by Mary Jo Tate, published in 1998:
“Gerlach was in the used car business in Flushing, New York, when he
attempted suicide by shooting himself in 1939; he indicated in his sui-
cide note that he had been an officer in World War I” (96). The entry
gives no satisfactory documentation, so I queried Bruccoli, who wrote a
foreword to A to Z. He responded by providing clippings from the New
York Herald Tribune and the World Telegraph (“Calls on Friend”). Here
is the text of the Herald Tribune story:
Pair Sit Reading Papers, Then He Shoots Himself.
‘Good By, Darling,’ Says Man; She Looks Up and He Fires
Max von Gerlach, fifty-five years old, of 35-40 [partly illeg-
ible] 163d Street, Flushing, Queens, shot himself in the head
at 10:50 last night while seated with Miss Elizabeth Mayer
in her apartment at 14 Jones Street. They had been sitting
there for almost three hours, each reading a newspaper.
“Good by, darling,” said Mr. von Gerlach suddenly.
Miss Mayer looked up just in time to see him fire the
shot. He was taken to St. Vincent’s Hospital and is in serious
condition. Until about a month ago he was proprietor of the
Park Central Motors, of 150- 10 Northern Boulevard, Flush-
48 HORSTKRUSE
ing, a used-car firm. The police found four notes, one of them
addressed to Miss Mayer. In one of them he said that busi-
ness was bad and he was tired of living. He was an officer in
the American Army in the World War and held a major‘s com-
mission in the Ordnance Department at the time of his ac-
tion.
To the reprint of “How Are You and the Family Old Sport?” in A
Documentary Volume, moreover, Bruccoli added a coda-“In 1939 Max
Gerlach, a used-car dealer in Flushing, New York, blinded himself in a
suicide attempt. He died in 1958” (20)-and a footnote:
The New York City Department of Health refuses to make

Max von Gerlach’s death certificate available. His probate
file has not been located. In 1951 and 1954 Gerlach con-
tacted Arthur Mizener offering information about Fitzgerald;
Mizener failed to act on these opportunities. (20n5)
A note about these contacts made by Mizener himself around 195 1 and
preserved in the Arthur Mizener Papers at Princeton records that when
Gerlach first tried to telephone Mizener and spoke to a secretary he
identified himself as Jay Gatsby.
After 50 years of speculation on the part of Fitzgerald scholars and
biographers, the recent additions to the known facts in the biography of
Max Gerlach illuminate the whole array of previously known details and
change the basis for assumptions regarding the relevance of such mate-
rial to the composition of Tne Great Gutsby, for critical evaluation of the
novel, and for speculation about the author‘s creative process.
Gerlach’s own claim to have served as a model for Gatsby and the
use of the nobility predicate von in the Herald Tribune, which is absent
from many other mentions of him, lend credence to Zelda Fitzgerald’s
statement that the Long Island bootlegger on whom Gatsby was based
“was a Teutonic-featured man named von Guerlach.” Moreover, the ref-
erences to Gerlach’s German ethnic background, along with the infor-
mation that he “was an officer in the American Army in the World War
and held a major’s commission . . . at the time of his action” directly
point to the text of the novel: Gatsby was a bootlegger; Gatsby had served
as a major; and Gatsby was rumored to be “a nephew or a cousin of
Kaiser Wilhelm’s”(28), “nephew to von Hindenburg’ (49) and suspected

of having been “a German spy during the war” (36). Testimony for the
latter assertion-“I heard that from a man who knew all about him,
grew up with him in Germany” (37)-and especially its refutation-
“Oh no, it couldn’t be that, because he was in the American army during
the war”+oincide with what has become an established fact of Gerlachs
biography.
More important and more intriguing than these correspondences
is the change of names that occurs in the biography both of the reaI
person and the protagonist of the novel, and which functions as a cen-
tral motif in the novel. Does the alternation between “von Gerlach and
“Gerlach” suggest a need to drop the nobility predicate as a particularly
obtrusive indicator of his ethnic background in order to be eligible for
service in the American Army? And does this alternation explain why he
may have suggested himself to Fitzgerald as a model for the protagonist
of his novel, who similarly was to change a German-sounding “Gatz”
into an Americanized “Gatsby”?
These questions called for further research into the life of Max
von Gerlach, the known facts in their new configuration serving as prom-
ising leads. What follows is not primarily an account of the complicated
quest for additional information, however, but a presentation of find-
ings about the German von Gerlachs and Max von Gerlach’s early life
and Army career, followed by a presentation of what appear to be rea-
sonable inferences about Gerlach as a bootlegger and his relations with
F. Scott Fitzgerald, focusing, finally and most importantly, on the role
he may have played in the compositional history of The Great Gatsby
and the traces he may have left in the text.
§
The nobility predicate vow, more clearly than the family name
(and, to some extent, the given name), identifies Max von Gerlach’s
ethnic background as German. Whereas “Gerlach as a family name
occurs fairly frequently in Germany, “von Gerlach” designates a mem-
ber of the nobility and is far less common and easier to trace. Extensive
correspondence and many interviews with the two separate German
von Gerlach families have established that there is no record and no
awareness of any member of either family ever having emigrated to the
50 HORSTKRUSE
United States3A complementary search, equally extensive, in all avail-

able shipping and immigration records in Germany and the United States
similarly brought no immediately useful results. In fact, both searches
merely increased the mystery surrounding the American Max von
Gerlach. Nevertheless, as will appear, the seemingly futile searches still
brought some unexpected finds that turned out to be helpful in resolv-
ing other matters relating to the case.
In addition to using the nobility predicate in Gerlachs name, the
1939 Herald Tribune story about his suicide attempt stated that he was
“an officer in the American Army in the World War and held a major‘s
commission in the Ordnance Department at the time of his action.”
Records of the Office of the Chief of Ordnance are preserved by the
National Archives and Records Administration in their Records I1 Build-
ing in College Park, Maryland. They are designated as Record Group
156 and consist of various materials going back as far as 1832.4
Among these records are nine folio-sized volumes titled “Ordnance
Officers called to duty in World War I.” They contain handwritten en-
tries in nonalphabetical order, some volumes having been supplied with
a handwritten index in front. Volume 8, page 4, contains the following
information (now declassified) on Max Gerlach given as autograph en-
tries in ink in various hands:
Max S. Gerlach 1st Lieut. O.D. - U.S.A.
Aug 15 1918 Ordered to Metuchen N.J. Par 10 S.O. 191
W.D. 18
Aug 17 1918 Reports for duty at Metuchen N.J. per tel mst.
A.G.O. W.D. ’18
Dec. 11, ’18 Ordered to port of emb., Hoboken, N.J. Par.94
S.O. 289-0
Mar. 29, 1919 Appt’d on Bd. of Officers - P.4, S.O. 75, Hq.
Raritan Ars., N.J.
Oct. 28 ” Honorably discharged, eff. Oct.31, ’19. P.5, S.O.
272, C. of 0.
These entries make up his entire service history. Additional details con-
cerning his military service career (along with, for the first time, per-
sonal information) are provided on an index card from the Adjutant
General’s office (Record Group 407), first made out on 13 September
19 18. It confirms 15 August 1918 as the date of his appointment and

commission as first lieutenant, and it gives his service address as C.O.
Motor Instr. School, Raritan Arsenal, Metuchen, New Jersey. It speci-
fies that Gerlach was appointed from “civil life” and contains a later
entry showing that he was sworn in on 1 October 1918. His personal
data are given as follows: born on 12 October 1885 in Yonkers, New
York; his New York City address at the time of his entering the army was
30 West 6 1st Street. On its verso the index card records Gerlach’s hon-
orable discharge, giving the following particulars: rank, 1st Lt.; corps,
Ord. Dept.; date, 10-31-19;date of S.O., 10-28-19;home address, “Are0
[Aero] Club” New York, NY; all is recorded on 12 September 19 19.5
The real serendipity of the discovery of Record Group 156 emerges
from collateral material, however. As has been surmised, Max Gerlach’s
name, even without the nobility predicate, was likely to be seen as a
mark of his German ethnic background; and indeed his application for a
commission in the US Army required special treatment. His name ap-
pears in the “Name Index to Correspondence of the Military Intelli-
gence Division of the War Department General Staff 19 17-1 94 1.” The
index leads to an MID file containing detailed correspondence relating
to investigations into his personal history in connection with his appli-
cation, including two investigation reports. For the investigations,Gerlach
had filled in an Ordnance Department personalia sheet on 6 August,
before his enlistment, which provides what comes close to being a com-
plete curriculum vitae. Identifymg Max Stork Gerlach (the full middle
name occurs for the first time) as applicant for the rank of captain, the
form confirms his home address and his date and place of birth, gives
his nationality as American, fails to answer questions regarding his marital
status and the names and birthplaces of his parents, and goes on to the
following information:
SCHOOLS AND INSTITUTIONS ATTENDED WITH

DATES:
5 yrs Public Sch. 5 yrs private tuition & studies in every branch
of Automobile mechanics, practical and technically.
Speak German and Spanish.
EMPLOYERS, PLACES AND DATES:
1900 Went to Mexico as marine gas Engine[er] on Motor
Boat.
52 HORSTKRUSE
1902-05 Mgr. of garage & Shop in Yonkers, N.Y. “Fuller &

Walsh”
1905-06 Established a garage in Havana Cuba for “Winton
Motor Car Co.”
1907 Operated Auto Repair Shop in Havana Cuba.
1908 Promoted Auto racing in Cuba & U.S.A.
1909-10 Mgr. of garage & foreman of shop (Gen’l repairs)
employing about 20 men-E. H. Underhill & Martin
Lyons “Garage Dr. Luxe” East 108th St. N.Y.C.
1910-12 Mgr. of Motor Car Exchange 250 W. 84th St. N.Y.C.
REFERENCES WITH ADDRESSES:

