Elyse Graham writes for the Princeton Alumni Weekly about the strange fate of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s career:
At the start of the 1940s, F. Scott Fitzgerald 1917 was, as the kids say, in his flop era. In the first year of that decade, the total sales for all of Fitzgerald’s books, from This Side of Paradise to The Great Gatsby, were a whopping 72 copies. The amount of scholarly ink spilled on him could fit into a thimble. When Fitzgerald died in December 1940 — of a heart attack, at the age of 44 — the world’s verdict on the author was that he was a tragic figure: a sort of literary sparkler who burned too bright, too young, then fizzled out when his decade did, enjoying great celebrity during the Jazz Age and losing it all in the 1930s when the public had too many worries to care about flappers and champagne.
His early death was all the crueler, critics said, because it came late enough for him to see the collapse of his youthful promise. On his 40th birthday, the New York Post published a profile that depicted him as a washed-up alcoholic who knew his best days were behind him, interesting only as a symbol of the failures of his generation […]
As artists even better than him have done — Mozart is an example — Fitzgerald died in penury. He was living in a girlfriend’s apartment in Los Angeles, drinking too much and scratching up a bare living by writing screenplays. At the time of his fatal heart attack, he was reading an issue of the Princeton Alumni Weekly.
Just 30 people came to his funeral. The newspapers covered his death, but the story they told was a tragedy of youthful talent squandered: “Roughly, his own career began and ended with the Nineteen Twenties,” said The New York Times. “The promise of his brilliant career was never fulfilled.” “Poor Scott,” Ernest Hemingway said of him, and the label stuck. Poor Scott, who died in the worst way an artist can die: too early, but late enough to see himself forgotten.
Three years after Fitzgerald’s death, a junior scholar named Arthur Mizener ’30 *34 — who had taken a Ph.D. in English literature at Princeton but hadn’t yet landed a permanent faculty job — was working as a dogsbody in Princeton’s library when it received Fitzgerald’s papers on loan from his estate. He took on the job of organizing them.
In the process, Mizener became so enamored with the author that he resolved to become his champion, as the literary historian William Anderson Jr. wrote in a 1974 study of Fitzgerald’s reception. Until then, Mizener had focused on early modern literature; his dissertation had been on 17th-century poetry. No more. He started publishing article after article about Fitzgerald, arguing that he deserved a place in the great American Romantic tradition. […] In 1951, Mizener published the first biography of the author, The Far Side of Paradise.
The papers were in the library in the first place due to the machinations of Willard Thorp *1926, a professor in Princeton’s English department. Thorp, who joined the faculty in 1926, thought the late author’s papers were an overlooked treasure. The only other person who believed they were worth anything might have been Fitzgerald himself, who, as one scholar commented drily, scrupulously preserved all his drafts, proofs, and correspondence “at a time when no one would have placed a wager on his chances for immortality.”
When Fitzgerald died, his estate was scarcely enough to merit the title: some insurance money, a little cash, and a set of literary copyrights that appraisers deemed valueless. The estate’s executor, John Biggs 1918, Fitzgerald’s roommate at Princeton, had liked Fitzgerald as a person, but he shared the world’s assessment of him as a writer. He thought selling Fitzgerald’s papers would bring in at least a little scratch for his heirs, but Fitzgerald’s daughter resisted, writing, “If that library were worth $.50 or $10,000, I couldn’t bear to part with it.” Thorp, who knew that wars are won inch by inch, offered to house the papers at Princeton temporarily. She agreed.
In his memoir, David Randall, a rare book dealer who worked for Fitzgerald’s publisher, Charles Scribner’s Sons, said he wanted to make an offer for the papers, but was prevented by his bosses because they thought he was just being charitable to the surviving family. Princeton offered $1,000. (Not everyone at the University was a fan of Fitzgerald’s work; when Randall told a Princeton history professor that $1,000 was a lowball number, “I was reminded tartly that Princeton was not a charitable institution, nor was its library established to support indigent widows of, and I quote, ‘second-rate, Midwest hacks.’”)
