Keeping in line with my F. Scott Fitzgerald obsession of late, I finished reading This Side of Paradise yesterday (from the Library of America edition of Novels and Stories 1920-1922). Of course, I loved this portrait of the artist as a young man (though not as much as Gatsby or Tender is the Night)–and was tickled in reading how closely Fitzgerald’s own chronology fits that of Amory Blaine, the protagonist. Here’s just at taste:

Amory spent nearly two years in Minneapolis. The first winter he wore moccasins that were born yellow, but after many applications of oil and dirt assumed their mature color, a dirty, greenish brown; he wore a gray plaid mackinaw coat, and a red toboggan cap. His dog, Count Del Monte, ate the red cap, so his uncle gave him a gray one that pulled down over his face. The trouble with this one was that you breathed into it and your breath froze; one day the darn thing froze his cheek. He rubbed snow on his cheek, but it turned bluish-black just the same.