Babylon Revisited and Other Stories

Last updated March 12, 2019

Babylon Revisited and Other Stories is a collection of ten short stories written between 1920 and 1937 by F. Scott Fitzgerald. It was published in 1960 by Charles Scribner's Sons.

A short story is a piece of prose fiction that typically can be read in one sitting and focuses on a self-contained incident or series of linked incidents, with the intent of evoking a "single effect" or mood, however there are many exceptions to this.

Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was an American fiction writer, whose works helped to illustrate the flamboyance and excess of the Jazz Age. While he achieved popular success, fame, and fortune in his lifetime, he did not receive much critical acclaim until after his death. Perhaps the most notable member of the "Lost Generation" of the 1920s, Fitzgerald is now widely regarded as one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century. He finished four novels: This Side of Paradise, The Beautiful and Damned, The Great Gatsby, and Tender Is the Night. A fifth, unfinished novel, The Last Tycoon, was published posthumously. Four collections of his short stories were published, as well as 164 short stories in magazines during his lifetime.

Charles Scribners Sons American publisher

Charles Scribner's Sons, or simply Scribner's or Scribner, is an American publisher based in New York City, known for publishing American authors including Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Kurt Vonnegut, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Stephen King, Robert A. Heinlein, Thomas Wolfe, George Santayana, John Clellon Holmes, Don DeLillo, and Edith Wharton.

Selection

Babylon Revisited collects ten of F. Scott Fitzgerald's best-known short stories. In an afterword to the 1996 edition, Fitzgerald scholar Matthew Bruccoli describes the period leading up to the selection, "F. Scott Fitzgerald died believing himself a failure. The obituaries were condescending, and he seemed destined for literary obscurity. The first phase of the Fitzgerald resurrection—'revival' does not properly describe the process—occurred between 1945 and 1950. By 1960 he had achieved a secure place among America's enduring writers."^[1] In an afterword to the 2000 edition, James L. W. West III of Pennsylvania State University explains of the Babylon Revisited stories, "His writings embody lessons of ambition and disappointment, idealism and disenchantment, success and failure and redemption, that are central to the American experience...His romantic readiness for life and his gift for hope have come to embody important aspects of the American experience."^[2]

Matthew Joseph Bruccoli was an American professor of English at the University of South Carolina. He was the preeminent expert on F. Scott Fitzgerald. He also wrote about writers such as Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe and John O'Hara, and was editor of the Dictionary of Literary Biography.

The Pennsylvania State University is a state-related, land-grant, doctoral university with campuses and facilities throughout Pennsylvania. Founded in 1855 as the Farmers’ High School of Pennsylvania, the university conducts teaching, research, and public service. Its instructional mission includes undergraduate, graduate, professional and continuing education offered through resident instruction and online delivery. Its University Park campus, the flagship campus, lies within the Borough of State College and College Township. It has two law schools: Penn State Law, on the school's University Park campus, and Dickinson Law, located in Carlisle, 90 miles south of State College. The College of Medicine is located in Hershey. Penn State has another 19 commonwealth campuses and 5 special mission campuses located across the state. Penn State has been labeled one of the "Public Ivies," a publicly funded university considered as providing a quality of education comparable to those of the Ivy League.

Reception

When the title story appeared in Fitzgerald's final collection, 1935's Taps at Reveille , The New York Times wrote, "'Babylon Revisited,' which seems oddly linked in spirit to Mr. Fitzgerald's latest novel, 'Tender is the Night,' is probably the most mature and substantial story in the book. A rueful, though incompleted, farewell to the Jazz Age, its setting is Paris and its tone one of anguish for past follies."^[3] In a January 2011 essay to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Penguin's Modern Classics series, University of East Anglia's Sarah Churchwell wrote,

Taps at Reveille (1935) is a collection of 18 short stories by F. Scott Fitzgerald. It was the fourth and final collection of short stories Fitzgerald published in his lifetime. All were timed to appear a few months to a year after each of his four completed novels were published.

<i>The New York Times</i> Daily broadsheet newspaper based in New York City

The New York Times is an American newspaper based in New York City with worldwide influence and readership. Founded in 1851, the paper has won 125 Pulitzer Prizes, more than any other newspaper. The Times is ranked 17th in the world by circulation and 2nd in the U.S.