In 1950 — after almost a decade of negotiations that Thorp insisted Princeton see through — Princeton would pay $2,500 to make its temporary custodianship of the papers permanent.
She goes on to discuss the Armed Services Editions, the U.S. government’s wartime initiative to send free books to servicemen abroad, which included two of Fitzgerald’s books, The Diamond as Big as the Ritz and Other Stories and The Great Gatsby.
Why these books? Scholars have suggested different theories. Publishers were the ones who offered titles for the council to choose from, and perhaps Scribner’s offered up Fitzgerald’s works so it could do its wartime duty without giving up truly valuable titles. Perhaps the council was running out of bestselling fiction, or perhaps it thought the setting of Gatsby, a period of postwar prosperity to the point of excess, would hearten young men who were looking ahead to a new postwar period after the fighting.
Whatever the case, the Armed Services Edition of The Great Gatsby — a handsome little green affair, 222 pages long and weighing just 2.3 ounces — put the novel into the hands of some 155,000 readers. A capsule biography of Fitzgerald that follows the novel’s text calls Gatsby “his greatest novel” while rehearsing the story of his ruined promise: “F. Scott Fitzgerald gave a name to an age in American life, lived through the age, saw it burn itself to a grim cinder — and wrote finis to it. Few authors have such an achievement to their credit.”
After the war, authors whose books came out in the Armed Services Editions reported a bump in sales. (The humorist H. Allen Smith said he received more than 1,000 letters from readers who discovered his books in the trenches.) But more importantly, the Armed Services Editions proved to publishers that the paperback format worked. The postwar publishing industry saw a rush of new paperback imprints, and Scribner’s, still unsure of Gatsby’s value, leased the reprint rights to the novel to seemingly as many imprints as it could. By the end of 1946, Anderson notes, Gatsby was out in three commercial paperback editions.
A book can’t be rediscovered without readers. Without paperbacks, there is no Gatsby. The fate of literature is inextricable from the fate of books.
The story continues with the role of critics, including Edmund Wilson (“a great champion of Fitzgerald’s work both during Fitzgerald’s lifetime and after”), John Peale Bishop, and Mizener:
By the 1950s, all of this scholarly and critical activity was having an effect. Fitzgerald’s work was appearing in college readers, showing that faculty were demanding it from publishers, as well as mass-market paperbacks such as The Portable F. Scott Fitzgerald, which was in its fifth printing by 1951. Graduate students were writing theses on him by the score. […] By 1974, as Anderson notes, Fitzgerald’s works had been “published in at least 172 editions in foreign languages, including a pirated El Gran Gatsby, published in communist Cuba.”
There’s lots more, including images (you can see that Armed Services Edition paperback); if only F. Scott could have known how his fortunes would improve!
By the way, if you have any interest in Russian and Ukrainian literature, you can help out a bunch of authors by voting for them (as many as you like) at the site for the «Дар» prize; the authors, who are mostly in exile and presumably can use the money, get a certain amount of euros for each vote.
I am confused by the numbers after the names. Something to do with Princeton itself (year of enrollment? graduation?), but what’s with “’30 *’34”?
I don’t know much about The Great Gatsby, but I do know that there’s a fantasy retelling of it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chosen_and_the_Beautiful
Also, I’ve been seeing this paragraph quoted around recently:
I am confused by the numbers after the names. Something to do with Princeton itself (year of enrollment? graduation?), but what’s with “’30 *’34”?
Me too, but I was too lazy to investigate. Usually alumni mags will give the year of graduation (so ’30 = BA 1930), but this seems a more complicated system.
The asterisk is for graduate degrees.
The fellow described in the linked piece as “Charles Scribner III ’73 *77” is described in this earlier PAW piece (which he authored) as “Charles Scribner III ’73 *75.” Truly these apostrophes are complex … Also, that’s the same fellow also sometimes referred to (per wikipedia) as “Charles Scribner V.”
https://paw.princeton.edu/article/charles-scribner-iii-73-f-scott-fitzgerald-17
This particular Scribner is inter alia apparently a translator responsible for the English versions of two books by Kirsten Liese originally published in German.