Major Cushman A. Rice, Army & Navy Club, N.Y.C.
Hon. Asron [Aaron] J. Levy, N.Y.C.
George Young Bauchle, N.Y.C.
Such investigations were apparently routine for all applicants, but

Gerlachs case seems to have been given special attention. One of the
investigations was entrusted to the American Protective League, an or-
ganization created in 19 17 and frequently called upon to assist MID in
counterintelligence efforts on the home front. The report made out by
Joseph Brennan on 1 October 1918 in New York is a typical example of
the vigilante ardor that motivated the APL in its work. It runs to a little
over four double-spaced typewritten pages, summarizes the results of
interviews with the employers and references named by Gerlach, and
concludes, with particular reference to “subject’s German ancestry,” as
follows: “There should rest grave suspicion on entire bona fides of Ap-
plicant” (Brennan 5).
Aside from a possible anti-German bias, Brennan’s judgment is
based on his learning that Gerlach had left his New York City address
without forwarding instructions for his mail (he had given up his room
in a boardinghouse when he joined the army); on learning that Judge
Levy, one of the references, said he did not know Gerlach; on finding
that several of the businesses listed in the personalia sheet did not re-
member Gerlach at all, or did not know him in the capacity he claimed,
or knew him under the name of Max Stork. The Winton Company, ac-
cording to Brennan’s report, claimed they never had a garage in Havana.
They did have an agency there, but no one in the agency had ever heard
of Gerlach. However, George Young Bauchle, a lawyer with offices at 5 1
Chambers Street, the only other reference whose name had been passed
along to Brennan, said: “Gerlach claimed to have been born in New
York of German parents and seemed anxious to get into the United States
service. He always appeared to be normally patriotic” ( 1-2). The follow-
ing additional facts about Gerlach emerge from the information given
by Bauchle: Gerlach is divorced, his divorced wife’s maiden name was
Miss Lover. His father has died, his mother‘s name after remarriage is
Mrs. Reilly. “On one occasion,” Brennan reports, “Gerlach spoke of his
father or grandfather, Mr. Bauchle could not remember which, having
filled the position of secretary, or held some other post under Fredrich
111, the present German Emperor‘s father.” Gerlach also showed a photo
with a Richard Wagner autograph that had been presented to his father
or grandfather. Bauchle does not doubt Gerlach’s loyalty; according to
him (as Brennan puts it):
subject suggests being an excellent mechanic, with thorough
knowledge of automobiles and their mechanism. In the opin-
ion of Mr. Bauchle, the subject’s brain is so filled with me-
chanics that he is incapable of giving subtle thought to un-
derhand work of any kind.
Bauchle also indicated that in the spring of 19 18 Gerlach was “in some
business connected with automobiles for himself, on the upper West
Side of New York City” (2-3). Brennan still finds the case “a most un-
satisfactory one to investigate. . . . Could not find out where [Gerlach]
has been from 1912 to date, but it was suggested by Mr. Bauchle that
he may have been in Cuba” (4).6The main points of Brennan’s report
were incorporated in the 9 October 1918 MID report to the Chief of
Ordnance, but Brennan’s reservations were ignored. The phrases “anx-
ious to get into the United States service” and “normally patriotic” seem
to have offset the negative points. In any case, Gerlach had long since
been commissioned and sworn in. His work at the Motor Instruction
School at the Raritan Arsenal in Metuchen, New Jersey, was probably
congenial for a man who was “normally patriotic” and whose brain was
“filled with mechanics.” There is no further information about his life
up to October 1919.
54 HORSTKRUSE
§
Nor is there anything to suggest why, on leaving the army, he
gave as his new civilian address the Aero Club of New York. But it was a
likely place to move for a 34-year-old single male whose brain was “filled
with mechanics,” who had no business or employment to return to, and
who had given up his rented room when entering the service. The Aero
Clubs of the United States, many of which had come into existence all
over the country in the early years of the century, were places where
people interested in aircraft and aeronautics would meet. But in addi-
tion to an interest in mechanics and aeronautics, money was a requisite
for membership in those years when flying was still a novelty and a
privilege. The New York Aero Club in particular became famous for its
shows and its social events. Another person who served as a model for a
character in Great Gatsby, Edward Robinson Gilman, who along
with Robert L. Seaman inspired the figure of yachtsman Dan Cody7
was a member of both the NewYorkYacht Club and the New YorkAero
Club in the first decade of the century (Bruccoli, Documentary Volume
24). Was this, then, the place where Gerlach met someone who saw his
qualities, realized his potential as a bootlegger, and “start[ed] him in
business” (Fitzgerald, Cambridge Gatsby 133)? It need not have hap-
pened in this venue, but it must have happened about this time, soon
after his discharge from the army, because by 1922-23, when Fitzgerald
met him, he was already the person whom Zelda later recalled as having
been “in trouble over bootlegging.” He was also the man whom Wilson,
on the strength of Fitzgeralds description, was to characterize as a “gentle-
man bootlegger [who] lives like a millionaire” (This Room 75) and whom
each of the two authors was to use for his literary purposes.
Indeed, Gerlach’s qualifications were well suited to the new mar-
ket that was opening up after the passing of the Volstead Act on 27
October 1919-just a day before orders were issued for Gerlachs dis-
charge-and its going into effect on 16 January 1920. Gerlach knew all
about automobiles and motorboats and motors in general; he had spent
many years doing business in Cuba and some years in Mexico; he spoke
Spanish; as a veteran and an officer, he had good credentials; he was
unattached; and, most importantly, he did not have any business or job
to return to in civilian life. He might have found it hard to turn down
lucrative offers which, at the same time, appealed to his “brain . . . filled
with mechanics.”
The bootlegging business of the early 1920s needed men of
Gerlach’s skills and experience. The Cuban and Mexican rum-running
operations involved business and logistics negotiations in those coun-
tries as well as practical arrangements for delivery of contraband liquor
via ships, with motorboats dispatched to pick up the cargo off the coast.
In addition to his being called a “yachtsman,” there are two other indi-
cations that this might have been Gerlachs line of business. One is his
1923 note to Fitzgerald: “Enroute from the coast-here for a few days
on business.” The reference is to the Pacific coast of the United States,
which, along with the Gulf coast, was where bootleg alcohol from Mexico
was being landed. The other indication is the presence of his name on
the passenger list of the S. S. Esperunzu, arriving in New York from Ha-
vana, Cuba, on 7April 1924 (Ship Manifest),’ at a time when rum run-
ning had become such a problem that a treaty was being negotiated to
control the shipment of liquor from Cuban ports (“Decree Controlling
Shipment”).The ship manifest, in addition to confirming 12 October as
his birthday (but giving 1886 rather than 1885 as the year of his birth),
indicates that Gerlach was traveling in the company of his (second)
wife, Elena Gerlach, 24 years of age, born in Huntington, West Virginia.
It also lists two addresses: 24 East 40th Street, NewYork City, penciled
in over a typed 42 Broadway, New York City. While it has not been
possible to find reliable information about Gerlachs being “in trouble
over bootlegging during the time that the Fitzgeralds knew him, from
late 1922 to early 1924, two pieces of evidence have emerged that con-
cern minor offenses at a later time. The US district court with jurisdic-
tion over New York City heard two cases involving Max V. Gerlach or
Max Gerlach in 1927.9 Though these cases serve as prima facie evi-
dence of Gerlachs bootlegging activities, they come well outside the
period relevant to the present investigation.
§
Having lived in St. Paul, Minnesota, for well over a year, the
Fitzgeralds arrived in Great Neck, Long Island, in October 1922. Life
in the East with its manifold and unexpected distractions could well be
seen as a negative influence on a writer trying to complete his next novel.1°
56 HORSTKRUSE
But in the genesis of what was to become The Great Gatsly, the decision
to move to Long Island proved fortunate, because the seeming distrac-
tions over a period of nearly a year and a half helped to transform the
initial plan for a novel with a partly Midwestern setting and a historical
bent into an incisive analysis of contemporary America as exemplified
in a typical affluent Eastern community. This transformation and the
role that Great Neck played in it readily emerge from the author‘s corre-
spondence with Maxwell Perkins. In June 1922, Fitzgerald had given
Perkins the following description of his plans for the third novel: “Its
locale will be the middle west and New York of 1885 I think. It will
concern less superlative beauties than I run to usually + will be cen-
tered on a smaller period of time. It will have a catholic element”
(Bruccoli, Life in Letters 60). Although there are occasional references
to the project after he had moved to Great Neck, such as his remark of
early November 1923 that he “put aside the novel three weeks ago”
(Letters 161), he seems to have made little progress.
On 7 April 1924, Perkins wrote Fitzgerald about the reservations
he had regarding a new title, “AmongAsh-Heaps and Millionaires,”which
the author had since proposed. The title shows that both the setting and
the cast of characters of the novel had changed and that, all distractions
notwithstanding, Fitzgerald (who had been passing the Corona dumps
every day for several weeks as he went to the city to attend rehearsals of
his play, The Vegetable) had begun to ponder the significance of the
defining features, topographical as well as social, of his new habitat.
Shortly after receiving Perkins’s letter, Fitzgerald explicitly confirmed
the changed conception: “Much of what I wrote last summer was good
but it was so interrupted that it was ragged and, in approaching it from
a new angle, I’ve had to discard a lot of it . . .” (Letters 162). Soon there-
after he booked his passage to Europe for 3 May 1924. His stay in Great
Neck had served its purpose, and served it well: it had helped Fitzgerald
to redefine the subject and theme of The Great Gatsb.
When Fitzgerald explained to Perkins that he was approaching what
he had written in 1923 from “a new angle,” he obviously was not refer-
ring to aspects of narrative technique, such as the change from third-
person to first-person narration. Rather, as Bruccoli has pointed out,
“new angle” indicates that Fitzgerald “meant a new plot or a new narra-
tive frame” (Documentary Volume 53) and that “Great Neck provided
the setting and background material” (54) for it. More specifically, I
believe that the “new angle” was a new type of protagonist to supplant
whatever character had been at the center of the 1922-23 version that
had grown out of the plan as devised in St. Paul. Along with the new
protagonist, there would, of course, be a somewhat different story, which
would center on the newly discovered world of Great Neck. There is
ample evidence to indicate that this new protagonist was not merely
influenced by, but actually based on, Max von Gerlach.
Just how and why Gerlach came to be the model of the new pro-
tagonist will emerge more clearly from a look at “Absolution.”This short
story grew out of the discarded material that the author had written in
the summer of 1923 and can be taken as an index to aspects of the early
conception of the novel. Many of its details reappear in The Great Gatsby
and show a continuity between the original plan of 1922, the revised
plan of 1924, and the version that grew out of it. One such detail is the
two fathers. Both Carl Miller and Henry C. Gatz are ineffectual men.
Both admire James J. Hill, the “empire builder,” and point to him as an
example. Both live in the Minnesota-Dakota country.
Stronger arguments for continuity concern the two protagonists.
Both Rudolph Miller and James Gatz refuse to believe that they are the
son of their parents. Both protagonists, moreover, change their name:
from Rudolph Miller to Blatchford Sarnemington, and from James Gatz
to Jay Gatsby. It is noteworthy, however, that these parallel themes are
given totally different treatments in the two works. Rudolph Miller’s
“not believing I was the son of my parents” is given in Catholic confes-
sion as one of a series of possibly trumped-up sins, told, as it were, at
the prodding of Father Schwartz. It is just one of a series of minor of-
fenses that help him avoid specifymg others that “it was agony to tell”
(162). In the novel, on the other hand, because of a different narrative
technique, the same motif is presented not as a statement by the pro-
tagonist himself but as an explanatory metaphor provided by the narra-
tor. That Gatsby denied his parents is merely a surmise on the part of
Carraway, an inference that is bound up with James Gatz’s act of chang-
ing both his given and his family name. In “Absolution” there is no such
direct linking of the two motifs, and the name change is not made pub-
lic, nor is it permanent. It certainly does not mark the beginning of a
58 HORSTKRUSE
new career in the real world, for which “Blatchford Samemington”would

