Where was F. Scott Fitzgerald’s favorite bar?

Fitzgerald drank in a lot of places, and over the years, many joints claimed to be his favorite. Fitzgerald drank, it seems, in more places than Abraham Lincoln supposedly slept. Given his prodigious thirst, Fitzgerald was likely thrown out of more places than ever hosted the Kentucky-born President for a night.

But we do know that when Fitzgerald was in Kentucky — specifically, Louisville — his favorite bar was at the Seelbach Hotel. In fact, it can be argued that one of the greatest writers of the 20th century walked into one of the most iconic bars in the South and walked out with a masterpiece, “The Great Gatsby.”

According to Seelbach lore, Fitzgerald, then a young, reluctant soldier, escaped the confines of Camp Zachary Taylor on weekend passes and headed to the big city. A college dropout, desperate to leave his naiveté behind with his dismal grades, Fitzgerald put on the impeccably tailored uniform he had recently acquired at Brooks Brothers and instantly became the handsomest and most dangerous man in the bar.

The hotel did its bit for the World War I effort by turning its famous Rathskeller into a USO. Young recruits hobnobbed with the city’s belles in the Bavarian cave of a nightclub, the walls lined with hand-painted Rookwood pottery, the vaulted ceiling covered in hand-tooled leather, surely the most unusual USO anywhere. Bartender Max “Scoopie” Allen presided over the copper-topped bar. Romances bloomed and wilted in the space of a brisk quickstep. The music was zippy, and the gin was cold. The girls were pretty, and the soldiers were anxious. The whole world speeded up, and anything might happen at the Seelbach.

Fitzgerald already believed at 21 that he was a genius — or at least knew he badly wanted to be. He expected to die in the war and was already at work on his first novel (the never-published “Romantic Egotist”). There is nothing as glamorous as a doomed genius. He went to the Seelbach looking for some worldly wisdom and, as any writer would, for inspiration.

To walk into the lobby of the Seelbach was to walk into infinite possibility. In 1918, hotels were still special places, the province of the wealthy and glamorous. This was no “garden inn,” no dial-your-own-cereal breakfast buffet, no suitcase on wheels and an empty minibar. This was a Beaux Arts jewel box brimming with mystery.

Everyone looked more beautiful, more elegant and more mysterious at the Seelbach. The hotel seemed to promise something, anything, everything. For F. Scott Fitzgerald, preferably immediately.