Note the convention of giving graduation years (for undergrads) as only two digits until they are a century old or perhaps 96 years old. Referring to Fitzgerald as merely ’17 in a June 2013 piece published only a few months before the ambiguity-creating class of 2017 matriculated was starting to cut it close.
MFA 1975 PhD 1977 apparently, but I don’t know how you decide which one to put after an asterisk on any given occasion.
https://www.encyclopedia.com/arts/educational-magazines/scribner-charles-iii-1951
I have never really understood this whole ‘class of’ business – how do you know when you’re going to finish before you start?
I now* know the US custom where each current high school and undergraduate cohort is described as “class of n” where n is the future year of graduation assuming taking 4 years to complete the program. On that basis it’s cool and succinct for the student newspaper to call someone “Lee Young ’27” rather than “sophomore Lee Young”.
The number will turn out to be wrong when people drop out, transfer, graduate early, or graduate late (with or without a gap of non enrolment). For those who do graduate, the post nominal year in student journalism I presume is the actual graduation year rather than the original cohort year. What about other alums? Is their association passed over in silence or mentioned in some other way? I see one reference to “Bill Gates ’77” on thecrimson.com, but suggest “Bill Gates †75” would be apter.
It must have been tedious in pre computer days of student journalism to check whether people mentioned in a story were alums and if so of what year.
* unlike in 1982, when I saw a poster for the movie “Class of 1984” — tagline “We are the future and nothing can stop us —- and assumed the genre was dystopian science fiction and/or time travel.
“Class of 1977, mutatis mutandis”, is a more precise mouthful.
@Jen
“how do you know when you’re going to finish before you start?”
Hope springs eternal.
Saying So-and-so ’77 is, I think, traditionally understood as a statement that So-and-So is a member of the Class of 1977. Whether So-and-so ever received a decree and if so in what year are not directly relevant to the truth value of that statement even though it may generally be true that a majority of the Class of 1977 did receive bachelor’s degrees in 1977. Many universities deal with the issue of people who received a bachelor’s degree in a year other than the presumed/default one for their year of matriculation by letting such people choose which class they wish to be considered a member of – the university’s primary interest being not so much consistent application of some abstract theory for labeling people but in whatever subjective feeling of connection/solidarity will maximize the odds of the given individual donating money. Some universities may require a never-graduated student to have stuck it out for some minimum number of semesters before they count in later life as an alumnus affiliated with a particular class, but one imagines that for press-release-type purposes standards may be looser when it is to the university’s advantage to mention a briefer association.
The same system is typically used for U.S. graduate/professional schools of the law/medicine/business variety, where each year there is a substantial cohort that starts together and are expected for the most part to finish together in a predictable year (depending on the length of the program).* That system doesn’t work very well for Ph.D.-type programs where there is often no longer even a pretense of a normative number of years to finish, and/or such normative pretenses vary by discipline.
In a context where it is obvious that e.g. only students/alums of the med school are under discussion one might just refer to So-and-so ’94 – in a more university-wide context it would typically be ’94M or ’94MED or some such disambiguating convention. Lack of further specification will generally mean the undergraduate part of the university, although that gets more complicated at universities that have multiple undergraduate schools because engineering or nursing or music or whathaveyou is treated as an administratively separate unit rather than just one course of study within the generic undergraduate program. Princeton famously lacks law/business/medical schools and so on, so its asterisk-based system may work for its particular circumstances.
At MIT, The Tech, as a primarily student newspaper, identified undergraduate attendees by their expected class year by default, both before and after their graduation. I wasn’t fond of this policy, and it led to some weird circumstances and edge cases, but it mostly worked.
To give a couple examples: I, from the time I matriculated in 1995 to my first graduation, would be named as “Brett Altschul ’99.” Then, when I was a graduate student, I was “Brett Altschul G”; the letter was the designation for all current graduate students, since the most relevant fact about my MIT affiliation was my current enrollment status, and unlike many other campus and alumni publications, The Tech‘s style was never to give anyone more than one designation. After I finished my doctorate, I defaulted back to “Brett Altschul ’99,” although should I so wish, I could ask to have it changed to “Brett Altschul PhD ’03.”