have been anything but a viable choice.
Still, Rudolph Miller‘s denial of his parents and his name change,
along with the rest of the plot, are clearly bound up with his Catholic
faith and the “Catholic elemen? of the story that was part of Fitzgeralds
original plan for the novel. It was this element that the author must have
found incompatible with the “newangle,”while in other details Fitzgerald
remained the saver of old beginnings, felicitous phrases, and useful de-
tail that he always was.‘‘
One such detail in particular appears to have been important to
him both in the originaI plan and in Tne Great G a t s b as it was taking
shape in 1924: the ethnic background of the protagonist. Barely percep-
tible and hardly ever noticed in critical discourse on “Absolution,”the
European origin of Carl Miller nonetheless motivates his behavior. De-
spite his “mystical worship of the Empire Builder, James J. Hill,” he
clings to “his faith in the Roman Catholic Church” (164), the inherited
faith that links him to the Old World through his ancestors as well as
through the seat of his church. His ethnicity is brought out even more
clearly in an iconic detail that is used at the end of the story to dramatize
Rudolph Miller‘s epiphanic conviction that God must have understood
that he had told his lie in confession merely “to make things finer . . . by
saying a thing radiant and proud’:
At the moment when he had affirmed immaculate honor a
silver pennon had flapped out into the breeze somewhere
and there had been the crunch of leather and the shine of
silver spurs and a troop of horsemen waiting for dawn on a
low green hill. The sun had made stars of light on their breast-
plates like the picture at home of the German cuirassiers at
Sedan. (171)
In the narrow world of his experience, Rudolph Miller calls on a litho-

graph celebrating the decisive German victory in the Franco-Prussian
War of 1870-7 1, commemorated annually as Sedantug (the Day of Se-
dan), which epitomized German nationalism until World War I and be-
yond. A finely observed realistic detail, the picture in its emblematic
function emphasizes the German ethnic background of Carl Miller.
Moreover, it turns Rudolph Miller’s experience in “Absolution” into an
immigrant experience, which (under the influence of Fitzgeralds read-

ing of the novels of Willa Cather) probably also figured in the original
plan for The Great Gatsby.
But the Catholic element and the wholly escapist nature of
Rudolph Miller‘s name change keep the story from developing its
potential in that particular direction. Temporarily changing into
Blatchford Sarnemington offers a futile escape; his Alger novels and
his college pennants notwithstanding, it does not take him out of the
narrowly circumscribed world of the small Dakota town of Ludwig. A
different angle was needed to link the Middle West to the newly
discovered world of Great Neck: a new protagonist for whom the act
of choosing another name and slipping into another existence involved
taking him out of Midwestern immigrant surroundings and into main-
stream American life as exemplified by the East, a new protagonist
whose faith would not be the kind of obstacle that Catholicism was
felt to be at the time, both to his integration into the mainstream and
to his successful career. Henry C. Gatz and his son James Gatz of
The Great Gatsby also live in Minnesota-Dakota, and the family name,
less obtrusively than the combination of hints in the short story but
with similar precision, identifies the father as a German immigrant.
But the faith of the Gatzes, typically for Germans, is Lutheran. For a
brief time young James Gatz attends “the small Lutheran college of
St. Olaf in southern Minnesota” (77); it is a Lutheran minister who
officiates at Gatsby’s funeral; and it is the Protestant work ethic that
motivates him even as a boy. Similarly, the name change that occurs
in the novel is a definite instrument in Jay Gatsby’s social and eco-
nomic advancement. Abandoning “Gatz”and taking on “Gatsby”means
more than shedding an ethnic past; it also means claiming a radiant
future.12
§
It is impossible to determine which came first: Fitzgerald’s
dissatisfaction with the manuscript in its original version, with its
emphasis on the Midwestern and Catholic elements, or his acquain-
tance with Max von Gerlach, who provided a possible model for a
protagonist whose story would permit the author to shift the empha-
sis to the contemporary Great Neck material. Max von Gerlach’s bi-
60 HORSTKRUSE
ography in a great many of its details neatly fitted the mold of the origi-
nal plan, enabling Fitzgerald to develop that plan rather than abandon-
ing it, not only discarding “a lo< of what he “wrote last summer” but also
saving as much of it as possible by “approaching it from a new angle.”
As all the evidence would seem to suggest, Fitzgeralds new Long
Island neighbor was born simply Max Gerlach and used that name up to
1918. He also served in the US Army as Max Gerlach and received his
honorable discharge under that name. Had there been any knowledge
or indication of his having been of noble descent, or his having used the
nobility predicate in his private life before entering the army, George
Young Bauchle would probably have known about it, and Joseph Brennan
would have pounced on it.13Zelda Fitzgerald, however, who saw him
only while the Fitzgeralds lived in Great Neck, definitely knew him as
“von Guerlach,” and the von is also used in the record of the 9 May
1927 criminal case and the 1939 newspaper reports of his suicide at-
tempt. Notwithstanding the 1930 New York Evening Journal photo cap-
tion, which refers to him as Max Gerlach, the 1924 ship manifest entry
(presumably based on his passport), or the record of the 5 August 1927
criminal case, he probably began using the nobility predicate after his
army discharge.
This change is part of what seems a total change in his way of life
when he started his career as a bootlegger, or after he had become suc-
cessful in it. Others may have been involved in starting him or guiding
him in the business, and the tale he told Bauchle-that his grandfather
(or even his father) had been associated with Kaiser Friedrich 111-may
have prompted the idea that he ennoble himself. Actual meetings be-
tween Fitzgerald and Gerlach are suggested by Zelda’s remark in a letter
of the summer of 1923 about having “unearthed some of the choicest
bootleggers (including Flei~chman)”’~ and are confirmed by Gerlachs
“How are you and the family old sport?” of 20 July. In the course of
1923, therefore, Fitzgerald would have learned enough about Gerlach
to see how neatly his biography could be fitted into the Midwestern
context of the original plan and how well it would serve the purpose of
writing about Great Neck mi1li0naires.l~Knowing enough about Gerlach
thus helped the author to develop the “new angle” for his novel. Indeed,
the eight chapters of the manuscript of The Great Gatsby that had been
compIeted by September 1924, as well as the galleys and revised galleys
that incorporate Perkins’s suggestions for improvement, contain features

