A literary tour of Princeton will include stops outside the doors where T.S. Eliot, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Thomas Mann once set up shop.
By: Ilene Dube
William Faulkner, Galway Kinnell, Philip Roth, Mario Vargas-Llosa, Saul Bellow, Dashiell Hammett, John O’Hara some of the greatest writers of all time have lived and worked in Princeton at one point or another during their belletristic careers. Delmore Schwartz, Edmund Wilson, W.S. Merwin, Geoffrey Wolff and so many others have made Princeton the literary epicenter it is.
Eileen Morales, curator of the Historical Society of Princeton, will lead a tour June 9, stopping outside the former homes of Thomas Mann, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Annis Boudinot Stockton and T.S. Eliot, among others.
The tour will begin at Bainbridge House, HSP’s headquarters and formerly the site of the Princeton Public Library, a place for the nurturing and nourishing of writers. From there it’s on to 185 Nassau St., home to Princeton University’s creative writing department, whose faculty includes Joyce Carol Oates, John McPhee, Toni Morrison, Chang-rae Lee, C.K. Williams and Paul Muldoon. Those halls echoed with the words of E.L. Doctorow and Russell Banks in recent years.
"John McPhee was a Princeton native, and was the first to submit a novel as his undergraduate thesis," Ms. Morales says. Ironically, the author of The Pine Barrens (1968) went on to make a career out of narrative nonfiction.
Hot Zone author Richard Preston, who lives in nearby Hopewell, studied narrative nonfiction under McPhee while earning his doctoral degree in English at the university.
Upton Sinclair came to Princeton for the university’s collection of Civil War documents in order to research his 1904 novel, Manassas. "He lived in a shack near Province Line Road, then earned enough money to build his own house and buy a farm where he wrote ‘The Jungle’ (Sinclair’s well-known novel criticizing the meat-packing industry)," says Ms. Morales. "He did the research in Chicago but came to Princeton to write it."
Despite the success of The Jungle, "Sinclair turned to journalism because it was hard to publish the novels and get literary notice," continues Ms. Morales, who adds that Sinclair’s wife was not happy in Princeton. "She felt isolated, and after their divorce, he moved around the U.S., eventually returning to his son’s family in Bound Brook, where he died (in 1968)." Sadly, his Princeton house had been left to deteriorate, and all that was left by the 1980s was a fireplace, a wall and some beams.
F. Scott Fitzgerald lived at 15 University Place as a freshman in 1914, then moved to Patton Hall for his sophomore year and Little Hall for his junior year. "He barely passed his entrance exam and wasn’t the greatest student," says Ms. Morales. "He didn’t finish he took a nine-month sabbatical in his junior year, attributed to a ‘health problem,’ although it may have been academic problems and in his senior year left to join the Army."
This Side of Paradise, published in 1920, was based on his experiences in Princeton, and makes several references to the university, including a mention of the Dinky coming all the way up to Blair Arch. "It was a realistic portrayal of life on campus, with parties over academics, and the administration was not happy with it, but those were his interests here," says Ms. Morales. "He tried out for the football team, didn’t make it, but went to the games. He wrote for the Triangle Club, founded in 1893 by Booth Tarkington (winner of the Pulitzer Prize for The Magnificent Andersons), who lived in University Hotel on the corner of University and Nassau Street." Originally built as a hotel, it was bought by the university and used as a dormitory.
Tarkington never graduated either, nor did Eugene O’Neill, who should have been class of 1910 but only completed his freshman year. O’Neill also was involved with the Triangle Club, for which McCarter Theatre was built, although it eventually grew to be much more than a home for the playwriting and performing club. While in graduate school at Princeton in 1938, Thornton Wilder saw the world premiere of his play Our Town on McCarter’s stage. The original playbill, as well as an ad for the play in The Princeton Herald, can be seen in HSP’s collection.
Wilder was one writer who did complete his studies, earning a master’s degree in modern languages in 1926. He taught French at the Lawrenceville School in the 1920s.
