What do you think?
Rate this book
Short Stories
Hardcover
1 person is currently reading
12 people want to read
About the author
F. Scott Fitzgerald
2,097 books25.6k followersFrancis Scott Key Fitzgerald, widely known simply as Scott Fitzgerald, was an American novelist, essayist, and short story writer. He is best known for his novels depicting the flamboyance and excess of the Jazz Age, a term he popularized in his short story collection Tales of the Jazz Age. During his lifetime, he published four novels, four story collections, and 164 short stories. Although he achieved temporary popular success and fortune in the 1920s, Fitzgerald received critical acclaim only after his death and is now widely regarded as one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century.
Born into a middle-class family in Saint Paul, Minnesota, Fitzgerald was raised primarily in New York state. He attended Princeton University where he befriended future literary critic Edmund Wilson. Owing to a failed romantic relationship with Chicago socialite Ginevra King, he dropped out in 1917 to join the United States Army during World War I. While stationed in Alabama, he met Zelda Sayre, a Southern debutante who belonged to Montgomery's exclusive country-club set. Although she initially rejected Fitzgerald's marriage proposal due to his lack of financial prospects, Zelda agreed to marry him after he published the commercially successful This Side of Paradise (1920). The novel became a cultural sensation and cemented his reputation as one of the eminent writers of the decade.
His second novel, The Beautiful and Damned (1922), propelled him further into the cultural elite. To maintain his affluent lifestyle, he wrote numerous stories for popular magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post, Collier's Weekly, and Esquire. During this period, Fitzgerald frequented Europe, where he befriended modernist writers and artists of the "Lost Generation" expatriate community, including Ernest Hemingway. His third novel, The Great Gatsby (1925), received generally favorable reviews but was a commercial failure, selling fewer than 23,000 copies in its first year. Despite its lackluster debut, The Great Gatsby is now hailed by some literary critics as the "Great American Novel". Following the deterioration of his wife's mental health and her placement in a mental institute for schizophrenia, Fitzgerald completed his final novel, Tender Is the Night (1934).
Struggling financially because of the declining popularity of his works during the Great Depression, Fitzgerald moved to Hollywood, where he embarked upon an unsuccessful career as a screenwriter. While living in Hollywood, he cohabited with columnist Sheilah Graham, his final companion before his death. After a long struggle with alcoholism, he attained sobriety only to die of a heart attack in 1940, at 44. His friend Edmund Wilson edited and published an unfinished fifth novel, The Last Tycoon (1941), after Fitzgerald's death. In 1993, a new edition was published as The Love of the Last Tycoon, edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli.
Born into a middle-class family in Saint Paul, Minnesota, Fitzgerald was raised primarily in New York state. He attended Princeton University where he befriended future literary critic Edmund Wilson. Owing to a failed romantic relationship with Chicago socialite Ginevra King, he dropped out in 1917 to join the United States Army during World War I. While stationed in Alabama, he met Zelda Sayre, a Southern debutante who belonged to Montgomery's exclusive country-club set. Although she initially rejected Fitzgerald's marriage proposal due to his lack of financial prospects, Zelda agreed to marry him after he published the commercially successful This Side of Paradise (1920). The novel became a cultural sensation and cemented his reputation as one of the eminent writers of the decade.
His second novel, The Beautiful and Damned (1922), propelled him further into the cultural elite. To maintain his affluent lifestyle, he wrote numerous stories for popular magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post, Collier's Weekly, and Esquire. During this period, Fitzgerald frequented Europe, where he befriended modernist writers and artists of the "Lost Generation" expatriate community, including Ernest Hemingway. His third novel, The Great Gatsby (1925), received generally favorable reviews but was a commercial failure, selling fewer than 23,000 copies in its first year. Despite its lackluster debut, The Great Gatsby is now hailed by some literary critics as the "Great American Novel". Following the deterioration of his wife's mental health and her placement in a mental institute for schizophrenia, Fitzgerald completed his final novel, Tender Is the Night (1934).
Struggling financially because of the declining popularity of his works during the Great Depression, Fitzgerald moved to Hollywood, where he embarked upon an unsuccessful career as a screenwriter. While living in Hollywood, he cohabited with columnist Sheilah Graham, his final companion before his death. After a long struggle with alcoholism, he attained sobriety only to die of a heart attack in 1940, at 44. His friend Edmund Wilson edited and published an unfinished fifth novel, The Last Tycoon (1941), after Fitzgerald's death. In 1993, a new edition was published as The Love of the Last Tycoon, edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 of 1 review
June 18, 2024
The best ten percent of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s more than 160 short stories he wrote during his short life. His untimely passing robbed us of a deeper and broader view of the jazz age, and the opportunity to see how it would have been treated beyond WWII through the author’s literary lens.