and details that owe their presence in the text to Max Gerlach and par-
ticular incidents in his life. The following sections will identify these
features and details, trace them as they develop in the stages of compo-
sition from manuscript to printed book, and attempt to assess the role
they played in shaping the novel.
§
Gerlach was obviously known to his neighbors as a bootleg-
ger. Zelda remembered him being in trouble over bootlegging, and in
Wilson’s The Crime in the Whistler Room, the wealthy parvenu based on
Fitzgeralds report is also referred to as a bootlegger-as a “gentleman
bootlegger,”to be exact. Gerlach would appear to be the chief model for
Jay Gatsby in his role as a bootlegger primarily because in the 1924
manuscript of the novel (as opposed to the printed version) bootlegging
is hinted at throughout as his only source of income. But Gatsby is a
bootlegger chiefly because he is rumored to be one by his party guests
and taken to be one by Jordan Baker and Tom Buchanan. Along with
other details of his life, references to actual bootlegging activities are
kept in the background, which supports the impression that he is agentle-
man bootlegger. Telephone calls from Chicago, Philadelphia, and De-
troit (Facsimile of the Mmuscript [hereafter M S ] 53, 59, 228) are re-
lated to his business but do not help to identify it. Tom Buchanan sur-
mises that he is “one of that bunch that hangs around Meyer Wolfshiem”
(184, 194), but Meyer Wolfshiem’s own explanation of how he started
Gatsby in business contains no definite hint as to its nature. Since it
does not implicate Gatsby in the long series of offenses that Wolfshiem
was tried for-grand larceny, forgery, bribery, and dealing in stolen
bonds-the explanation seems to suggest that Gatsby is what the ru-
mors call him, a big-time bootlegger.
What may strike the reader as the author‘s deliberate mystification
of his protagonist in the manuscript finds a different explanation in light
of subsequent correspondence between author and editor. In his de-
tailed response to the manuscript in his letter of 20 November 1924,
Perkins has three points to make about the portrayal of the protagonist:
he finds Gatsby “somewhat vague”; he feels that although “his career
must remain mysterious,” Fitzgerald “might here and there interpolate
62 HORSTKRUSE
some phrases, and possibly incidents, little touches of various kinds,

that would suggest that he was in some active way mysteriously en-
gaged” (Life in Letters 87);and he feels that the en bloc presentation of
Gatsby’s biography in the final chapter ought to be abandoned so that
“the truth of some of his claims like ‘Oxford’and his army career come
out bit by bit in the course of actual narrative” (88). Regarding the first
two points, Fitzgerald replied as follows:
Strange to say my notion of Gatsby’svagueness was O.K. What

you . . . found wanting was that:
I myse2f didn’t know what Gatsby looked like or was en-
gaged in + you felt it. If I’d known + kept it from you you’d
have been too impressed with my knowledge to protest. This is
a complicated idea but I’m sure you’ll understand. But I know
now-and as a penalty for not having known first, in other
words to make sure[,] I’m going to tell more. (91)
In its narratological implications not unlike Hemingway’siceberg theory,16
the answer specifies that it was not Gerlach as his model that he was
uncertain about, but that it was Gatsby as a fictive character whom he
had lost grasp of temporarily: “I had him for awhile then lost him + now
I know I have him again” (91).17
Despite Fitzgerald’s admission of Gatsby’s vagueness, however,
there are quite a few sentences that deliberately portray him as an indi-
vidual and show what he looked like. Nick Carraway describes his neigh-
bor as “a handsome blue-eyed man” ( M S 52) and keeps calling him ”the
blue-eyed man” until he identifies himself. The subsequent summary of
the impression Gatsby has made on Nick continues to emphasize the
stunning quality of his eyes:
He was undoubtedly one of the handsomest men I had
ever seen-the dark blue eyes opening out into lashes of shin-
ing jet were arresting and unforgettable. A sort of hesitant
candour opened them wide when he listened but when he spoke
the hesitancy was transferred to his voice and I got a distinct
impression that he was picking his words with care. (53)
In relating how Gatsby calls on him one morning in June, Nick once
more comments on the striking beauty of his eyes: “He saw me looking
at him and suddenly he smiled-his eyes, damp and shining like blue
oil, opened up with such brilliance that it was an embarrassing bril-
liance” (66).1*
There is no evidence that the blue eyes actually were an identify-
ing mark of the Teutonic-featured Gerlach. But it is remarkable that the
above description seems to take its cue directly from that of the 1 1-year-
old Rudolph Miller in “Absolution.” Father Schwartz, when turning
around to face the boy, finds himself “staring into two enormous, stac-
cato eyes, lit with gleaming points of cobalt light” (159). Later Rudolph
appears as the “beautiful little boy with eyes like blue stones, and lashes
that sprayed open from them like flower-petals” (169). Along with two
further references to the beauty of his eyes (169, 171), these descrip-
tions indicate an obvious continuity in the portrayal of a detail that ap-
pears to have been bound up with the German ethnic background that
Fitzgerald has been shown to have been interested in preserving.19
Another feature, as striking as that of the blue eyes, emerges in the
moment when Nick first meets Gatsby, just before the butler summons
him to the telephone to take a call from Chicago:
He was [no] older than me-somehow I had expected
a florid and corrupulent person in his middle years-yet he
was somehow not like a young man at all. There was a tre-
mendous dignity about him, a retiscence which you could
fear or respect according to your temperment but on the other
hand a formality that just barely missed being absurd, that
always trembled on the verge of absurdity until you found
yourself wondering why you didn’t laugh. (53)”
The formality runs to such oddity that when Gatsby “was standing in
the hall, speeding his last guests” he was “bowing slightly over every
lady’s hand” (59). The distinctly European and faintly aristocratic, chiv-
alrous manner appears ludicrous because such behavior is wholly inap-
propriate to the occasion and even more so to a parvenu bootlegger. The
model for this deportment couId well have been Max von Gerlach, the
“gentleman bootlegger” who claimed a social status and an aristocratic
rank that he had no title to, either through achievement or heritage. The
hypercorrectness resulting from such pretension might have been in-
tensified in Gerlachs case by the facts that he had been born into a
64 HORSTKRUSE
German immigrant family, had had little formal schooling, and had spent
a number of years outside the United States. In the following passage in
chapter 3 of the manuscript (which survives in chapter 4 of the novel
only in a much revised version), the possible influence of Gerlach on
the portrayal of this land of behavior is made all but explicit by refer-
ence to “foreignness.” At the same time, the passage illustrates how,
with great care and deliberation, Fitzgerald set about to develop in his
protagonist the Americanness that he turns into the distinguishing fea-
ture of his novel:
That faint foriegness, that >formal< caution

-dm >that enveloped >his< every word<
was less perceptible in the sunshine and as he stood balanc-
ing on the dashboard of his car -f-hqk&m he >seemed
very< American h, after all in His body had >about it<
that resourcefulness of movement ;> L pal-
t i d a r >which< stamps of all our young men- -it is
due, I suppose, fmm >to< the absence of heavy lifting work
in youth and, even more, from>to< the formless grace of our
nervous sporadic games. (66)
For all the American resourcefulness of movement ascribed to him, the
impression of Gatsby’s “foreignness” is retained. He chokes a little on
the phrase “educated at Oxford,” so that Nick “began to believe that
there was something sinister about him after all” (69). Gatsby’s speak-
ing with hesitancy and picking his words with great care ( 5 3 ) ,as well as
Jordan Baker‘s remark that he is “a terrible roughneck underneath it all”
(92),further argue for the influence of Gerlach on Fitzgerald’s portrayal.
Gatsby’s dignity and aloofness, which reassert themselves after he has
proffered his spurious biography (76), as well as the isolation and reti-
cence that are stressed throughout the text, are similarly traceable to
the faint foreignness of demeanor that is likely to have characterized the
man who had decided to cast himself as Max von Gerlach.
Fitzgerald’s reaction to Perkins’s response to the typescript of ??ne
Great Gatsby contains what appears to be yet another, more precise,
reference to Gerlach as a source for the portrayal of his protagonist,
though again the author refrains from identifying him by name. Sup-
porting his argument of Gatsby’s vagueness by indicating that although
Nick Carraway mentions that he is little older than himself, Perlns yet
felt that “a reader . . . gets an idea that Gatsby is a much older man
than he is” (Lqe in Letters 87). Fitzgerald replied as follows:
It seems of almost mystical significance to me that
you thot he was older-the man I had in mind, half uncon-
sciously,was older (a specific individual) and evidently, with-
out so much as a definate word, I conveyed the fact. -or
rather. . . I conveyed it without a word that I can at present
or for the life of me, trace. (91)
While the manuscript did in fact state that Gatsby, though little older
than the narrator, was “not like a young man at all” (53), Perhns appar-
ently got that impression solely by indirect means. But it is true that
Gerlach, the “specific individual” parenthetically referred to by
Fitzgerald, actually was all of 36 years old in the summer of 1922, a
full 11 years older than the author. Though in his reply to Perkins
Fitzgerald does not grant him more than “half unconscious” influence,
he does admit that Gerlach affected his portrait of Gatsby, purportedly
even beyond his own awareness.
Both instances of Fitzgerald’s reactions to Perkins’s letter of 20
November 1924 occur in the context of the two separate replies of
December 1924, which show his enormous relief at finding his own
high opinion of the novel shared by his editor and at seeing the work
appreciated and praised in the highest terms. It is probably for this
reason that the author, though he himself had actually believed that
his “notion of Gatsby’s vagueness was O.K.,” fully conceded the two
points Perkins was making. Later statements of his that he made after
the novel was published will be shown to correct that assessment and
to let Gerlach come into his own as a rich, if finally limited, source of
inspiration. Along with the following survey of further substantial cor-
respondences between the biographies of the real bootlegger and his
fictive counterpart, those statements indicate that Fitzgerald knew
Gerlach better than he felt it necessary to admit.
4
Gerlach’s 1923 salutation “How are you and the family old
sport?”-evenif it was somewhat presumptuous, though perhaps typi-
cal, coming from a parvenu bootlegger; and even if “the familiar ex-
66 HORSTKHUSE
pression held no more familiarity than the hand which reassuringly