The head of the office of Resident and Campus Activities for much of my time at MIT was Andrew Eisenman. When he was hired, someone at The Tech looked up the year he had graduated from the Institute in the alumni directory, and so for a couple years he was referred to as “Andrew Eisenman ’75.” However, he eventually asked us to change that to reflect his original class year. Unknown to us, he had enrolled as a freshman in 1966 (alongside my father), so we changed him to “Andrew Eisenman ’70.”
Things got particularly dicey for undergraduate attendees who never graduated. Official policy was that students who died while attending MIT were entitled to their year. Hence, “Melissa Rong ’98… took her own life.” If people dropped out, they did not get a year, but it was essentially mandatory to state that they had attended. There were sometimes disagreements about how long someone needed to be absent from MIT for that policy to kick in (in the absence of specific information about whether the student intended to return). At one point, the Undergraduate Association president from 1968 (whom my father referred to as “that Maoist”) was invited back to campus to give a talk, and some people really wanted to give him his ’69 year, even though he never graduated. He claimed to have been expelled from MIT, but what actually happened was that he never registered for classes, and at some point he was informed that that meant he was no longer an MIT student.
@mollymooly: student journalism
PAW isn’t written by students. The author of the article on Fitzgerald is listed in the magazine as Elyse Wright ’07, an English professor at Stony Brook University. Alumni relations are big money, as J. W. Brewer implied, and I imagine most alumni magazines are written by professionals.
By the way, the name Princeton Alumni Weekly contains a figure of speech. There are eleven issues per year.
It looks like Fitzgerald himself is a recipient of an “honorary” year of graduation — he dropped out of Princeton to enlist.
The linked article phrases it that “[He] had to drop out in his senior year”, but WikiP makes it look like a choice made out of depression and heartbreak at being rejected by Ginevra King’s family rather than being forced by external responsibilities or similar.
I am reminded of something posted here by John Cowan:
Lots of people with no expectation of finishing attended English universities in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Many young men from aristocratic families attended only two years if they intended to go into the army, for example.
When I was in college, in addition to graduation year, the Harvard Crimson standardized use of a middle initial, so unless you had mentally prepared, the reporter would ask and you would provide before realizing you were allowing yourself to be portrayed as a nineteenth century toff.
I expected to send up the policy by giving first initial and middle name. If you had asked I’d have said I pulled it off, but google doesn’t remember it the way I do.
“Indians of consequence would write things like “B.A. Oxon. (Failed)” on their business cards.”
So that explains Barry Took and Marty Feldman’s “Dr Chou En Ginsberg, MA (Failed)” from the 60s radio show “Round the Horne”! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Round_the_Horne#Chou_En_Ginsberg_and_Lotus_Blossom
Incidentally, I still have an Armed Services Edition of “The Fireside Book of Verse: favorite poems of romance and adventure” edited by Louis Untermeyer which my (British) father brought home from WW2 – presumably left behind by a GI.
Ah yes, Untermeyer of the Thousand Anthologies! I only have two of them, A Concise Treasury of Great Poems and Story Poems. I see Wikipedia defines him first as a poet — does anybody actually read his poems?
I’m puzzled by the idea that using a middle initial corresponds to “allowing yourself to be portrayed as a nineteenth century toff”. It was an extremely widespread practice in the 20th century in the US, and I’ve seen no indication it’s died out in the 21st. It does seem to be a stereotypically American practice, but if anything I’d expect that to correlate negatively with stereotypically toffish behavior.
I was puzzled by that as well.
My late father-in-law, who disliked his first given name and always went by his middle name, always used an initial for the first name in his published works. (He was of Borders origin rather than Scottish, but this sort of thing is common in Scotland, where many an eldest son gets saddled with his father’s name, but is actually called by his middle name.)
