Live! in The Lounge at Iwan Ries, 19 S. Wabash Av, 2d Floor.

Cocktails and cigars at 5:30pm, with the presentation to begin at 6:00 and last about 45 minutes,
followed by a very active Q&A session, more cocktails, then eclectic cocktail talk.

$60 includes lounge fees, two premium cigars, premium open bar, and snacks.
Dessert & tea sponsored by Cigar Society member Cathy Hareas. 
Event offered via Zoom for out-of-towners. Contact Curtis Tuckey for the Zoom link.

Hazelgrove, as I have written before, brings a novelist’s artfulness to his work, imbuing it with narrative force and enlivening and energizing his deep research. [He] is a sociable historian, writing in a style closer to breezy conversation than droning academia, and is not at all reluctant to share his enthusiasm for his subjects. He has done this in previous books about such colorful characters as Teddy Roosevelt, Al Capone, Edith Wilson, the Wright Brothers and Sally Rand.

In his latest, he writes in his preface that Gatsby is “the greatest work of American fiction the world has ever known.” He then gives readers a typically well-researched and smartly written story that focuses on the 11 months between the summer of 1924, when Fitzgerald began writing his novel, and April 10, 1925, when it was published. You get a fine look at the writer before and after that writing interlude, on a booze-fueled journey from “one party to another and one hotel to another,” and will cringe at the self-destructive antics of Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda, a pair who came to define the Jazz Age in all its raucous energy.