brushed my shoulder” (Cambridge Gatsby 43-44)-betokens some de-
gree of acquaintance and indicates that Gerlach and Fitzgerald knew
some basic facts about each other‘s lives. Fitzgerald, as has been main-
tained throughout this essay, knew Gerlach and his biography well enough
to have seen the latter‘s potential as a protagonist once he started devel-
oping the “new angle” for his novel. In addition to making Gatsby a
bootlegger and giving him some characteristics of the parvenu, he can
be assumed to have borrowed from Gerlach some details that identify
him as a source of the protagonist-including, of course, the familiar
salutation “old sport,” which he decided to turn into Gatsby’s defining
expression.Another look at these and other details borrowed and adapted
for the purposes of the novel brings out Gerlach more fully as a chief
source of inspiration for a compelling fictional character. Once again, I
follow the manuscript version of The Great Gatsby as the document
closest to the facts that the novel builds upon.
One of the intriguing features in the introduction of Gatsby is the
rumors that circulate about him even at his own parties. While these
rumors are cited as “a tribute to the romantic speculation Gatsby in-
spired” (45), their far-fetched allegations, along with their very presence
in the text, can best be accounted for by the ethnic background, family,
and military service of the person whom Gatsby was modeled on. Given
his name and ethnic background, Max Gerlach is likeiy to have been
accused of having been “a German spy during the war,” of being “a
nephew or cousin of Kaiser Wilhelm’s” and “nephew to Von
Hindenburg,”*’even of having grown up in Germany, and he is likely to
have been absolved of these charges by the circumstance that he was
“in the American army during the war” (45). For Fitzgerald, who had
served in the US Army from October 1917 to February 1919, and for
whom his military service continued to loom large in his imagination, it
would have been natural in the early 1920s to talk with others about his
wartime experiences, just as Nick Carraway does with Gatsby at their
first meeting. It is perhaps no coincidence, therefore, that Gatsby was
commissioned a first lieutenant just as Gerlach was, and that Gatsby
was discharged as a major, the very rank that Gerlach seems to have
appropriated after the war, along with the nobility predicate. Like
Fitzgerald, however, Gerlach did not go overseas. Gatsby’s battle experi-
ence and his deeds of courage, needed for purposes of characterization

and plot development, were evolved from other sources,22and the de-
tails of the Meuse-Argonne offensive were researched and adjusted with
care so as to render them historically probable.23But Gerlach probably
continued as Fitzgeralds chief source for the details of Gatsby’s civilian
career as a bootlegger. A passage in the manuscript directly reflects
Gerlach’s situation after his discharge in 1919 as it has been recon-
structed from available evidence. It also draws on Fitzgeralds own
memory of that year, and thus, while providing extenuating circumstances
for a demobilized soldier‘s drifting into a criminal career, it also helps to
explain the ambivalent feelings that the narrator is to develop toward
the protagonist:
It was such wild luck that he should have run into

Wolfshiem-Gatsby of all the young officers that flushed,
feverish spring poured loose into New York. After losing Daisy
he must have been ripe for anything and there were b t d
>a good many< others beginning life over again at twenty
dollars a week who would have welcomed such remunera-
tive corruption and even found in it the vanishing stimulous
of the war. (246)
As has been noted, GerIachs various jobs and activities in the
United States and abroad-and, most notably, his military service and
family background-were indeed singularly appropriate qualifications
for a successful career as a gentleman bootlegger. Exactly the same is
made to be true of Gatsby. He too is shown to leave behind the confin-
ing circumstances of his youth and ethnic background. More obviously
than in the case of Gerlach, but certainly in a similar fashion, his uni-
form is shown to give him an entry into the world of Daisy Fay, and then,
along with his rank and service record, into the world of big-time crime.
In his eulogy, Meyer Wolfshiem is made to stress this very detail and to
choose words that in a general way similarly fit the situation of Gerlach:
A young major in the army covered over with medals he got
in the war. He was so poor he had to keep on wearing his
uniform because he couldn’t buy any regular clothes. . . . I
raised him up out of nothing, right out of the gutter. I saw
68 HORSTKRUSE
right away he was [a] fine appearing gentlemanly young man

and when he told me he was an Ogsford I knew I could use
him good. I got him to join up in the American Legion and he
got to stand high there. . . . (245)24
Thus Gatsby and Gerlach shared more than the position of gentleman
bootlegger, they also shared many details of life that led up to that posi-
tion and prepared them for it.
But Gerlach never fought on a European battlefield and did not
get sent to Oxford after the Armistice. He did visit the United Kingdom
in 1910, however, perhaps in his capacity as manager of the Motor Car
Exchange at 250 West 84th Street, NewYork City, for the ship manifest
(S. S. St. Paul) lists his occupation as machinist. Given his impulse to
act as a confidence man, he could perhaps have exploited that visit along
with his other social pretensions. In 1939, for example, he told his land-
lady that “he was a former German baron” and that “he had attended
some English university”; and Miss Mayer, in whose apartment he shot
himself, testified to his “military bearing and “Oxford accent” (“Car
Dealer Dying).
All in all, then, the biography of Max von Gerlach as Fitzgerald
knew it included blatantly fraudulent claims to social distinction. A spu-
rious university connection, the self-conferred rank of major, and his
pretended nobility, however helpful they may have been to Gerlach in
starting and pursuing his criminal career, made his social status very
precarious. In addition to the constant fear of being indicted as a boot-
legger, they could have made him behave as cautiously and as strangely
as Gatsby is shown to do by his author. I suggest that Fitzgerald, in his
attempt to underscore the peculiar Americanness of the rags-to-riches
story of his protagonist, found Gerlachs nobility pretensions anything
but the right material for his purposes, just as the Catholic element of
the original plan would have run counter to the idea of a novel that,
according to his last-minute wishes, was to have been titled “Under the
Red, White, and Blue.” Accordingly, the matter is kept on the level of
mere rumor, where the author knew how to turn it to great effect. He
made much more of Gerlachs pretended rank of major, but again he
adapted the motif, slowly dispelling Nick Carraway’s disbelief regarding
Gatsby’s military exploits rather than exposing him as a braggart.
What on the basis of available evidence must have figured lowest

in the hierarchy of Gerlachs pretensions, the Oxford connection-which
might have been no more than a humorous attribution to begin with-
was turned to greatest account in the novel. To take up and exploit this
detail and have Gatsby pretend to be an Oxford man must rate as a
sheer stroke of genius.25It fits the character of his protagonist and the
exigencies of his plot in equal measure, giving the author the opportu-
nity to develop Gatsby’s social pretensions out of the very twist in the
story (the delayed return from the war) that precipitates his loss of Daisy
and the corruption of his dream. Moreover, the claim of being an Ox-
ford man, used to structure the novel through a sequence of varying
versions and varying responses to these versions, admits a denouement
that enabIes Gatsby to save face, at least in the eyes of the narrator.
When Nick Carraway learns about the circumstances of Gatsby’s stay
in England and hears him say that he “can’t really call [himselfl an Ox-
ford man,” he has another one “of those renewals of complete faith in
him” that he has experienced before (Cambridge Gatsby 100-01). Such
a resolution may indeed reflect the particular nature of Gerlach’s fabri-
cations as well. The nobility presumption above alI-if it did in fact
grow out of an ancestor‘s official position with the German Kaiser
Friedrich 111-would seem similarly defensible to a sympathetic wit-
ness: “what better right does a man possess than to invent his own ante-
cedents?” is what Fitzgerald has his narrator proclaim in a passage de-
leted from chapter 8 of the galleys (161).
§
Although based on compelling parallels and circumstantial
rather than prima facie evidence, the putative influence of Gerlach’s
self-conferred nobility and military rank on the portrayal of Gatsby’s
deportment in general, and the implications of his avowed Oxford edu-
cation in particular, are good measures of the impact that Gerlach had
on the thematic concerns of the novel. In these details the effect can be
said to go well beyond external similarities of person and biography. With
just a minimum of speculation, they could be extended to include pride
in the possession of an expensive car (“Do you like my car? . . . It’s the
handsomest car in New York . . .” [ M S 661) and a hydroplane (“he told
me suddenly that he had just bought a hydro-plane and was going to try
70 HORSTKRUSE
it out in the morning [52]). The slight adjustments in the “Schedule”

