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Fans pay tribute to F Scott Fitzgerald in worldwide Facebook gathering

The most glamorous and madcap of all literary honeymoons began this weekend 100 years ago as newlyweds Zelda and F Scott Fitzgerald, future stars of the Jazz Age, prepared to check into the Biltmore Hotel in New York, shortly before cartwheeling through the lobby.

To mark the moment, and to celebrate the publication that same month of Fitzgerald’s first novel, This Side of Paradise, fans of the great American writer across the world have joined together for online events, including a mass reading of the text.

“This wasn’t just a book when it came out – it was a cultural event,” said Dr Kirk Curnutt, director of the F Scott Fitzgerald Society. “We have had to get creative [because of Covid-19 restrictions] and so we set up a Facebook reading.”

The infamous marriage, solemnised at St Patrick’s Cathedral in New York, did not run smoothly, but it did kick off in style.

After enjoying midnight room service snacks of champagne and – intriguingly – fresh spinach, the couple decamped to the neighbouring Commodore Hotel where, legend has it, they spun in the revolving doors for half an hour.

Zelda had agreed to marry the 23-year-old Princeton graduate once he was a published author, and her gamble was soon to pay off.

“He had been an advertising copywriter, and socialite Zelda Sayre wouldnt have anything to do with him. He had to convince her he was going somewhere,” said Curnutt, an English professor at Troy University in Montgomery, Alabama, Zelda’s home town.

A local Montgomery bookshop, Read Herring, will be marking the occasion by giving its first drive-through customers copies of a new collection, published by NewSouth Books, of three short stories by Fitzgerald set in a fictionalised version of the town.

By the end of April 1920 the author’s debut novel had made his name.

This Side of Paradise is a bold, almost cocky novel, and it came from nowhere,” Philip McGowan, editor of a new Oxford World Classics print of the book, published next month, told the Observer.

“The novel is important because it is his first one and not because it is especially well-crafted,” McGowan added. “It sold better than The Beautiful and Damned, [The Great] Gatsby or Tender is the Night.

“Set in an America about to go into prohibition, it blasts a hole through 19th-century morality. It is really about teenagers having sex, and that was a bit of a shocker. All his later novels were measured against it, because it had broken the mould.”

A version of Zelda is a key character in This Side of Paradise, and she went on to inspire female characters throughout his fiction.

“He wanted the book to secure Zelda and had promised the earth. This book tipped the scales for her, so they got married a few days later,” said McGowan.

Competing views of the marriage suggest that either he was a genius and she was “a pain”, said McGowan, or that he was “controlling” and she was undervalued. “Both are partly true, I think.”