"A man with prominent teeth cut in. Edith inhaled a slight cloud of whiskey. She liked men to have had something to drink; they were so much more cheerful, and appreciative and complimentary--much easier to talk to. 'My name's Dean, Philip Dean,' he said cheerfully. 'You don't remember me, I know, but you used to come up to New Haven with a fellow I roomed with senior year, Gordon Sterrett.' Edith looked up quickly. 'Yes, I went up with him twice--to the Pump and Slipper* and the Junior prom.' "
--F. Scott Fitzgerald
"May Day"
Tales of the Jazz Age, 1922
"Warren was nineteen and rather pitying with those of his friends who hadn't gone East to college. But, like most boys, he bragged tremendously about the girls of his city when he was away from it. There was Genevieve Ormonde, who regularly made the rounds of dances, house-parties, and football games at Princeton, Yale, Williams, and Cornell; there was black-eyed Roberta Dillon, who was quite as famous to her own generation as Hiram Johnson or Ty Cobb; and, of course, there was Marjorie Harvey, who besides having a fairylike face and a dazzling, bewildering tongue was already justly celebrated for having turned five cart-wheels in succession during the last pump-and-slipper dance at New Haven."
--F. Scott Fitzgerald
"Bernice Bobs Her Hair"
Flappers and Philosophers, 1920
"Joe Jelke and two other boys were along, and none of the three could manage to take their eyes off her, even to say hello to me. She had one of those exquisite rose skins frequent in our part of the country, and beautiful until the little veins begin to break at about forty; now, flushed with the cold, it was a riot of lovely delicate pinks like many carnations. She and Joe had reached some sort of reconciliation, or at least he was too far gone in love to remember last night; but I saw that though she laughed a lot she wasn't really paying any attention to him or any of them. She wanted them to go, so that there'd be a message from the kitchen, but I knew that the message wasn't coming--that she was safe. There was talk of the Pump and Slipper dance at New Haven and of the Princeton Prom, and then, in various moods, we four left and separated quickly outside. I walked home with a certain depression of spirit and lay for an hour in a hot bath thinking that vacation was all over for me now that she was gone; feeling, even more deeply than I had yesterday, that she was out of my life."
--F. Scott Fitzgerald
"A Short Trip Home"
The Saturday Evening Post
January 17, 1927
"St. A's appeals to the 'cool element' of Preppies at Yale; this means Preppies who don't iron their shirts. It isn't rowdy: parties there conform to the intellectual self-image Yalies hold dear."
--The Official Preppy Handbook
Lisa Birnbach, ed.
Workman Publishing, 1980
*Note: The Pump and Slipper is an annual ball, held at St. A's each spring.