[Fitzgerald, F. Scott]

Spengler, Oswald.  The Decline of the West. Form and Actuality. Authorized Translation with Notes by Charles Francis Atkinson. London: Allen & Unwin, n.d.



In 8s (9 1/4 x 6 1/2in; 235 x 165mm). 3 folding tables at rear. Original blue cloth, unopened; spine a bit faded and with light wear at ends, endpaper cracked at rear inner hinge.

Spengler, Oswald. The Decline of the West. Form and Actuality. Authorized Translation with Notes by Charles Francis Atkinson. London: Allen & Unwin, n.d. In 8s (9 1/4 x 6 1/2in; 235 x 165mm). 3 folding tables at rear. Original blue cloth, unopened; spine a bit faded and with light wear at ends, endpaper cracked at rear inner hinge.
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Association Copy, with a long gift inscription from Fitzgerald to Gene Tunney on the front free endpaper: "Dear Mr. Tunney, I couldn't find either Boyd's book or Broun's book. This is an extraordinary thing you've perhaps heard of—the idea that civilizations have as definite mortality as people. You'll probably never plough through it, but do at least look at the tables at the end. Yrs., F. Scott Fitzgerald."  Given the fact that the book is unopened, Tunney did not "plough through it"—as Fitzgerald feared he wouldn't.

Spengler's The Decline of the West was a work which Fitzgerald greatly admired. In a letter of 6 June 1940 to Max Perkins, he wrote:  "Did you ever read Spengler?... I read him the same summer I was writing The Great Gatsby and I don't think I ever quite recovered from him" (Turnbull, Letters, pp. 289–90).  As Mary Jo Tate remarks in F. Scott Fitzgerald A to Z (p. 231), Fitzgerald "must have read about Spengler's work" while writing The Great Gatsby, since he did not read German and the book wasn't translated into English until 1926.

Matthew J. Bruccoli notes that Fitzgerald was with Tunney on at least two occasions: once in  New York in 1927 when Scott and Zelda  attended "a party for heavyweight champion Gene Tunney with the Morans and George Jean Nathan [and] Fitzgerald stuck close to Tunney all evening and did not want to leave"; and again in Paris in August 1928 when Thornton Wilder, who was there with Tunney, "who had intellectual ambitions, had arranged a gathering at the Ritz Bar that included Fitzgerald" ( Some Sort of Epic Grandeur: The Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald, pp. 306 and 313).  A photograph of this gathering, picturing Tunney, Fitzgerald, and Wilder, is reproduced in Bruccoli's The Romantic Egoists (p. 161). This inscribed copy of The Decline of the West  probably stems from one of those occasions.