Jazz Age period in the 1920s ending with the Great Depression

The Jazz Age was a period in the 1920s and 1930s in which jazz music and dance styles rapidly gained nationwide popularity in the United States. The Jazz Age's cultural repercussions were primarily felt in the United States, the birthplace of jazz. Originating in New Orleans as a fusion of African and European music, jazz played a significant part in wider cultural changes in this period, and its influence on pop culture continued long afterwards. The Jazz Age is often referred to in conjunction with the Roaring Twenties, and in the United States it overlapped in significant cross-cultural ways with the Prohibition Era. American author F. Scott Fitzgerald is widely credited with coining the term, first using it in the title of his 1922 short story collection, Tales of the Jazz Age.

"Babylon Revisited" is at once timeless and startlingly modern in its evocation of a single father struggling with alcoholism and trying to care for his daughter, and coming to terms with the costs of extravagance...Nine years after the publication, less than a year before he would die at 44, Fitzgerald wrote his daughter Scottie a letter about the story: "You have earned some money for me this week because I sold 'Babylon Revisited,' in which you are a character, to the pictures (the sum received wasn’t worthy of the magnificent story—neither of you nor of me—however, I am accepting it)." Like [the story's hero], Fitzgerald learnt the hard way that loss is remorseless, absolute; what has been wasted is irrecoverable. But as "Babylon Revisited" also shows, even out of the wreckage some things can be salvaged, if not everything: what Fitzgerald retrieved he bequeathed to us, the hard-won lessons of his life transformed into heartbreaking art.

Churchwell called the story—as of 2011—"a perfect tale for the times we live in".^[4]

Betty Draper can be seen reading the collection in the second season of Mad Men .

Elizabeth "Betty" Hofstadt Francis is a fictional character on AMC's television series Mad Men, portrayed by January Jones. The character's appearance is often compared to that of Grace Kelly.

<i>Mad Men</i> American television period drama series

Mad Men is an American period drama television series created by Matthew Weiner and produced by Lionsgate Television. The series premiered on July 19, 2007, on the cable network AMC. After seven seasons and 92 episodes, Mad Men's final episode aired on May 17, 2015. Mad Men is set primarily in the 1960s – initially at the fictional Sterling Cooper advertising agency on Madison Avenue in New York City; later at the newly created firm, Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce – located near the Time-Life Building at 1271 Sixth Avenue. According to the pilot episode, the phrase "Mad men" was a slang term coined in the 1950s by advertisers working on Madison Avenue to refer to themselves, a claim that has since been disputed.

Related Research Articles

The Great Gatsby is a 1925 novel written by American author F. Scott Fitzgerald that follows a cast of characters living in the fictional towns of West Egg and East Egg on prosperous Long Island in the summer of 1922. The story primarily concerns the young and mysterious millionaire Jay Gatsby and his quixotic passion and obsession with the beautiful former debutante Daisy Buchanan. Considered to be Fitzgerald's magnum opus, The Great Gatsby explores themes of decadence, idealism, resistance to change, social upheaval, and excess, creating a portrait of the Roaring Twenties that has been described as a cautionary tale regarding the American Dream.

The Beautiful and Damned, first published by Scribner's in 1922, is F. Scott Fitzgerald's second novel. It explores and portrays New York café society and the American Eastern elite during the Jazz Age before and after "the Great War" and in the early 1920s. As in his other novels, Fitzgerald's characters in this novel are complex, especially with respect to marriage and intimacy. The work is generally considered to have drawn upon and be based on Fitzgerald's relationship and marriage with his wife Zelda Fitzgerald.

<i>The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald</i>

The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald is a compilation of 43 short stories by F. Scott Fitzgerald. It was edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli and published by Charles Scribner's Sons in 1989. It begins with a foreword by Charles Scribner II and a preface written by Bruccoli, after which the stories follow in chronological order of publication.

Ada Beatrice Queen Victoria Louise Virginia Smith, better known as Bricktop, was an American dancer, jazz singer, vaudevillian, and self-described saloon-keeper who owned the nightclub Chez Bricktop in Paris from 1924 to 1961, as well as clubs in Mexico City and Rome. She has been called "...one of the most legendary and enduring figures of twentieth-century American cultural history."

"Winter Dreams" is a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald that first appeared in Metropolitan Magazine in December 1922, and was collected in All the Sad Young Men in 1926. It is considered one of Fitzgerald's finest stories and is frequently anthologized. In the Fitzgerald canon, it is considered to be in the "Gatsby-cluster," as many of its themes were later expanded upon in his famous novel The Great Gatsby in 1925.

