Transcendental Modernity in Fitzgerald’s “How to Live on $36,000 a Year,” “How to Live on Practically Nothing a Year,” and Other Writings

Abstract In the centenary of the Fitzgeralds boarding the SS Minnewaska headed for Cherbourg, France—the trip resulting in The Great Gatsby—it is timely to reimagine Fitzgerald’s connection to his homeland. On the Riviera in 1924, Fitzgerald stepped away from his contemporaries and toward transcendental mythologizers from his national past such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. Two works of nonfiction written in 1924 reveal that Fitzgerald sought alternative modes of living during the completion of his most modern novel. “How to Live on $36,000 a Year” and its sequel, “How to Live on Practically Nothing a Year”—both published in the Saturday Evening Post while Fitzgerald labored over Gatsby—present his attempt to integrate disciplined living traits on the outskirts of New York and then outsourcing the virgin land in the old world: Europe. Fitzgerald’s works of nonfiction during the writing of his most famous novel offer insight into a life in which transcendentalism remains a guiding principle.