Richard Webb, Jr., foreword by Robert Steve Williams.
Hardcover, large format coffee table, 192 pages, 12 x 9
ISBN 978-1-63226-097-0 – $40.00 US / $51.99 CN
Publication date: June 26, 2018
Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald honeymooned for five months in the summer of 1920 in a modest gray house in Westport, Connecticut. It was an experience that had a more profound impact on both of their collective works than any other place they lived.
It was, for Scott and Zelda, their honeymoon. Having just gotten married and after being kicked out of some of New York city’s finest hotels, they were, for the first time, in their very own place, albeit for only five months. 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 basking in 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 Great Gatsby, he was stirred to devote much of his time 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.
The book is beautifully illustrated with a fantastic array of never-before-seen photos from the Lewis family, as well as the scrapbooks of the Fitzgeralds, period newspaper clippings, and a myriad of compelling stories about Scott, Zelda and their fantastically wealthy neighbor.
A companion book to the documentary Gatsby in Connecticut: The Untold Story, Boats Against the Current also recounts Webb’s own journey of making the film with fellow Westporter and filmmaker, Robert Steven Williams.
The Great Gatsby may be one of America’s essential novels. Boats Against the Current is an essential document for anyone who has read the book and wondered at the fantastical world whose story it tells.
There was a great article about the book, the film, and the authors in the New York Times, May 18, 2018.
Visit the film and book website, Gatsby in Connecticut, for more news and information about this project.
Order the book from your favorite bookseller or from Two Rivers Distribution 800-343-4499.
Jonathan Williams: The Lord of Orchards
Edited by Jeffery Beam and Richard Owens
Paperback ISBN 978-1-63226-087-1
496 pages
$30.00 US / $40.00 CN
Publication Date: September 26, 2017
The Lord of Orchards
selects his fruit
in the Firmament’s
breast
“Of all the Black Mountain poets (teachers and disciples alike), Jonathan Williams is the wittiest, the least constrained, the most joyous.” – The New York Times
“This master of anathema has also a sense of wonder and awe at human quality, at the surviving marvels of landscape on both sides of the Atlantic and at the metaphoric power of both words and music.” – John Russell, The New York Times
The Jargon Society publisher, Jonathan Williams, was a whirlwind of creativity—a poet of considerable stature, book designer, editor, photographer, letter writer, critic, proselytizer of visionary folk art, curmudgeon, gardener, resolute walker, and always an adroit raconteur and gourmand.
At the forefront of the Modernist avant-garde, yet possessing a deep appreciation of the traditional, Williams and his seminal press nurtured the work of hundreds of emerging or neglected poets, writers, artists, and photographers. A recordist of the peculiarities of American and British vernacular speech, he tirelessly advocated the beauty of the mundane and the strange.
Buckminster Fuller once called Williams “our Johnny Appleseed.” Critic Guy Davenport described him as a “kind of polytechnic institute,” while Hugh Kenner hailed Jargon as “the Custodian of Snowflakes” and Williams as “the truffle-hound of American poetry.”
This book of essays, images, and shouts aims to bring new eyes and contexts to Williams’ influence and talent as poet and publisher. One might call his life a poetics of gathering, and this book a first harvest.
