Losing Daisy

by Catherine Corman

Shortly before it was torn down, Catherine Corman photographed the house that inspired Daisy Buchanan's Gold Coast home in The Great Gatsby. Fitzgerald went to Jazz Age parties there, where Dorothy Parker and the Duchess of Windsor danced atop the swimming pool cabana. But now it stood abandoned, Palladian windows broken and hand-painted wallpaper falling to the floor in strips. It filled the tip of Sands Point, visible from Fitzgerald's porch across the bay. "The front was broken by a line of French windows," he wrote, "glowing now with reflected gold."

22 pages, Kindle Edition

Published May 7, 2013

About the author

Catherine Corman's book of photographs, Daylight Noir: Raymond Chandler's Imagined City, was exhibited at the 2009 Venice Biennale, and is included in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art Library. Her short film Les Non-Dupes screened at the 2012 Berlin Biennale. She is also the editor of Joseph Cornell's Dreams. Her work has appeared in The Times Literary Supplement and Vogue Italia, and on the websites of The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and The Economist. She was educated at Harvard and Oxford Universities.