80 Years in the Making: F. Scott Fitzgerald’s I’d Die for You

Gang, it’s Banned Books Week! Come on down to the library and pick yourself up a few banned/challenged titles and a “Stand Up for Your Right to Read” bookmark… Or, if you can’t make it in, add a Twibbon to your Twitter profile pic instead!

And while we still have that First Amendment on the brain, in honor of Mr. Fitzgerald’s banned classic The Great Gatsby, may we present a whole new collection of the Jazz Age author’s provocative fiction? Keep your eyes peeled next spring for the previously unpublished I’d Die for You (due out from Scribner in April 2017, a mere 80 years or so after its originally intended release). According to The Guardian:

It ranges from work that Fitzgerald was unable to sell because its “subject matter or style departed from what editors expected of [the author] in the 1930s”, Scribner said, to writing that he submitted to magazines, and which was accepted for publication but never printed.

Scribner promised the collection featured “Fitzgerald writing about controversial topics, depicting young men and women who actually spoke and thought more as young men and women did, without censorship”.

The US publisher added: “Rather than permit changes and sanitising by his contemporary editors, Fitzgerald preferred to let his work remain unpublished, even at a time when he was in great need of money and review attention.”

What with new J.D. Salinger on the way as well, what a time to be alive, right?