F. Scott Fitzgerald's St. Paul Plays, 1911-1914

From the dust jacket notes: "...The Elizabethan Dramatic Club of St. Paul - a group of about forty youngsters - was founded in 1911 when Fitzgerald was only fourteen. It was named for its 'directress,' Elizabeth Magoffin, who had just turned twenty. She had the foresight to save a number of manuscripts including her transcriptions of her friend Scott's first four attempts at writing for the theatre. The club produced one of his plays each summer during the years 1911 through 1914. A year after her death in 1951, Princeton University Library purchased the manuscripts, but they have remained unpublished until now. Alan Margolies has edited these plays with a clear text for the general reader and full textual notes for the Fitzgerald scholar. The first, The Girl from Lazy J, is brief and extremely flawed, but each succeeding play shows great improvement over the previous summer's efforts. Fitzgerald acted the leading role in The Captured Shadow (1912), performed two parts in Coward (1913), and both stage-managed and acted in Assorted Spirits (1914). After the demise of the Elizabethan Club and his departure from Princeton for the Amry, he devoted his professional efforts to fiction, beginning with This Side of Paradise in 19120. Only once again did he complete a full-length work for the stage, and that was a political satire, The Vegetable, which closed after a brief tryout in Atlantic City in 1923...."