| 
| 
| 
| 
In the summer of 1920, the Fitzgeralds honeymooned in Westport, Connecticut. It was an experience that had a profound impact on both of their collective works. Presented by author Richard Webb.
* Use this link to join our virtual program: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83644214152
Having just gotten married and after being kicked out of some of New York City's finest hotels, the Fitzgeralds were, for the first time, in their very own place. It was a time that Scott Fitzgerald called "the happiest year since I was eighteen." He had, after all, just achieved success with his first novel, "This Side of Paradise", and was suddenly awash with money.
The Fitzgeralds lived a wild life of drinking, driving, and endless partying while living in suburban Connecticut. As it happens, living near the beach, they were neighbors to a larger-than-life reclusive multi-millionaire, F.E. Lewis.
Historian Richard Webb grew up in Westport a few doors down the street from where the Fitzgeralds had lived some forty years earlier. Fascinated with the Fitzgeralds, when Webb learned that author Barbara Probst Solomon, who grew up across the river from the F.E. Lewis estate, proposed in the New Yorker that Westport was the real setting for Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby", he was stirred to actively researching her claim.
"Boats Against the Current" tells the real story behind the famous novel and its tragic hero, debunking the long-held belief that the book was solely inspired by the Fitzgerald's time in Great Neck, across the Sound in Long Island, and lays out enough information about the fascinating Mr. Lewis that it is difficult not to believe that Webb has located the true inspiration for one of the most captivating and iconic characters in American literature, the great Gatsby himself.
Richard “Deej” Webb is an author, an award-winning educator, and a documentary filmmaker. A graduate of Vanderbilt University, he has taught history for twenty-four years at both the high school and college levels. A featured presenter in the Connecticut Public Broadcasting Prohibition documentary Connecticut Goes Dry, Webb is also co-creator and co-producer with Robert Williams of a documentary film about the Fitzgeralds in Connecticut, "Gatsby in Connecticut," which is a companion to the book "Boats Against The Current."
At the conclusion of the program please feel free to take a brief online survey here:
https://www.projectoutcome.org/responses/56557
* Virtual programs work best with the current version of the browsers listed below:
