F. Scott Fitzgerald

Here’s a great reading list given to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s nurse and written down in her handwriting.

Here’s more on the list from Open Culture:

In 1936 — perhaps the darkest year of his life — F. Scott Fitzgerald was convalescing in a hotel in Asheville, North Carolina, when he offered his nurse a list of 22 books he thought were essential reading. The list, above, is written in the nurse’s hand.

Fitzgerald had moved into Asheville’s Grove Park Inn that April after transferring his wife Zelda, a psychiatric patient, to nearby Highland Hospital. It was the same month that Esquire published his essay “The Crack Up”, in which he confessed to a growing awareness that “my life had been a drawing on resources that I did not possess, that I had been mortgaging myself physically and spiritually up to the hilt.”

Here’s the list in full:

1. Sister Carrie, by Theodore Dreiser
2. The Life of Jesus, by Ernest Renan
3. A Doll’s House, by Henrik Ibsen
4. Winesburg, Ohio, by Sherwood Anderson
5. The Old Wives’ Tale, by Arnold Bennett
6. The Maltese Falcon, by Dashiel Hammett
7. The Red and the Black, by Stendahl
8. The Short Stories of Guy De Maupassant, translated by Michael Monahan
9. An Outline of Abnormal Psychology, edited by Gardner Murphy
10. The Stories of Anton Chekhov, edited by Robert N. Linscott
11. The Best American Humorous Short Stories, edited by Alexander Jessup
12. Victory, by Joseph Conrad
13. The Revolt of the Angels, by Anatole France
14. The Plays of Oscar Wilde
15. Sanctuary, by William Faulkner
16. Within a Budding Grove, by Marcel Proust
17. The Guermantes Way, by Marcel Proust
18. Swann’s Way, by Marcel Proust
19. South Wind, by Norman Douglas
20. The Garden Party, by Katherine Mansfield
21. War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy
22. John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley: Complete Poetical Works

(Thanks to Tarcher/Penguin for the link)