and “General Rules” of young James Gatz that Fitzgerald made from
manuscript to galley might also reflect Gerlach’s interest in technical
matters (MS 248-49).26 Still, to critics and readers who are working
solely from the printed text of The Great Gutsby, the claim that Gerlach
was an important inspiration for the portrayal of the protagonist must
seem less convincing, particularly in view of additional source materials
that have attracted considerable attention in Fitzgerald scholarship and
have pointed to persons who played a more conspicuous role in the
Roaring Twenties than Gerlach did. Most of these additional materials,
however, became part of the text only when the author began to revise
the work according to the criticism and suggestions made by Perkins.
About the middle of February 1925, “after six weeks of uninterrupted
work (Life in Letters 95), Fitzgerald returned the revised galleys and in
a letter to Perkins specified the nature of his revisions and additions.
The first two points in his list particularly concern the portrayal of his
protagonist: “( 1.) I’ve brought Gatsby to life; (2.) I’ve accounted for his
money” (96).As early as in his second letter of December 1924, he had
told Perkins that for the latter point he was planning to draw on the
Fuller-McGee case: “after careful searching of the files (of a man’s mind
here) for the Fuller Magee case + after having had Zelda draw pictures
until her fingers ache I know Gatsby better than I know my own child
(91).
The galley corrections of the novel, its inserts above all, demon-
strate how Fitzgerald wove the particulars of the much-publicized Fuller-
McGee case into the story, and in doing so transformed Gatsby from the
bootlegger he was rumored to be in the manuscript version into the big-
time operator involved in a wide range of criminal activities he became
in the final version of the text. Gatsby’s statement, “Oh, I’ve been in
several things . . . , I was in the drug business and then I was in the oil
business. But I’m not in either one now . . .” (Galleys 76-77) and the
telephone call from Chicago-‘Young Parke’s in trouble. They picked
him up when he handed the bonds over the counter” (179)-are ex-
amples of inserts in which Fitzgerald “accounted for his money” and
“brought Gatsby to life.” Henry Dan Piper is certainly correct in con-
cluding that of all of the author‘s Long Island neighbors, Edward M.
Fuller is “the one whose outlines are most clearly discernible” in the
novel (1 15); and it is no wonder that even before he published his ex-
haustive study of Fitzgeralds use of the details of the case, Richard D.
Lehan should have concluded that Fuller was the author‘s inspiration
for Gatsby (‘The Great Gatsby and Its Sources” 71). However, Piper also
perceived that “Fitzgerald borrowed more heavily from the newspaper
accounts of Fuller’s business affairs in creating Gatsby than he had from
the details of Fuller’s personality” (1 19). Indeed, while the scope of
Gatsby’s criminal activities widened from the galleys to the final ver-
sion, the essential features of his character and demeanor as suggested
by Gerlach remained unchanged. The galleys and the galley inserts re-
veal only minor adjustments to these features. Insert A to galley 15, for
instance, deletes a remark about Gatsby’s “stiff dignitf but emphasizes
his “formality of speech” by adding the adjective “elaborate” (33, 35).
Insert A to galley 17 deletes “bowing slightly over every woman’s hand”
but substitutes “ceremonious formality” as a less specific term (40,4 1).
Still, one galley insert is of special interest. At the beginning of
what in the printed text is chapter 4, following the guest list, the author
has Gatsby drive up to Nick‘s house to take him to lunch in New York
City. The scene opens with a conversation about Gatsby’s “gorgeous
car” and his pride of ownership, which-with slightly more detail in
both the manuscript and the galleys-clearly reflects Gerlach’s abiding
professional and personal interest in automobiles, even if the talk does
not center on technicalities. At the point where Nicks description of his
ride with Gatsby begins, Fitzgerald decided to place the following in-
sert:
I had talked with him perhaps half a dozen times in the past
month and found, to my disappointment, that he had little to
-luw.’’ So my first impression, that he was a

person of some undefined consequence, had gradually faded
and he had become simply the proprietor of an smtd p . crte
elaborate roadhouse next door. (5 1)
In assessing the role of Gerlach in the writing of The Great Gatsby, this
passage can be taken to have a double function. On the one hand, it
72 HORSTKRUSE
effectively offsets Gatsby’s subsequent burst of eloquence regarding his

spurious autobiography and the first version of his claim of an Oxford
education. On the other hand, it points to a significant conclusion that
Fitzgerald himself had arrived at in the course of writing his novel: Max
von Gerlach, though he had helped Fitzgerald redefine his plan and
start his work, was not a suitable model to carry him through the pro-
cess of composition to the end. After all, even if like Gatsby he had at
first appeared to be “a person of some undefined consequence,” Gerlach
only a few years before had been described as a man whose brain was
filled with mechanics to the exclusion of everything else. However in-
teresting his success story may have appeared to Fitzgerald in the begin-
ning, his biography would seem to indicate that he was no man of ideas
and had his limitations as a model for the protagonist of the novel as it
developed and took shape in the course of composition. Indeed,
Fitzgerald came to see this very clearly, as he specified in two further
direct references to the man who had inspired his protagonist. Both
were made after the publication of The Great Gutsby and fully agree in
their final assessment of Gerlach, though again without mentioning him
by name. Responding to incisive critical remarks made by his friend
John Peale Bishop (the model of Thomas Parke D’Invilliers, the poet in
This Side ofPuradise and “author”of the epigraph to that novel), Fitzgerald
wrote to him on 9 August 1925:
you are right about Gatsby being blurred and patchy. I never
at any one time saw him clear myself-for he started as one
man I knew and then changed into myself-the amalgam
was never complete in my mind. (Letters 358)
In a 1927 inscription in a copy of the novel for Charles T. Scott, the
author repeated essentially the same facts:
Gatsby was never quite real to me. His original served
for a good enough exterior until about the middle of the book
he grew thin and I began to fill him with my own emotional
life. So he’s synthetic-and that’s one of the flaws in this
book. (Documentary Volume 27)
Whatever story Gerlach may have told about his emotional life-
by 1918 he was divorced from his first wife-Fitzgerald’s decision to fill
the protagonist of his novel with his “own emotional life” certainly ac-
counts for the fervor of Gatsby’s feelings and the credibility of his quest.
Zelda’s infatuation with Edouard Jozan during the writing of the novel
in France in the summer of 1924 must have intensified the presentation
of the feeling of having lost “the old warm world (Cambridge Gatsby
126) that pervades the novel: “One of the lost illusions that informed
T h e Great Gatsby,” writes Bruccoli, tiwasFitzgerald’s certainty in Zelda’s
fidelity” (Some Sort of Epic Grandeur 200). In this way the autobio-
graphical element, confined so far to certain aspects in the portrait of
Nick Carraway, entered into the delineation of the protagonist.
But this came against all expectation. As late as April 1924,
Fitzgerald had informed Perkins as follows regarding his work on the
novel:
I don’t know anyone who has used up so much personal ex-
perience as I have at 27. Copperfield and Pendennis were
written at past 40, while This Side of Paradise was three books
and T h e B. and D . was two. So in my new novel I’m thrown
directly on purely creative work-not trashy imaginings as in
my stories but the sustained imagination of a sincere yet ra-
diant world. So I tread slowly and carefully and at times in
considerable distress. This book will be a consciously artistic
achievement and must depend on that as the first books did
not. (Letters 163)
In other words, after This Side of Paradise and T n e Beautiful and Damned,
The Great Gatsby was not going to be another autobiographical book.
Having used up, if not wasted, all of his autobiographical material,
Fitzgerald concludes that the protagonist of the new novel must be the
product of purely creative work. According to this early statement of
what, in the context of Tender Is the Night, the author was to defend as
his method of composite characterization, Gatsby was to be created by
combining material taken from various sources other than his own life.
And this is precisely the method that he did follow in the delineation of
his protagonist. One source was, as he told John Jamieson in 1934, per-
haps the image of “some forgotten farm type of Minnesota that I have
known and forgotten, and associated at the same moment with some
sense of romance” (Letters 509). This protagonist was tried out in the
74 HORSTKRUSE
material from which “Absolution” came to be salvaged. Next there was

Gerlach, who had his own past-and perhaps his physiognomy-modi-
fied by what he was made to borrow from the Minnesota forerunner.
Gerlach helped to transform the original plan for the novel and develop
the “new angle,” but he carried the author only to “about the middle of
the book,” when he could provide no more than “a good enough exte-
rior.”At this point and for this reason the need arose for Fitzgerald to
deviate from his reliance on “purely creative work.” This was the point
when “I began to fill him with my own emotional life.” Not only did the
“good enough exterioi‘ continue to function in the rest of the novel, but
as I have shown, the model of Gerlach also touched the thematic con-
cerns of the novel. Borrowing and integrating additional details from
Edward M. Fuller and the Fuller-McGee case to “[bring] Gatsby to life”
and “[account] for his money” complemented the portrayal of the
protagonist‘s circumstances but did not affect his character. Of the fami-
lies and persons whom the author identified as sources of individual
chapters-the Rumsies, the Hitchcocks, the Goddards, the Dwanns,
the Swopes, and Robert C. Kerr, all of them Great Neck neighbors of
the Fitzgeralds or people they knew during their residence there-only
the last made a significant contribution to the characterization of the
protagonist.
What Kerr told Fitzgerald about his encounter in 1907 with the
industrialist and yachtsman Edward Robert Gilman on Sheepshead Bay
in Brooklyn and his subsequent three-and-a-half-year service as Gilman’s
secretary aboard his yacht resulted in the most important addition, that
of the story of young Jay Gatsby and Dan Cody. But as straight rags-to-
riches matter, Kerr‘s account proved readily compatible with the out-
lines of Gatsby’s biography and fully consistent with the facts of Gerlachs
life. Gerlach’s name change, moreover, provided a concomitant success-
story motif. In its particular local adaptability, Kerr‘s account also served
the author well in his need to integrate the Midwestern and the Great
Neck materials. All things considered, then, neither Fitzgeralds own
emotional life, nor the additional sources, however important they fi-
nally were for the characterization of the protagonist and the impact of
the novel, ever fully canceled out Gerlach and his contribution to The
Great Gatsby. Even if he ceased to function as a model when Fitzgerald
began to focus on emotional life as the all-important quality of his char-
acter, the role Gerlach played in creating Gatsby helped to contain the
autobiographical impulse and to objectify the portrait of the protago-
nist. Fitzgeralds achievement in this regard has been well perceived by
Bishop. In a second letter about f i e Great Gatsby he wrote to its author:
I can’t understand your resentment of the critic’s failure to

