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Posts From Author: f scott fitzgerald

Don’t Throw Momma From The Train

I, Woodrow Wilson, President of the United States of America, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the said Joint Resolution, do hereby direct the government officials to display the United States flag on all government buildings and do invite the people of the United States to display the flag at their homes or other suitable places on the second Sunday in May as a public expression of our love and reverence for the mothers of our country. So wrote President Wilson on May 9, 1914, a hundred years ago today, marking the institution of Mother’s Day in the US (read the full proclamation here). It came about through the sweat of one Anna Jarvis, moved by her own mother’s death to campaign for wider recognition of the role of mothers in society. Later, as the holiday became increasingly commercial, she came to regret her exertions and mounted a series of spirited attacks on those who sought to exploit it for profiteering or fundraising, including Eleanor Roosevelt. She lost: according to the National Geographic, Americans will spend nearly $20 billion on mom this year. According to Hallmark, it falls behind only Christmas and Valentine’s Day in terms of greetings […]

Manhattan Follies: Amor Towles’s Rules of Civility

“It is a lovely oddity of human nature,” observes our heroine, Katey Kontent, “that a person is more inclined to interrupt two people in conversation than one person alone with a book, even if it is a foolish romance.” Commuting readers of Amor Towles’s debut novel, Rules of Civility, will certainly find themselves grateful for this lovely oddity as they immerse themselves in Katey’s world. The story, which concerns the good and not-so-good decisions made by Katey and her friends over the course of a single year (1938), is told from the perspective of her older self. Her memory is stirred by “Many Are Called”, an exhibition of photos Walker Evans surreptitiously took of regular Americans on the subway during the 1930s. In it, she sees two photos of a man she had known briefly very well, Tinker Grey, but had fallen out of touch with. The photos take her right back to the last day of 1937, when she and her friend Eve Ross first set eyes on Tinker… The Rules of Civility are the hundred and ten precepts a young George Washington jotted down in a writing exercise as a schoolboy in Virginia (see the full list here). […]