The US edition of his best-known work transposed this into a middle initial, in accordance with local custom. I think he just gave up trying to explain our exotic naming habits to the Americans.
this sort of thing is common in Scotland, where many an eldest son gets saddled with his father’s name, but is actually called by his middle name
This happened to me in America in 1948; whether by heritage or coincidence, I don’t know. (But my middle name and my father’s are different.)
This happened to me in America in 1949. Even the middle names are the same. Neither heritage nor coincidence was at work, but rather something more like cattle-branding. Had I been a girl, my father would have bound my feet.
“19th century” may have been overstating how archaic the practice was, though not how it seemed to us. I didn’t then and don’t to this day know anyone who uses their middle initial in any normal context. I was and remain an avid newspaper reader, and none of the papers I read did this or do this except the Crimson. Nicholas Delbanco’s books give his name that way, his wikipedia page gives it that way, but when I wrote up a talk he gave for the Crimson, I had to name him Nicholas F. Delbanco ’63. We did laugh about and satirize it then, and it still seems a little ridiculous.
I’m not clear about the details of the policy. It looks like it may have been the standard only for students and graduates. And apparently no one was checking. I don’t think I knew then (or now till googling) that James Atlas attended Harvard. In the Delbanco article he’s mentioned as the next speaker, without initial or class.
It seemed like a carryover from the days when Anglo naming stock, largely unsullied even by other European ethnicities, demanded disambiguation so often that it became standard.
George W. Bush?
Right (and maybe this is what you’re saying with the example) George Bush needed disambiguation. An initial may sometimes be necessary for that. A policy making the use of the initial standard is ridiculous.
The “James T Kirk” structure actually strikes me (and presumably other Brits) not as nineteenth-century, but as distinctly American.
That impression may be based on overhasty generalisation from a few very famous examples, though, rather than reflecting an actual US reality.
Some American publications in the old days would use not only middle initials but full middle names when referring to someone who was in the news for unhappy reasons such as being charged with a felony, in order to disambiguate the accused from anyone else in the community with a similar name.
Separate from disambiguation, using a middle initial or full middle name is sort of a more formal register, and intuitions/practices have shifted over time in what sort of register is appropriate for which sort of context. The NYT was for most of my lifetime thought “stuffy” stylistically because they continued to adhere to the practice of consistently using e.g. “Mr. SURNAME” on second reference after most other newspapers had abandoned it in favor of bare SURNAME.
There is in New Haven a small memorial erected by the Yale College CLASS OF MCMXVIII that is dedicated IN PROVD AND AFFECTIONATE MEMORY OF OVR CLASSMATES WHO GAVE THEIR LIVES IN THE WORLD WAR. And they are all listed with the fullest name available, alphabetically from BENJAMIN STRICKLER ADAMS to GLENN DICKENSON WICKS. Three of the fourteen are listed without middle names, perhaps because they lacked them, but two of those three have two-piece names so High-WASP that a middle name was perhaps unnecessary, viz. HOLMES MALLORY and DANFORTH MONTAGVE.
Many people would accept that gravestones, cenotaphs, and war memorials are contexts where an arbitrarily high/formal register may be appropriate, but not everyone always agrees as where it’s affirmatively not appropriate.
And then there’s the initials-only approach seen in e.g. crediting a multi-author scientific paper to e.g. “D. A. Reynolds, J. D. Davis, W. H. Ode, R. E. Brewer, and C. R. Holmes.” (That’s Bureau of Mines Technical Paper 683 from 1945. The space between the initials and the Oxford comma must have been Bureau of Mines house style at the time, or perhaps Government Printing Office style if the Bureau did not insist on its own stylebook.) That’s sort of formal but also maybe sort of deliberately impersonal-feeling, as if suggesting that These Are Scientists Dammit and you’re never going to refer to them by their first names so you don’t need to know what they are.
“OK, I admit it, I made up a middle initial for Edward FitzGerald! He must have had one, though…I just need to find out what it really was.”
(Mike Keith, in the comments for Cadaeic Cadenza)
[I tried to look it up a few years ago and couldn’t find the answer, and indeed couldn’t quite tell whether he had a middle name at all. Now I can find out on Wikidata; turns out it’s M, short for Marlborough.
