SOURCE: Gale, Robert L. “Fitzgerald's ‘A Snobbish Story’.” The Explicator 55, no. 3 (spring 1997): 154.

In the following essay, Gale identifies the source for Josephine Perry's nickname in “A Snobbish Story,”

In F. Scott Fitzgerald's “A Snobbish Story” (1930), the Chicago Tribune reporter John Boynton Bailey, who is also a would-be socialist playwright, derisively labels as “Miss Potterfield-Swiftcormick” the heroine Josephine Perry, the spoiled daughter of a wealthy Chicago businessman.

This name satirically combines the names of Chicago merchant-capitalist Potter Palmer (1826-1902) and perhaps his wife, the art collector Mrs. Potter Palmer (née Bertha Honoré), Chicago merchant-philanthropist Marshall Field (1852-1906), Chicago meat-packing capitalist Gustavus Franklin Swift (1839-1903) and his five meat-packing sons, and Chicago journalist-politician and Tribune proprietor Joseph Medill McCormick (1877-1925).

Although for a while Josephine associates with Bailey, once the chips are down she promises herself to consort “with the rich and powerful of this world forever” and thus...