The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald

Today, F. Scott Fitzgerald is known for his novels, but in his lifetime, his fame stemmed from his prolific achievement as one of America's most gifted (and best-paid) writers of stories and novellas. In The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Matthew J. Bruccoli, the country's premier Fitzgerald scholar and biographer, assembles a sparkling collection that encompasses the full scope of Fitzgerald's short fiction. The forty-three masterpieces range from early stories that capture the fashion of the times to later ones written after the author's fabled crack-up, which are sober reflections on his own youthful excesses. Included are classic novellas, such as "The Rich Boy," "May Day," and "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz," as well as a remarkable body of work he wrote for the Saturday Evening Post and its sister "slicks." These stories can be read as an autobiographical journal of a great writer's career, an experience deepened by the illuminating introductory headnotes that Matthew Bruccoli has written for each story, placing it in its literary and biographical context.
Together, these forty-three stories compose a vivid picture of a lost era, but their brilliance is timeless. As Malcolm Cowley once wrote, "Fitzgerald remains an exemplar and archetype, but not of the 1920s alone; in the end he represents the human spirit in one of its permanent forms." This essential collection is ample testament to that statement, and a monument to the genius of one of the great voices in the history of American literature.

F. Scott Fitzgerald was born in 1896, in St. Paul, Minnesota. In 1917, he left Princeton to join the army. Shortly after his demobilization, he sold his first short story to the Smart Set, edited by H. L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan. His first novel, This Side of Paradise (1920), earned him immediate critical and financial success. That same year, he married Zelda Sayre. For the next decade, the couple divided their time between New York, Paris, the Riviera, and Rome, becoming part of the American expatriate circle that included Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, and Thomas Wolfe. During this period, Fitzgerald wrote The Great Gatsby (1925). Increasingly beset by his wife's mental illness and his own drinking, Fitzgerald returned to America, where he wrote the heavily autobiographical Tender Is the Night (1934). He died in Hollywood in 1940 of a heart attack while working on his final novel, The Love of the Last Tycoon.