Jazz age types are caricaturist: young, privileged, class-conscious, hedonistic, self-indulgent – not unlike our social media types today, just with more primitive technology. Their time is spent at golf clubs, country homes, and parties, lubricated with plenty of booze. Despite their material wealth and station, they are deeply unhappy. Alcoholism, boredom, and mental ill-health plague them. They are trapped in a social fishbowl where reputations can be broken by being seen with the wrong man or woman not of their class. Financial ruin sits on their shoulder. Suicides will take place if reputations are compromised.
Some of the stories are macabre, some religious, some sad, others fantasist – all have edge. One even goes back to the sixteenth century when a famous bard acts like a jazz-ager. Fitzgerald is anal about descriptions - of setting, clothes, interior décor, and nature. His omniscient narrator takes firm hold of the characters and marshals them about each story. His writing style preceded the writing schools, so there is a lot of repeated words and unnecessarily long sentences, and the language is archaic (after all, his stories were written nearly 100 years ago) – when he says “making love” (which he does often), it is not what you and I mean. A couple could be taking a walk in the park and making love at the same time – a figure of speech for “wooing,” I think it was.
I won’t cover all the stories, which average about twenty pages in length. But a couple of the longer ones that stand out are “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz” and “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” both which I would classify in the fantasy or speculative fiction categories; they ask questions of how we would behave if certain counter-natural occurrences took place. In the first story, a man discovers a mountain made up of solid diamond, making him, by far, the richest man who will ever live on earth, and yet it is a fortune that his progeny will not be able to hold onto, another version of Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, I thought. In the second story, which was made into a movie, a man is born at the biblical age of “three score and ten” (70) and ages backwards; his best years are his middle ones when he is on par with his peers, but at either ends of his “aging” there is nothing but alienation and ostracization - a metaphor for the outsider.
Fitzgerald comes up with great lines that encapsulate the jazz age and its characters:
“At 18, our convictions are hills from which we live; at 45, they are caverns in which we hide.”
“Every young man with a large income leads the life of a hunted partridge.”
“Deep pain is only reserved for the strong.”
“I’m more beautiful than anyone else. Why can’t I be happy?”
“His was a great sin who first invented consciousness.”
Shades of Gatsby appear in the final story in this collection, titled “The Rich Boy,” in which despite all the partying, money, and “making love,” the protagonist is left loveless and alone because he is not able to love anyone else but himself – a symptom of the jazz age which has amplified in our present time.
Jazz age types are caricaturist: young, privileged, class-conscious, hedonistic, self-indulgent – not unlike our social media types today, just with more primitive technology. Their time is spent at golf clubs, country homes, and parties, lubricated with plenty of booze. Despite their material wealth and station, they are deeply unhappy. Alcoholism, boredom, and mental ill-health plague them. They are trapped in a social fishbowl where reputations can be broken by being seen with the wrong man or woman not of their class. Financial ruin sits on their shoulder. Suicides will take place if reputations are compromised.
Some of the stories are macabre, some religious, some sad, others fantasist – all have edge. One even goes back to the sixteenth century when a famous bard acts like a jazz-ager. Fitzgerald is anal about descriptions - of setting, clothes, interior décor, and nature. His omniscient narrator takes firm hold of the characters and marshals them about each story. His writing style preceded the writing schools, so there is a lot of repeated words and unnecessarily long sentences, and the language is archaic (after all, his stories were written nearly 100 years ago) – when he says “making love” (which he does often), it is not what you and I mean. A couple could be taking a walk in the park and making love at the same time – a figure of speech for “wooing,” I think it was.
I won’t cover all the stories, which average about twenty pages in length. But a couple of the longer ones that stand out are “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz” and “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” both which I would classify in the fantasy or speculative fiction categories; they ask questions of how we would behave if certain counter-natural occurrences took place. In the first story, a man discovers a mountain made up of solid diamond, making him, by far, the richest man who will ever live on earth, and yet it is a fortune that his progeny will not be able to hold onto, another version of Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, I thought. In the second story, which was made into a movie, a man is born at the biblical age of “three score and ten” (70) and ages backwards; his best years are his middle ones when he is on par with his peers, but at either ends of his “aging” there is nothing but alienation and ostracization - a metaphor for the outsider.
Fitzgerald comes up with great lines that encapsulate the jazz age and its characters:
“At 18, our convictions are hills from which we live; at 45, they are caverns in which we hide.”
“Every young man with a large income leads the life of a hunted partridge.”
“Deep pain is only reserved for the strong.”
“I’m more beautiful than anyone else. Why can’t I be happy?”
“His was a great sin who first invented consciousness.”
Shades of Gatsby appear in the final story in this collection, titled “The Rich Boy,” in which despite all the partying, money, and “making love,” the protagonist is left loveless and alone because he is not able to love anyone else but himself – a symptom of the jazz age which has amplified in our present time.
Displaying 1 of 1 review