Apparently he hated his middle name and never used it; if he needed three initials he used EFG.]
…That’s not the OP’s Fitzgerald (Francis Scott, another example of the first-initial-middle-name variant), but I couldn’t resist the connection.
Neither of those is to be confused with Edmund Fitzgerald, the man and ship, who’s apparently so obscure aside from the ship that he doesn’t even have a Wikipedia article (though there’s one for his son that mentions the connection).
While “James T Kirk” may strike Brits as distinctly American, writing it like that instead of “James T. Kirk” strikes me (and presumably other Americans) as distinctly British. (More precisely, distinctly British-newspaper, if I understand correctly.)
This famous quote (from O.* Henry’s “The Gift of the Magi,” 1905) about the social significance of middle names sprang to mind.:
@January First-of-May: F. Scott Fitzgerald was the name he usually used, but the writer’s full name was Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald, after the poet.
* O. Henry, of course, had no middle name, nor even a first name other than “O.,” since it was a pen name for William Sydney Porter.
Harry S. Truman …
J. R. Cash …
(I think we discussed this before.)
@Hat: Ah yes, Untermeyer of the Thousand Anthologies! I only have two of them, A Concise Treasury of Great Poems and Story Poems. I see Wikipedia defines him first as a poet — does anybody actually read his poems?
I’ve read the ones he diffidently included in two anthologies, one for children, and a high school textbook of my mother’s, Modern American Poetry / Modern British Poetry, Mid-Century Edition. In my opinion, you don’t have to run right out and read them. Some will prefer his parodies.
Some will prefer his parodies.
Apparently scanned on a ship amidst a storm, or by a drunkard.
Only Of Thee and Me
Only of thee and me the night wind sings,
Only of us the sailors speak at sea,
The earth is filled with wondered whisperings
Only of thee and me.
Only of thee and me the breakers chant,
Only of us the stir in bush and tree;
The rain and sunshine tell the eager plant
Only of thee and me.
Only of thee and me, till all shall fade;
Only of us the whole world’s thoughts can be —
For we are Love, and God Himself is made
Only of thee and me.
Jerry Friedman, Princeton has long been known for the keenness of its alumni. The Princeton Alumni Weekly actually was for many years published weekly during the school year, plus a couple of issues during the summer.
a carryover from the days when Anglo naming stock, largely unsullied even by other European ethnicities, demanded disambiguation so often that it became standard.
this! and i think you can measure a certain kind of cultural distance from old-line WASPiness based on how pervasive the practice is. in u.s. jewish contexts, for example, what’s technically a ritual name (shem) will often appear on official documents between the state name (kinui) and surname, but rarely shows up as a middle initial (though it may appear as a second initial if the kinui is also abbreviated*). my own family simply doesn’t do official middle names (if we have a shem, it’s only on record at a synagogue, not with the state), which is also not unusual.
also, truman should always be bare-S’d – his one-letter middle name is famously not an abbreviation, so doesn’t take a period.
.
* as with the writer known in yiddish simply as “bashevis”**, who is sometimes a three-name person but almost invariably abbreviated as “I.B. Singer”, not “Isaac B. Singer”.
** his older brother – usually “I.J.” in translation, not “Israel J.” – was already well-established enough to have a lock on “zinger” by the time bashevis came around.
@rozele: Truman said he didn’t care whether his middle name/initial was written with a period or not, and most news outlets opted to use the period. Associated Press style is that for single-letter names, reporters should try to find out the individual’s preference. However, if the preference is unknown or (as in Truman’s case) a person don’t have one, then a period should be used.
Some people at The Tech felt, as you evidently do, that the default position should be not to have a period. Timothy K Layman ’97 did not care whether his one-letter middle name got the period or not, but some people were emphatic that there should be no period. So how his name was listed on the mast (and his occasional bylines; he was mostly a technology department guy, not a reporter or photog) depended on who was the editor in chief at a given time.
i’m pretty much formalistic about it: if there’s a period, what’s being abbreviated?
if nothing is, then it seems to me a purely aesthetic question, and there’s no reason to use a period rather than an apostrophe, gershayim, or for that matter º or §. i kinda like “Harry S§ Truman”, actually.
