THE REAL DAISY BUCHANAN?
The courtship was conducted largely through correspondence. When it ended, the young woman destroyed the young man's letters, at his request. He was to do the same. However, the young man had the letters transcribed and then put them into a loose-leaf binder. Now, almost a century later, Professor James L. W. West III has used these letters and other documents to shed light on the brief but intense romance between the wealthy, poised, and confident 16-year-old Ginevra King from Lake Forest, Illinois, and the 
dashing, ambitious F. Scott Fitzgerald, then a sophomore at Princeton University. West's book, The Perfect Hour, was published in February by Random House.
"The romance was influential on Fitzgerald's later fiction. We know that Ginevra was one of the models for the wealthy and elusive Daisy Buchanan in The Great Gatsby," says West, the Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English. "She certainly encouraged his fixation on wealth and the privileges of the upper class."
The two met in 1915 at a sledding party in St. Paul, Minnesota. The debutante daughter of a successful Chicago stockbroker, King had legions of admirers. Fitzgerald, the son of a wholesale grocery salesman, was all too aware of his financial and social limitations, but he pursued her nonetheless, relying on his writing talent to win her over. And he did. For two years they were a part of the social scene around New York, at dances, parties, and campus events. King eventually became engaged to another man, paving the way for Fitzgerald's famous love affair with Zelda Sayre, the southern belle whom he eventually married.
Scottie, Fitzgerald's daughter, found the letters in 1950 and decided not include them in the papers she donated to Princeton , where the F. Scott Fitzgerald Papers are kept. She gave them back to King, who put them on a closet shelf in her home. Years later, when King's granddaughter was moving, she found the letters—and a diary—and called Princeton. West, a leading Fitzgerald scholar and editor of The Cambridge Edition of the Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald, learned of the letters' existence when he was contacted by Princeton.
"As soon as I began reading them, I realized how important these letters were," says West. "At first I felt like a voyeur, reading a young girl's letters and diary, but that feeling soon passed and I became fascinated."
Although Fitzgerald scholars were aware of his early romance with King, the episode was often overlooked in light of his tumultuous relationship with his wife, Zelda Sayre. Sayre's family was well off, but was not in the financial or social stratosphere as King's was.
"As most readers know, wealth and privilege are major concerns in Fitzgerald's work," says West. "It's easy to see Zelda in many of his female characters, but Daisy Buchanan, in particular, has King's famous melodic voice, and Daisy's husband, Tom, is very much like King's father."
Supplementing the letters with photographs and pages from King's diary, West, who is also director of the Penn State Center for the History of the Book, wanted to demonstrate to readers how biographies are written.
"You use detective work to reconstruct a romance that happened a hundred years ago," he explains. "Because I know so much about Fitzgerald's later years, these early pieces made sense, and it all fit together."