In preparing the tour, Ms. Morales says she tried to find women writers, but professional women only became a significant presence after the university started admitting women in the late 1960s. Joyce Carol Oates became writer-in-residence in 1978, and Toni Morrison joined the faculty in 1989.
"We can’t talk about women writers in Princeton and not mention Emily Mann," Ms. Morales says of McCarter Theatre’s artistic director and writer of, most recently, Mrs. Packard (on stage at McCarter through June 10). "Then there was Sylvia Beach, who spent several years as a young adult in Princeton her father was pastor of Nassau Presbyterian Church, then called First Presbyterian Church."
Beach went on to found Shakespeare and Co., an English language bookstore in Paris, the center of literary life for expatriates, and published James Joyce’s Ulysses for U.S. audiences. She returned to Princeton for her final resting place she is buried at Princeton Cemetery.
T.S. Eliot, a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in 1948, lived at 14 Alexander St., where he wrote the play The Cocktail Party, first produced in 1949 and then on Broadway a year later. He was living in Princeton when he won the Nobel Prize. "It’s been written that he suffered from depression while he was here," says Ms. Morales. "His wife had died, he was on his own, and was seen eating alone at the Nassau Club. He had a hard life his wife, too, had been institutionalized for emotional problems (as had Fitzgerald’s)."
Thomas Mann, a colleague of Albert Einstein and 1929 Nobel laureate, also fled Nazi Germany in 1933, living in Switzerland five years before coming to Princeton in 1939, where he was a lecturer. His palatial home now the Aquinas Institute on Stockton Street was rented for $250 a month. "He had his most creative moments between 9 a.m. and noon, and he said he was more comfortable here than any other home he’d ever been in," says Ms. Morales, although his daughter, Monika, compared it to a haunted castle. "He said Princeton was full of parks suitable for walking and wrote ‘what astonishingly beautiful trees, which are now, in this Indian summer, gleaming in the most splendid colours.’"
The Mann family lived here for two-and-a-half years, and when Thomas’ appointment was up, the family moved to California where the climate suited them better.
Perhaps Princeton’s earliest female writer of note was Annis Boudinot Stockton, who lived at Morven. "I’m happy to be here to talk about Annis, she was a pretty amazing person," says Ms. Morales. Wife of Richard Stockton, signer of the Declaration of Independence, she came from a prominent family. "Her father was a silversmith, so she had access to an education other women had not. She wrote letters to George Washington, but is mainly noted for being a poet of sonnets, odes and elegies in the style of the day, neoclassical in format.
"She wrote of family, friends, life cycles, birth and death, but also wrote political poetry," continues Ms. Morales. "She was very interested in the Revolution and kept up her correspondence with Washington, including poetry in her writings to him."
Annis derived the name "Morven" from the term for a mythical Gaelic kingdom in a poem by Ossian, the supposed narrator and author of a cycle of poems by the Scottish poet James Macpherson.
Just around the corner, on Boudinot Street, is where Peter Benchley lived, with his famous shark mural painted on the floor of the pool. But even as the old guard passes on, new young writers are starting out, such as the Hodder Fellows at Princeton University. Just three summers ago, writers from Fran Lebowitz to Peter Singer were lionized at Writers Block, the temporary garden of follies on Hulfish Street.
From its intellectual and artistic activity to the culture of java, Princeton offers everything the writer needs. "If you don’t want the hustle and bustle of New York City or Philadelphia, this is pretty close, and you see all walks of life," says Ms. Morales. "With the resources of the Princeton Public Library, the university, the Institute for Advanced Study and Small World Coffee, it’s very conducive to writing."
The Historical Society of Princeton Literary Tour and Great Gatsby Tea will be held June 9, 1:30 p.m., starting at Bainbridge House, 158 Nassau St., Princeton. Tickets cost $20 and include tea at the Nassau Club with professional storyteller Alisa Dupuy, who will dress in character from The Great Gatsby and talk about the history of tea (coffee and baked goods also available). Literary maps of Princeton are available in the HSP gift shop for $10. (609) 921-6748; www.princetonhistory.org

