Anthony Buttitta

Anthony Buttitta (26 July 1907 in Monroe, Louisiana - 11 August 2004 in New York City [1]), the son of poorly educated parents, recent immigrants from Sicily. He published his first plays and stories in the later 1920s as an undergraduate at Louisiana State Normal College and the University of Texas. Subsequently, at the University of North Carolina, he was one of the group of friends who founded the avant garde Intimate Bookshop and the literary magazine Contempo (1931–34). The magazine led to him meeting and corresponding with such writers as Sherwood Anderson, Ezra Pound, George Bernard Shaw, and William Faulkner. In 1932 he edited a special Contempo issue devoted to Faulkner’s work, now much coveted by Faulkner collectors.

References

  1. ↑ SSDI Number: 064-12-7291; Issue State: New York; Issue Date: Before 1951

Tony Buttitta met F. Scott Fitzgerald during the summer of 1935, while he was the proprietor of the bookshop in the George Vanderbilt Hotel. Fitzgerald was down on his luck and confided in the younger Italian-looking man. Later, in 1974, he published a book about the experience,[1] Fitzgerald, nearing forty, was a sick, tired, depressed man often doing his worst writing. However, he took time to instruct Tony about those who influenced him such as John Peale Bishop who introduced him to the Elizabethans and the English Romantic poets, Keats among them. The French Symbolists stimulated the poetic imagery of his work. Edmund Wilson, whom he described as an intellect "packed with cerebral energy," could not write novels-he being too analytic and critical. We learn a lot about Scott Fitzgerald at this age from the book. For example, despite Bishop and Wilson's critical assessment of Scott, Fitzgerald is generous in his praise of the pair. Buttitta also provides one of the few detailed descriptions of Fitzgerald's appearance at nearly 40.[2]

  1. ↑ "After the Good Gay Times: Asheville-Summer of '35" (New York: Viking Press, 1974).
  2. ↑ E. Ray Canterbery and Thomas D. Birch, "F. Scott Fitzgerald: Under the Influence," (St. Paul: Paragon House, 2006), pp. 253-255.
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