Forgotten Fitzgerald: Echoes of a Lost America

by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sarah Churchwell

While F. Scott Fitzgerald was writing the novels we remember him for today, he was also publishing short stories in popular magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post and Esquire . Although many of Fitzgerald's short stories are celebrated and anthologised today, more remain out of print than would be expected for a writer of his stature. Some of these forgotten stories deserve to be rediscovered by the many readers who love Fitzgerald's work.

Sarah Churchwell, author of the acclaimed Careless Murder, Mayhem and the Invention of The Great Gatsby, has selected twelve forgotten stories from throughout Fitzgerald's career that refract, in different ways, his most familiar the changing meanings of America in the first decades of the twentieth century, and the desire to reconcile rich and poor through a romantic search for glamour, hope and wonder. Each of these stories offers a riff on the theme of America, a world we have lost, but can hear echoes of in Fitzgerald's characteristically rich, vivid prose.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction

385 pages, Kindle Edition

First published November 6, 2014

About the author

Francis 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.

Reviews

[Ian B. · Rating 4 out of 5]

At times when I was reading this collection of neglected stories by F. Scott Fitzgerald the prose was so golden that I thought, Can anyone else really write at all? These pieces were mostly produced for the lucrative magazine market, and as editor Sarah Churchwell points out, the compromises required are sometimes evident: illogically happy endings, experiments with alien genres (The Dance, his only murder mystery), and themes and narratives large enough for novels twisted into submission (Fitzgerald’s complaint to his agent that The Swimmers is ‘too big for its space’ is correct, but what a brilliant story it is).

I admired the elegance with which he acknowledged and worked within these conventions. In Six of One, a pair of middle-aged men propose to track the fortunes of six boys from the complacent upper classes and six from ordinary backgrounds who show promise, the second group to be given the same educational and professional opportunities as the first. Fitzgerald covers ten years in twenty pages and deftly manages the fluctuations of fourteen (fourteen!) main characters with irony and freshness.

I would now like to read a further volume of the twelve stories Sarah Churchwell dearly wanted to put in this one but had to leave out…

[Margaret Conmey · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mostly excellent stories and I agree that it is puzzling that they are often not included in other collections.
I wish someone would do a book,or series of books containing all Fitzgerald ‘s short stories

[Mark Spence · Rating 4 out of 5]

A bit dated but excusable (for the most part), and eerily prescient.

[Natasha · Rating 3 out of 5]

Reading Fitzgerald always feels like a treat. Even tho I didn't particularly enjoy all the stories, you can't deny the style and elegance of his writing.

[Paul Taylor · Rating 5 out of 5]

Churchwell does for Fitzgerald what Angela Carter has done for Fairy Tales. It is to be regretted that so much of Fitzgerald's work has been lost or forgotten and that few appreciate how prolific he was and how consistently good his work was and all this in spite of his hectic and troubled life. The only omission from this collection is Babylon Revisited, which I commend to you. Churchwell's brief summaries before each story really set the the context to perfection.

Comparison is odious but I think it a shame that, with the exception of The Great Gatsby, Hemingway is now the better known and more widely read of the two. For my money (and I know this will be controversial) give me Fitzgerald any day; old sport.

[Alex Sarll]

Lost tales (except for the two thirds which are already in print). Churchwell's introductions are informative (strange to think that the Charleston could never have been danced at Gatsby's parties, which antedated it by years), but her selections fall between two stools. The proportion of gem to flaw in the stories varies, but all are worth reading. There are also a few lines quoted from Scott's doomed attempt at a series set in ninth century France, which I suspect are all anyone ever need read of those - "Listen, baby...pipe down! I'm a count, I tell you!"

[Jana · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5*

Mostly really good stories, one or two that I didn't like much