AUTHOR FANHOOD NEEDED FOR BOOMERS

image via bucknell.edu

If you’re a grown up adult, show your author fanhood.

You have a favorite athlete, movie star? A favorite politician and king.

Why not a favorite author? Where’s your author fanhood?

It’s not that big a deal, and it doesn’t make you a pretentious phony.

Fanhood reaches all areas of life, why not authors?

College kids should try and remember that Lit Survey class they took freshman year. Break out that huge Norton Anthology and dig in.

What? The print is too small?

You don’t remember small print?

Heads up, boomer. It’s not freshman year.

Listen, pick an author and read some of their work. That’s all there is.

You can try and see the world through their eyes, but that takes lots of work.

Just read something that was made into a movie. That way you don’t have to read so hard.

If you choose F. Scott Fitzgerald and his Great Gatsby, you’ll do just fine.

It’s been called the great American novel, an accurate portrayal of the flapper era.

It’s been called lucky, too.

If you pick F. Scott for the focus of your author fanhood, you’ll need to know why his other books weren’t so universally acclaimed.

What about his wife? Was she a hindrance or help?

I had the choice of F. Scott or Thomas Wolfe in Asheville, North Carolina.

Wolfe grew up there; Fitzgerald is immortalized there with his own shrine inside the Grove Park Inn.

Of all places.

Fans still line up for Scotty. Image via DG Studios

Why wouldn’t Wolfe be the star attraction in his own town?

Scotty actually stayed at the resort. I think locals weren’t as impressed.

The whole notion was lost on me when I learned that I wasn’t drinking at the same bar as Scott.

Turns out North Carolina was dry back then, and the area where the bar is had been something else when he stayed there.

Legend has it that he brought a gun to the resort and fired it in his room, so that’s fairly notorious.

His wife was staying in a local sanitarium, for what I don’t know, and he stayed nearby. At a famous resort, not a Best Western.

If F. Scott is the target of your author fanhood, you might be disappointed you didn’t pick Thomas Wolfe.

His books are huge, full of observations from difficult times in hard places, instead of slim volumes full of booze, sex, and fashion.

If you had to pick, would it be the six foot six giant in more ways than one, or the Lost Generation darling and Hemingway rival, Fitzgerald?

In a way both are famous for the same thing: characters with humble beginnings finding their way up the ladder of social mobility.

Go ahead and pick.