Database of the Lost Generation

The librar y ’s Fitzgerald collection is considered the world’s most comprehensive, with more than 3,000 publications, manuscripts, letters, book editions, screenplays and memorabilia. It also includes Fitzgerald’s walking stick, briefcase and an engraved silver flask his wife gave him in 1918.

Some parts of the collection are already online. With the ledger’s move to the website and the timing of the movie, Sudduth said, officials hope to call more attention to the collection.

In the ledger, Fitzgerald lists in carefully laid out columns his various pieces of writing, the location they were printed and the income they produced. Fitzgerald’s comments are sprinkled throughout. One describes the year 1919 — when his first novel was accepted for publication and Zelda Sayre agreed to marry him, as — “The most important year of life. Every emotion and my life work decided. Miserable and ecstatic but a great success.”

By the time Fitzgerald started the ledger, Sudduth said, “He probably knew what he was doing. He left a space for his remarks, and then the final disposition.”

With a laugh, she noted: “We know he didn’t spell very well. And his arithmetic wasn’t much better,”

But the overall document, she said, “shows that he was far more on top of his affairs than people thought,” given a reputation in later life as a heavy drinker.

“He was keeping a record of his work for the future,” Suddeth said. “He kept it, he updated it.”

For the past 30 years, researchers have had to rely on a limited print facsimile of the ledger, which didn’t catch the varied inks and scripts in Fitzgerald’s hand.

Park Bucker, a USC associate English professor, said he’s excited to discuss the new ledger with his students.

“It may be a unique artifact among American authors,” Bucker said. “This is going to be an amazing thing for students to pore over and dip into. He created his own database. We do it on computers now, but he did it for himself,”

Bucker also said students are fascinated by seeing something a well-known author penned in his own hand.

“Students always remark how much they love his handwriting,” he said. “They think his handwriting is just beautiful, and handwriting isn’t valued today.”

Bucker pointed out that the ledger shows Fitzgerald made most of his income from short stories and that he was able to earn a living from his literary work. “It was the rarest of things, an author who made a living,” Bucker said.

In 1925, the ledger shows Fitzgerald earned less than $2,000 for the book — the same amount he received for a single short story published in

In later years, Fitzgerald added more earnings from

He sold the foreign motion picture rights for $16,666, as noted in the ledger. In another section, he lists about $5,000 in earnings from when it ran as a play in New York, Chicago and elsewhere.

USC professor Matthew Bruccoli began to acquire items for the Fitzgerald collection in the 1950s. He received some, including the ledger, from the author ’s only child, daughter Frances Scott Fitzgerald, also known as Scottie. Bruccoli wanted the collection to be used as a teaching and research tool, and he gave it to the university in 1994.

Bruccoli has since died, but the collection has continued to grow. It is now valued at more than US$4-million, Sudduth said.

has opened up an entirely new angle in the plantvs.-animal discussion.

The research team, led by Dr. Steven Hazen, M.D., Ph.D., who, among his titles, is section head of Preventive Cardiology & Rehabilitation in the Miller Family Heart and Vascular Institute, began their studies with a question: Why do some people have heart attacks (or strokes, or other cardiovascular events) that simply cannot be predicted? Yes, cholesterol, blood pressure and markers of inflammation paint some of the picture, and genetics add another layer — though, as Hazen noted in an interview, our genes only seem to predict about 10% of our overall risk — but there is still a gap between what we predict will happen and what actually happens that remains unexplained.

Enter the gut bacteria. In a series of studies, Hazen’s team began by analyzing the plasma (blood) of patients who had undergone screening for heart health. After following the patients for three years, they looked specifically at those who had experienced a heart attack or stroke, or who had died, and compared them with ageand gender-matched controls. Without knowing what they were looking for, the research team found three compounds consistently present in the blood of those who had had the cardiac events: trimethylamine N-oxide (TMAO), betaine and choline. All three are derived from the same metabolic pathway: the breakdown of phosphatidyl choline, also known as lecithin, a nutrient predominantly found in eggs, milk, organ meats, red meat, poultry, shell-

No one needs a piece of meat larger than your palm.

FOTOLIA