ABSTRACT
Just why Fitzgerald lighted on Princeton as the college of his choice is conjectural, despite the number of his published comments on the topic. College must be in the East, Ivy-League style, of course. From the moment in Buffalo in 1908 when he heard the Princeton Glee Club concert, he seemed determined to attend that citadel of Presbyterianism. Fitzgerald recommenced his junior year in the fall of 1916 in a more subdued frame of mind. As he said of Amory, “Somehow with the defection of Isabelle the idea of undergraduate success had loosed its grasp on his imagination”, so too with Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald wrote that “of Monsignor’s funeral was born the romantic elf who was to enter the labyrinth with him” (TSOP, 266), explicitly noting the continuity which Fay supplied between the enclosure, escape and autonomy.