@Y: [Untermeyer’s parodies] Apparently scanned on a ship amidst a storm, or by a drunkard.
I think that’s imitation or caricature of the people he was parodying. With some poets, such as W. H. Davies and Stephen Philips (whoever he was), he imitates the monotonous regularity of their scansion.
The pre-emptive disambiguation middle initial is still common in Ireland for males with a common first name and surname (John A. Murphy, Michael J. O’Sullivan). It’s seldom used to disambiguate relatives; government ministers Brian Lenihan snr and jnr had different middle initials but the George X Bush pattern was not followed.
I believe in the US Sr. and Jr. often imply Identical middle names, which would mean Mark John Smith and his son Mark James Smith need their middle names spelled in full.
US Police use Mark NMI Smith for No Middle Initial, which is hard to fit in a form if there is only space for one middle initial. And what about Mark Norman Matthew Ingram Smith?
Scott Fitzgerald’s name was snowcloneish enough to inspire the nom de guerre of the late photographer F-Stop Fitzgerald,* an important documenter of the early SF punk-rock scene. After he left California and returned to his native upstate New York and decided to seek public office, they made him use his real name on the ballot, but established nicknames were a recognized thing so you could reportedly cast a vote for “Richard (F-Stop) Minisalli.”
*Sometimes stylized as “f-Stop” or “f-stop.”
@JF: I was just referring to the digitization on Google Books, where each page is smeared diagonally iin a different direction.
Oh, that scanning!
Iain Banks famously disambiguated himself as Iain M. Banks when writing science fiction. Still in the sf world, Arthur C. Clarke always used his middle initial. Said out loud, it flows well… I wonder if he would have called himself Arthur M. Clarke if his middle name, like Banks’s, had been Menzies, as the M puts a bit of a bump in the middle of the name.
Other than a few select politicians and other celebrities, almost every single publishing scientist from the US or Canada is an example. It’s not even gender-coded.
The practice is, further, to use the middle initial at every occasion but never mention what it stands for. A colleague of mine – in Canada all his professional life and earlier, but originally from Hungary – always publishes with his middle “R.”, but until recently even his students didn’t know what it stood for and joked it must be “Reptile” (which is what he works on, for some definitions of “reptile”).
“Murderers get three names”, possibly starting with John Wilkes Booth.
Oh, they still do that (and some still hate them for it). So does the Wall Street Journal. (…or The Wall Street Journal. I forgot.)
David S Berman always publishes without a period when he gets away with it, even in the middle of a list of coauthors who all have abbreviated middle initials with periods. Though sometimes his coauthors apparently forget.
@David NMI Marjanović: I never thought of it being odd that I don’t use my middle initial when publishing. Certainly, I knew I was in the definite minority, but I may never have appreciated how rare my choice not to use my middle initial in my formal name actually is. That was a decision I made in school and have simply stuck with, regardless of context, ever since. I generally only invoke my middle name when filling out government forms, or when commenting here that I am also one of the Davids.
Incidentally, I suppose that in my above comment I should have said we referred to Andy Eisenman in The Tech it was as “Andrew M. Eisenman ’75”; but I wasn’t thinking about middle initials at that stage of the discussion.
Here‘s a list of best published/most famous (US)American scientists. Just eyeballing it, the percentage of those who go by [First Name] [Last Name] is a minority, but a very sizeable one. And if there is a correlation with WASPishness, it is not apparent.
Interesting to find Anthony S. Fauci in there – when he was in the media for years, he was consistently NMI as far as I remember. It really does seem to be a cultural thing in science (to some extent).
Speaking of which, I said “from the US or Canada”. In Canada I’m pretty sure it’s limited to people with an English-speaking background.
Then there are the Dutch people with three middle initials…
Arthur C. C. Clarke’s father and brothers were apparently all known by first plus middle names, all distinct and all of them English. His mother may have been American.