Landon Y. Jones offers a fascinating glimpse into F. Scott Fitzgerald’s summer spent in Montana:
In the ensuing weeks, Fitzgerald would do what easterners visiting Montana often do: he went native. He outfitted himself in boots, brandished a pistol, rode horses, drank bad whiskey, played cards with cowboys, flirted with daughters of neighboring ranchers, and took but one bath a week. More significantly, Fitzgerald also found in Montana a western version of the predatory capitalism and baronial lifestyles that had so fascinated him in the East.
Jones posits that Fitzgerald, born in St. Paul, the heart of the Great Plains, always "saw the East through western eyes":
If anything, Fitzgerald’s summer in Montana only reinforced his self-image as a non-easterner. In his writing, Fitzgerald reversed the westerly thrust of the American imagination. The typical Fitzgerald character is not an easterner who travels west to seek personal freedom, or renewed health, or reclaimed masculinity. Instead, Fitzgerald wrote about westerners who venture east only to wreck themselves on the shoals of status and Old World corruptions. Near the end of The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald’s protagonist, Nick Carraway, reflects: “I see now that this has been a story of the West, after all—Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I, were all Westerners, and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life.”
The Dish 