In Gatsby's Shadow: The Story of Charles Macomb Flandrau

by Larry Haeg

In the closing decades of the nineteenth century Minnesota produced three young men of great talent who each went east to become writers. Two of them became famous: F. Scott Fitzgerald and Sinclair Lewis. This is the story of the third man: Charles Macomb Flandrau.

Flandrau, a model of style and worldly sophistication and destined, almost everyone agreed, for greatness, was among the most talented young writers of his generation. His short stories about Harvard in the 1890s were called “the first realistic description of undergraduate life in American colleges” and sold out of the first printing in a few weeks. From 1899 to 1902 Flandrau was among the most popular contributors to the Saturday Evening Post. Alexander Woollcott rated him the best essayist in America. And Viva Mexico!, Flandrau’s account of life on a Mexican coffee plantation, is a classic, perhaps the best travel book ever written by an American. Yet Flandrau turned his back on it all. Financially independent, he chose a solitary, epicurean life in St. Paul, Mexico, Majorca, Paris, and Normandy. In later years, he confined his writing to local newspaper pieces and letters to his small circle of family and friends.

Using excerpts from these newspaper columns and unpublished letters, Larry Haeg has painstakingly recreated the story of this urbane, talented, witty, lazy, enigmatic, supremely private man who never reached the peak of literary success to which his talent might have taken him.

This very readable biography provides a detailed and honest portrayal of Flandrau and his times. It will fascinate readers interested in writers’ life stories and scholars of American literature as well as general readers interested in midwestern literary history.

294 pages, Hardcover

First published September 1, 2004

Reviews

[Peter Gunn · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have some hesitations about evaluating Larry Haeg's biography of Charles Macomb Flandrau. First, I've not read any of Flandrau's books or essays, which I'm sure impacts whether I'd agree with Haeg's picture of Flandrau's potential for literary greatness. Second, I don't know the careers of Fitzgerald and Lewis all that well, and their lives and careers are a sort of background metric for examining Flandrau. (I have a sense that Haeg might not have done enough with that metric, but I can't yet be sure.) Third, I picked up the biography primarily because I'm a genealogist and researcher of the history of the Flandreau family in America. Charles M. Flandrau, his father Judge Flandrau, and his grandfather Thomas Hunt Flandrau are all notable figures in that family -- my interest in the biography's source material probably colored my view of the work itself. Certain small errors about his family history certainly got more attention from me that they would otherwise.

All those considerations aside, I enjoyed the biography and the opportunity to get a better picture of Charles and his family than I've gotten from vital records, encyclopedic entries, and obituaries.

A side note, for more information on Flandrau's sisters, and his cousins, and his aunts, read Kristie Miller's A Volume of Friendship: The Letters of Eleanor Roosevelt and Isabella Greenway. Isabella was his niece.

[Carl Rollyson · Rating 4 out of 5]

In his preface, Haeg explains that this book is "not a literary biography but a biography of one man's character--how it was formed by his world, the choices he made, the price he paid for those choices." According to the author, Flandrau had the talent but not the purpose, passion, and resolve required for greatness. Flandrau disliked the self-promotion that Fitzgerald and Lewis, his Minnesota contemporaries, practiced; he believed that great literature would find its own audience. Flandrau despised writing for slick magazines that dumbed down a writer's style--though writing for those very periodicals had honed the clarity and concision that marked Fitzgerald and Lewis at their best. If these two writers shadow Flandrau here, it is because they help explain why Flandrau never fulfilled his early promise as a writer.