Onthis Day...

September 24

• In 1896, F. Scott Fitzgerald, chronicler of the Jazz Age, was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, to an eccentric mother descended from “straight 1850 potatofamine Irish.” At 24 the success of his first novel “This Side of Paradise” catapulted him into the limelight. Knowing less of the New York society he was supposed to represent “than any hallroom boy in a Ritz stag line,” he married the dashing but neurotic Zelda Zayre and tried hard to live up to being “rich, famous, young and beautiful.” It didn’t work. “The Great Gatsby” brought min praise but no money. He drank heavily and Zelda was twice committed to an asylum. His last novel “Tender Is The Night” was a total failure, and alone and dispirited he wrote, “I left my capacity for hoping on the little road to Zelda’s sanitorium.”

• In 1869, Black Friday hit Wall Street. Jay Gould made an $11 million killing when, with James Fisk, he tried to corner the gold market, buying up to $15 million of gold then in circulation. President Grant ordered the U.S. Treasury to let government stocks go on to the open market, but the effect was lessened when the news was leaked by, among others, Grant’s brother-in-law. Watching the panic from a Western Union telegraph booth was Thomas Edison, who immediately realized that due to the vagaries of the Stock Exchange, news of the value of gold could be worth more than gold itself!

─ from Today’s The Day by Jeremy Beadle (Signet)