F. Scott Fitzgerald mentioned Asheville, North Carolina, in an early story for The Saturday Evening Post, “The Ice Palace” (22 May 1920), and in his third novel for Scribners, The Great Gatsby (1925). In both works, Asheville is referred to as a resort town, a mountain getaway for Southerners. He later became more familiar with the city through fellow Scribners writer Thomas Wolfe, whose Look Homeward, Angel was about growing up in Asheville (which Wolfe renamed Altamont).

In the summer of 1935, Fitzgerald left Baltimore for an extended visit in Asheville. He was concerned about his lungs, and the mountain area of western North Carolina was known for the treatment of tuberculosis. He moved into the Grove Park Inn, a plush resort hotel, where he intended to rest and write stories. There he met Laura Guthrie, a woman separated from her husband and working as a palmist for the hotel. She became his typist and companion for the summer. There was no romance between them, but they spent long evenings together, during which Fitzgerald drank beer and talked about himself. Mrs. Guthrie had literary ambitions, and from June to September she kept a journal of her time spent with Fitzgerald. The journal includes an account of Fitzgerald’s summer affair with Beatrice Dance, a wealthy Texan staying at the Grove Park Inn, as well as literary advice on such topics as revision, always a major step in Fitzgerald’s composition process. In “A Summer With F. Scott Fitzgerald” (Esquire, December 1964), Mrs. Guthrie, now Laura Guthrie Hearne, remembers asking Fitzgerald about his method of revising. He replied, “Three revisions are absolutely necessary. First, the first draft, the inspirational points. Second, the cold going over. Third, putting both in their proper balance” (p. 164). It was also during that summer of 1935 that Fitzgerald met Tony Buttitta, an aspiring writer and the owner of an Asheville bookstore. Like Mrs. Guthrie, Buttita kept a record of his conversations with Fitzgerald, which he published almost forty years later in After the Good Gay Times (New York: Viking, 1974).

On 8 April 1936 Fitzgerald transferred his wife Zelda to Highland Hospital at Asheville. He moved into Suite 441-443 of the Grove Park Inn for another summer. There he was close to Zelda, but he saw very little of her after he broke his shoulder in a July diving accident. It was a dark time for Fitzgerald. Besides his health problems and his worries over Zelda’s condition, he was concerned with rising debts and a falling income. During this second summer at the Grove Park, he fired a revolver in a suicide threat, after which the hotel refused to let him stay without a nurse. He was attended thereafter by Dorothy Richardson, whose chief duties were to provide him company and to try to keep him from drinking too much. In typical Fitzgerald fashion, he developed a friendship with Miss Richardson and attempted to educate her by providing her with a reading list. In July of 1937, Fitzgerald left Asheville for Hollywood, where he remained until his death on 21 December 1940.

The Grove Park Inn has changed its attitude toward Fitzgerald since his days there as a troublesome guest. Today F. Scott Fitzgerald’s picture hangs in a gallery of photographs of the great and celebrated who have stayed at the hotel, and his name is mentioned prominently in the hotel’s publicity, often before such other famous names as Thomas Edison, Bela Bartok, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Dwight D. Eisenhower. In addition, the inn’s Vanderbilt Wing features meeting rooms known as the Fitzgerald Suite.