Larry Haeg, the Biographer of Charles Flandrau Talks About Why Some Great Writers Fail

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This weekend, the literati gather to hand out the annual Minnesota Book Awards. In a few minutes, Marianne will be talking murder with two of the fiction nominees. In the history category, one of the books is a biography of a man who was arguably one of Minnesota's great writers. Toward the end of the 19th century, Minnesota produced three men who would go on to Ivy League schools and pursue writing careers. You've no doubt heard of Princeton's F. Scott Fitzgerald and Yale's Sinclair Lewis. But the name of Harvard's Charles Macomb Flandrau probably draws a blank. Flandrau was a wit, a mentor, a critic and a sought-after writer by both book and magazine publishers. Though he traveled the world, he called a house in St. Paul's Ramsey Hill neighborhood home until his death in 1938. So why doesn't the world know about Charlie Flandrau, a writer who all agreed was destined for greatness? "In Gatsby's Shadow," a new biography by Larry Haeg - who lives just a stone's throw from where the Flandrau house used to stand. He didn't set out to write about Flandrau. While researching Fitzgerald's life, Haeg stumbled across his name.

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