perceive your countenance behind Gatsby’s mask. To me it
was evident enough. I haven’t watched you living up to the
Fitzgerald legend since 1917 for nothing. But it seems to me
interesting, if at all, privately only. The point is that you have
created a distinct and separate character, perhaps the first
male you have ever created on the scale [word or words miss-
ing] a novel, whom you have filled, as is inevitable, with your
own emotional life. But to ask people to see you in Gatsby
seems to me an arrant piece of personal vanity; as an artist it
should flatter you that they did not see it.
(Bruccoli and Duggan 175)
If Gatsby turned out to be a distinct and separate character after all, it

was Gerlach who helped to make him such.
All in all, then, Gerlach did play a vital role in helping Fitzgerald to
transform the original plan for his third novel into what became The
Great Gatsby, and Gerlach’s character as well as his biography provided
much specific circumstantiation for the texture of the narrative. Such
findings are no argument, however, to begin to read the novel-any more
than has been done so farZ7-in terms of the German ethnic background
of its protagonist. As the author began to draw on his own emotional life
for the portrayal of Gatsby, he allowed the German element to recede
and the references to the protagonist’s German past to assume a differ-
ent function. The Great Gatsby thus transcends these and all its other
sources. But to the reader interested in the creative process, the study
of such matter remains indispensable. It reveals how Fitzgeralds art
developed from and flourished on the finely observed detail of the im-
mediate circumstances of his life. And even the critic can profit from
what the compositional history of the novel tells him. Gatsby-to point
to a current debate-was never thought of as either Jewish or black;28
he was simply the man with an immigrant background trying to pass
and to make good as an American.
76 HORSTKRUSE
Notes
1. For a reproduction of the clipping see Bruccoli, “How Are You and the
Family Old Sport?” 34.
2. The Crime in the Whistler Room is the first of three plays reprinted in
Edmund Wilson’s This Room and This Gin and These Sandwiches. When
reading Wilson’s description in his own copy of the book, Fitzgerald wrote
in the margin: “I had told Bunny [Wilson] my plan for Gatsby” (Wilson 75;
facsimile in Bruccoli, E Scott Fitzgerald: Inscriptions item 86). Fitzgeralds
account is corroborated by what Wilson later told Mizener about the inci-
dent, as Mizener relayed to Gerlach in a letter of 15 January 1951.
3. It is my pleasure to acknowledge the assistance of the following mem-
bers of the two von Gerlach families in correspondence and interviews
relating to their family history and in providing genealogical documents:
Mireta von Gerlach, Klaus-Henning von Gerlach, Anita Sylvia von Gerlach,
Ernst von Gerlach, Dr. Peter von Gerlach, and Harald Richert of the
Genealogische Gesellschaft, Sitz Hamburg e.V
4. I am greatly obliged to Mitchell Yockelson, Reference Archivist, Mod-
ern Military Records Branch, National Archives and Records Administra-
tion, College Park, Maryland, for his expert advice and assistance in iden-
tifymg and locating the relevant files.
5 . All of these data are confirmed by a World War I service card for Max
Stork Gerlach in the New York State Archives in Albany, New York. This
document, based on World War I service records in the National Person-
nel Records Center in St. Louis, Missouri, expressly states that Gerlach
did not serve overseas. I am obliged to James D. Folts, Head of Reference
Services, New York State Archives, Albany, for a copy of the card and
additional information.
6. The reason for the gap in the list of employers in Gerlach’s personalia
sheet for 19 12 to 19 18 may well be that the dates given for 1900 to 19 12
took up all the available space, and that its possible continuation on an
extra sheet was lost. Responses from persons interviewed by Brennan in-
dicate that Gerlach continued to be involved with automobiles through-
out the period not covered in his list.
7 . See Corso, “One Not-Forgotten Summer Night” and “Gatsby and Rob-
ert Kerr.”
8. This discovery was made when searching Ellis Island records for pos-
sible von Gerlach immigrants from Germany.
9. The first case, heard on 9 May 1927, involved charges on four separate
counts: selling, on 7 March 1927, four drinks of whiskey; selling, on 9
March, four drinks of whiskey; possessing, on 9 March, “at 5 1 West 58th
Street, New York City, . . . a quantity of intoxicating liquor, to wit, 19
bottles of Scotch whiskey, 3 bottles of gin, 1 bottle Bacardi rum, 1 bottle
Holland gin, 2 bottles Chartreuse, 1 bottle Champagne, 1 bottle 3/4 full
of alcohol”; and possessing, on 9 March, “a quantity of labels, corks and
tops.” The defendant pleaded not guilty and was fined $200. The second
case, heard on 5 August 1927, involved the charge of possessing, on 24
July 1927, “at 5 1 West 58th Street, New York City, . . . 1 quart bottle filled
with whiskey.”The defendant was fined the sum of $10.
I greatly appreciate the assistance and cooperation of Richard Gelbke,
Archives Specialist, National Archives and Records Administration, North-
east Region, New York City, in obtaining these records.
10. See, for instance, Eble 82
1 1. See Bruccoli’s introduction to The Notebooks of E Scott Fitzgerald. See
also Anderson.
12. Bruccoli writes that Fitzgerald “seems to have felt that the by name-
ending had an aristocratic sound.” He also points out that there is “a fash-
ionable family named Katzby in Fitzgeralds 1923 story ‘Dice, Brassknuckles
and Guitar”’ (Apparatus 119). The Katzbys live in Southampton, a fash-
ionable Long Island community like Great Neck and Manhasset Neck
(West Egg and East Egg). According to the protagonist, “It’s about the
most aristocratic watering trough-watering-place there is around here”
(57).
13. The sheer volume of documents relating to Kaiser Friedrich 111 in the
Geheimes Preussisches Staatsarchiv in Berlin would seem to preclude
easy identification of the person referred to in the 1918 MID report as
Max Gerlach’s father or grandfather. Specialists and staff familiar with
this complex material agree that a member of the nobility of whatever
rank would have left a trace and not escaped their notice. But there is
definitely no mention of a zlon Gerlach in the diaries and correspondence
of Friedrich 111.
I gratefully acknowledge the assistance of Professor Wolfgang Stribrny
as well as Dr. Peter Letkemann and Dr. Iselin Gundermann of the Amtliches
Geheimes Staatsarchiv, Stiftung Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin-Dahlem.
It is also noteworthy that, at the time of Gerlach’s suicide attempt,
the German consulate is reported as saying that “they had no record of a
baron by the name of Gerlach” (“Car Dealer Dying).
78 HORSTKRUSE
14. Zelda Fitzgerald to Oscar and Xandra Kalman, n.d. [summer 19231,
Minnesota Historical Society, qtd. in Bruccoli, Some Sort of Epic Gran-
deur 184. The Fleischmann Company’s involvement in illicit production
and distribution of alcohol received much attention from 1922 to 1924-
so much, in fact, that Zelda would simply take it for granted that the
Kalmans in St. Paul were familiar with Fleischmann’s name. There is a
possibility, too, that Fleischmann’s lifestyle, like that of several other resi-
dents whom Fitzgerald was to identify by name, contributed to the por-
trayal of Great Neck life in The Great Gutsby.
15. In all probability, Fitzgeralds process of getting to know Gerlach is
reflected and perhaps even hinted at in the manuscript of The Great Gatsby
in a brief passage deleted from page 2:
Little by little, for >he was not< one of those men who make
general confessions, I came to know more about Gatsby than
anyone else ever knew. And in telling the story of that summer
on Long Island I shall let him drift into it casually, as he did in
life, without suspicion that he would come to dominate it-
that he who walked so lightly <shoul> would be the only one
to leave footprints in that vacuum after all. (MS 3)
His seeming presumptuousness in addressing Fitzgerald as “old sport”
notwithstanding, Gerlach is reported to have been as reserved as Gatsby
is shown to be in the early chapters of the novel. In the Long Island Star-
Journal story of his suicide attempt, for instance, the police are quoted as
saying “that Gerlach was not given to talkmg about his past, his relatives
or his personal affairs” (“Car Dealer Dying). This item was found by
Howard G. Comen of the Comen Detective Agency, Charleston, SC, and
has hndly been made available to me by Sharon Churcher of Associated
Newspapers Ltd. [USA] /Mailon Sunday, New York City.
Fitzgeralds deletion of the passage is in accordance with his deci-
sion to present events dramatically, by showing rather than telling, and
serves “to preserve the sense of mystery,” as he once called it (letter to
John Jamieson, 15 Apr. 1934. [Letters 5091).
16. The same observation is made by Bruccoli, Cambridge Gatsby xixn20.
17. The paragraph as a whole indicates that the author is discussing prob-
lems of character delineation, not his relation to Gerlach as an actual
person.
18. This sentence, in slightly different form, was transferred to page 69 of

