Boats Against the Current: The Honeymoon Summer

Richard Webb, Jr., has created tribute to F. Scott ad Zelda Fitzgerald: Boats Against the Current: The Honeymoon Summer of Scott and Zelda. The book centers on the five-month honeymoon period in 1920 which Scott and Zelda spent in Westport, CN. Scott Fitzgerald, in fact called the time in Westport “the happiest year since I was eighteen.” But the retrospective is not limited to that period in the Fitzgeralds’ lives.

Boats Against the Current is a large, coffee table book, a book meant to be savored and returned to again and again. The pictures alone deserve a reader’s attention. Many are candid shots that one would find in any family album of pictures. Only the people in these pictures are Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald.

Webb has also documented events of the time with newspaper articles, pictures, and memories. He has also documented sources extensively with notes, acknowledgements, and information from behind the scenes.

Webb, www.boats-against-current.com, graduated from Vanderbilt U. He has taught in high schools and universities. In addition to his teaching, he has become an authority on Westport history. Boats Against the Current functions, too, as a companion to the documentary Connecticut Goes Dry.

Webb is an author, documentary filmmaker and historian. A graduate of Vanderbilt University, he is a multiple award-winning educator who has taught at the high school and university level for more than 25 years. A featured presenter in the Connecticut Public Broadcasting Prohibition documentary Connecticut Goes Dry, Webb is Executive Producer of Gatsby in Connecticut, an F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald documentary by Robert Steven Williams. Boats Against the Current is the companion piece of the film. Considered an authority on Westport history, he is a consultant to several local historical societies and has given talks throughout Fairfield County on the time the Fitzgeralds spent in Westport.

Webb is pictured above with Daisy (left) and Zelda (right), his dogs.