the manuscript but not carried into the galley version.
19. One cannot quite exclude the possibility, however, that even before he
began to assert himself as an important force in the development of a new
angle for the novel, Gerlach had begun to influence Fitzgerald’s writing in
certain small details. After all, both “Dice, Brassknuckles, and Guitar”
and the early draft of the novel from which “Absolution” came to be res-
cued were written three or even nine months after the author had moved
to Great Neck. The story clearly draws on Long Island material similar to
that in The Great Gutsby, and the early version of the novel seems to have
at least hinted at what Gerlach’s person and biography were to suggest for
the version written after the new angle had been decided on.
20. The “no” in the first sentence is called for by the context. It is under-
stood in the manuscript as a whole and in Perkins’s response to it.
21. Zelda’sremark that Gerlach “was said to be General Pershings nephew’’
(for which I have discovered no justification in the Pershing family history,
other than that early in the war the German-American press claimed that
his ancestry was German) may go back to her having heard this allegation
somewhere or to the text of the novel itself. Would she have confused the
General of the Armies of the United States with his German counterpart,
von Hindenburg? Like Gerlach and the Fitzgeralds, Pershing was a resi-
dent of Great Neck, but on his retirement in September 1922 he gave up
his home there because of publicity. This was about the time the Fitzgeralds
moved there (“General Pershing Gives U p Great Neck Home”).
22. Here, too, Fitzgerald is known to have drawn on the experiences of a
Great Neck resident, the “patrician war hero and polo star Tommy
Hitchcock,” whom he idolized throughout his life (Meyers 103; see also
Bruccoli, Some Sort of Epic Grandeur 184n).
23. See Bruccoli’s explanatory notes, Cambridge Gutsby 188-89.
24. It has not been possible to verify that Gerlach was a member of the
American Legion. The Legion did not start microfilming records until 1968:
“The records of millions of members that The American Legion had be-
fore that had not been kept in any form by any one” (Hovish).
25. Once more Fitzgerald may have borrowed a detail from the biography
If his Great Neck friend Tommy Hitchcock. As Meyers notes, “After the
80 HORSTKRUSE
war Tommy attended Harvard and (like Jay Gatsby) spent a term or two at
Oxford (103).
26. As it stands in the printed version (Cambridge Gatsby 135), the sched-
ule includes “Study electricity, etc.” and “Study needed inventions.” Both
items reflect Gerlach’s biography and interests more than they do Gatsby’s.
27. See, for instance, Lehan, who points to the multiethnic world of The
Great Gatsby and identifies Nick Carraway as Scottish-American and
Gatsby as German-American (Limits of Wonder 85).
28. See West.
In addition to the indispensable help that has been recognized in the text
and the notes, the following individuals and institutions have assisted my
work on Max von Gerlach, F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gutsby, and the
completion of this study in various ways: First, foremost, and most effec-
tively, my wife, Ursula Kruse, along with my friend of many years, Mat-
thew J. Bruccoli. Next, Fitzgerald scholars Ruth Prigozy, Milton R. Stern,
Jackson R. Bryer, and James Meredith. Experts on related matters: the
late Edmund Spevack, Marvin Spevack, and David Castronovo. Staff
members of Cornell University Library (with special thanks to Katherine
Reagan, Curator of Rare Books, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collec-
tions; and to the Division of Reference Services); Princeton University
Library; National Archives and Records Administration in Washington,
DC, and College Park, MD; and the Library of Congress. Last but not
least, my home university, the Westfaelische Wilhelms-Universitaet Muen-
ster, and its English department, which let me purchase a useful collec-
tion of Fitzgeraldiana during my years as head of American Studies from
1972 to 1994. I am grateful to all the above for their services.
Sharon Churcher of New York City wrote an account of the quest
for the real Gatsby, “Unmasked: The Real Gatsby,” for the London Mail
on Sunday, 23 June 2002, Review Section 60-61. She also deserves credit
for providing me with an additional newspaper clipping about Gerlach’s
suicide attempt previously located by Howard G. Comen (see note 15).
A shorter version of the present article, entitled “The Quest for thf
Real Gatsby: Max (von) Gerlach and the Writing of F. Scott Fitzgerald,
The Great Gatsby,”has appeared in Literatur in Wissenschufiund Unterrich
35.1 (2002): 55-64.
Works cited
Anderson, George. “F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Use of Story Strippings in
Tender Is the Night.” Reader’s Companion to E Scott Fitzgerald’s
Tender Is the Night. Ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli with Judith S.
Baughman. Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 1996. 213-19.
Brennan, Joseph. American Protective League Report on Max Gerlach
for the American Military Intelligence. New York City, 1 Oct.
1918. Record Group 165. National Archives and Records Admin-
istration, College Park, MD.
Bruccoli, Matthew J. Apparatus for E Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby
[Under the Red, White, and Blue]. Columbia: U of South Carolina
P, 1974.
. “‘HowAre You and the Family Old Sport?’-Gerlach and
Gatsby.” FitzgeraldlHeminpay Annual ( 1975): 33-36. Rpd.
Bruccoli, ed., F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby: A Documen-
tary Volume. 20-2 1.
. Some Sort of Epic Grandeur: The Life of E Scott Fitzgerald.
New York: Harcourt, 198 1.
, ed. E Scott Fitzgerald: Inscriptions. Columbia: Bruccoli, 1988.
, ed. E Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby: A Documentary
Volume. Dictionary of Literary Biography 2 19. Detroit: Bruccoli,
2000.
, ed. The Notebook of E Scott Fitzgerald. New York: Harcourt,
1978.
, ed., with the assistance of Judith S. Baughman. E Scott
Fitzgerald: A Life in Letters. New York: Scribner‘s, 1994.
Bruccoli, Matthew J., and Margaret M. Duggan, eds., with the assis-
tance of Susan Walker. Correspondence of E Scott Fitzgerald. New
York: Random, 1980.
“Calls on Friend, Attempts Suicide.” World Telegraph 22 Dec. 1939.
“Car Dealer Dying; Shot Himself in Head; Von Gerlach Tries Suicide in
Village Apartment.” Long Island Star-Journal 21 Dec. 1939: 2.
Corso, Joseph. “Gatsby and Robert Kerr.” E Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great
Gatsby: A Documentary Volume. Ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli. 22-26.
(A reprint, with revisions, of “One Not-Forgotten Summer Night”
by Corso.)
. “One Not-Forgotten Summer Night: Sources for Fictional
Symbols of American Character in The Great Gatsby.” Fitzgeraldl
Hemingway Annual 8 (1976): 9-34.
82 HORSTKRUSE
“Decree Controlling Shipment of Liquor from Cuban Ports.” New York

Times 30 May 1924: 4.
Eble, Kenneth E. E Scott Fitzgerald. Rev. ed. Boston: Twayne, 1977.
Fitzgerald, F. Scott. “Absolution.” The Stories of E Scott Fitzgerald. New
York: Scribner‘s, 195 1. 159-72.
. “Dice, Brassknuckles and Guitar.” Bits of Paradise. Selected by
Matthew J. Bruccoli with the assistance of Scottie Fitzgerald
Smith. 1973. New York: Pocket Books, 1976. 50-76.
. The Great Gatsby. Ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli. Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 199 1.
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J. Bruccoli. Washington: Microcard, 1973.
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duced and arranged by Matthew J. Bruccoli. F. Scott FitzgeraId
Manuscripts vol. 3 . New York: Garland, 1990.
. The Letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Ed. Andrew Turnbull. New
York: Scribner’s, 1963.
“General Pershing Gives Up Great Neck Home Because of Publicity.”
New York Times 26 Sep. 1922: 10.
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Record Group 156. National Archives and Records Administra-
tion, College Park, MD.
Hovish, Joe, Librarian and Curator, American Legion. Letter to the
author. 22 Oct. 200 1.
Index Card for Max Gerlach. Adjutant General’s Office. Record Group
407. National Archives and Records Administration, College Park,
MD.
Lehan, Richard D. “The Great Gatsby and Its Sources.” Critical Essays
on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Ed. Scott Donaldson.
Boston: Hall, 1984. 66-74.
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Mizener, Arthur. T h e Far Side of Paradise: A Biography of E Scott
Fitzgerald. Boston: Houghton, 1951.
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(C0634). Princeton University Library.
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Tribune 22 Dec. 1939.
Piper, Henry Dan. The Great Gatsby: The Novel, the Critics, the Back-
ground. New York: Scribner‘s, 1970.
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Havana, Cuba, 7 April 1924. www.ellisislandrecords.org. Passen-
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Life and Work. New York: Manly, 1998.
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May 1927). National Archives and Records Administration,
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1927). National Archives and Records Administration, Northeast
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The Real Jay Gatsby:

Max von Gerlach,

“I was crazy about The Great Gatsby. Old Gatsby. Old

Tne F. Scott Fitzgerald Reuiew 2002 45

Both Mizener and Bruccoli also point to the description of the

The New York City Department of Health refuses to make

Kaiser Wilhelm’s”(28), “nephew to von Hindenburg’ (49) and suspected

United States3A complementary search, equally extensive, in all avail-

19 18. It confirms 15 August 1918 as the date of his appointment and

SCHOOLS AND INSTITUTIONS ATTENDED WITH

1902-05 Mgr. of garage & Shop in Yonkers, N.Y. “Fuller &

REFERENCES WITH ADDRESSES:

Such investigations were apparently routine for all applicants, but

new career in the real world, for which “Blatchford Samemington”would

In the narrow world of his experience, Rudolph Miller calls on a litho-

immigrant experience, which (under the influence of Fitzgeralds read-

that incorporate Perkins’s suggestions for improvement, contain features

some phrases, and possibly incidents, little touches of various kinds,

Strange to say my notion of Gatsby’svagueness was O.K. What

That faint foriegness, that >formal< caution

pression held no more familiarity than the hand which reassuringly

ence and his deeds of courage, needed for purposes of characterization

It was such wild luck that he should have run into

right away he was [a] fine appearing gentlemanly young man

What on the basis of available evidence must have figured lowest

it out in the morning [52]). The slight adjustments in the “Schedule”

-luw.’’ So my first impression, that he was a

effectively offsets Gatsby’s subsequent burst of eloquence regarding his

material from which “Absolution” came to be salvaged. Next there was

I can’t understand your resentment of the critic’s failure to

If Gatsby turned out to be a distinct and separate character after all, it

18. This sentence, in slightly different form, was transferred to page 69 of

“Decree Controlling Shipment of Liquor from Cuban Ports.” New York

. Note c. 195 1. Arthur Mizener Papers on F. Scott Fitzgerald

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