<i>The Pat Hobby Stories</i> book by F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Pat Hobby Stories are a collection of 17 short stories written by F. Scott Fitzgerald, first published by Arnold Gingrich of Esquire magazine between January 1940 and May 1941, and later collected in one volume in 1962. The last five installments in Esquire of The Pat Hobby Stories were published posthumously; Fitzgerald died on December 21, 1940.

"The Ice Palace" is a modernist short story written by F. Scott Fitzgerald and published in The Saturday Evening Post, 22 May 1920. It is one of eight short stories originally published in Fitzgerald's first collection, Flappers and Philosophers, and is also included in the collection Babylon Revisited and Other Stories.

All the Sad Young Men is the third collection of short stories written by F. Scott Fitzgerald, published by Scribners in February 1926.

The Bridal Party is a short story written by F. Scott Fitzgerald featured in the Saturday Evening Post on August 9, 1930. The story is based on Ludlow Fowler's brother's, Powell Fowler, May 1930 Paris wedding. It is Fitzgerald's first story dealing with the stock market crash, and celebrates the end of the period when wealthy Americans colonized Paris.

"The Freshest Boy" is a short story by American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald. It was first published in the July 28, 1928 issue of The Saturday Evening Post, and was reprinted in Fitzgerald's 1935 collection, Taps at Reveille.

The Basil and Josephine Stories is a collection of two separate short stories collections by F. Scott Fitzgerald which initially ran serially in The Saturday Evening Post. Some of them were later collected in Taps at Reveille and posthumous short story collections. The title characters were intended by Fitzgerald to meet each other, but this never happened in his literature.

<i>The Vegetable</i>, or <i>From President to Postman</i> play written by F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Vegetable, or From President to Postman is a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald that he developed into a play.

"First Blood" is a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald published in April 1930 in the Saturday Evening Post. It was later collected in the collection Taps at Reveille.

"Babylon Revisited" is a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald, written in 1930 and first published on February 21, 1931 in the Saturday Evening Post and free inside The Telegraph, the following Saturday.

"The Rich Boy" is a short story by American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald. It was included in his 1926 collection All the Sad Young Men.

Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was an American author of novels and short stories, whose works are the paradigmatic writings of the Jazz Age. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century. Fitzgerald is considered a member of the "Lost Generation" of the 1920s. He finished four novels: This Side of Paradise, The Beautiful and Damned, The Great Gatsby, and Tender Is the Night. A fifth, unfinished novel, The Last Tycoon, was published posthumously. Fitzgerald also wrote many short stories that treat themes of youth and promise along with age and despair.

Sarah Bartlett Churchwell is a professor of American Literature and Public Understanding of the Humanities at the University of London, UK. Her expertise is in 20th- and 21st-century fiction. She has appeared on British television and radio and has been a judge for the Booker Prize, the Women's Prize for Fiction, and the David Cohen Prize for Literature. She is the director of the Being Human festival.

"The Adjuster" is a short story written by American author F. Scott Fitzgerald. The story appears in Fitzgerald's third collection of short stories All the Sad Young Men, published by Scribners in February 1926. The story depicts the troubled relationship of married couple Luella and Charles Hemple, living in New York City in 1925.

References

↑ F. Scott Fitzgerald, Babylon Revisited and Other Stories, New York: Scribner's, 1996. p. 260.
↑ F. Scott Fitzgerald, Babylon Revisited and Other Stories with a new afterword by James L. W. West, New York: Scribner's, 2000. p. 259.
↑ Edith H. Walton, "Scott Fitzgerald's Tales", The New York Times , March 31, 1935.
↑ Sarah Churchwell, "Babylon Revisited: When the money runs out", The Telegraph , 28 January 2011. (Churchwell draws an implicit economic connection between the early twenty-first century slowdown and 1930s Paris and America: "'Babylon Revisited' clearly chimes with Fitzgerald’s own life in late 1930: the extravagant dissipation of life in Paris during the boom years; the wife lost to illness; a fortune frittered away in the confidence that 'even when you were broke, you didn’t worry about money,' as Fitzgerald later wrote about the rampant spending in the Twenties, 'because it was in such profusion around you.'”)

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[1] F. Scott Fitzgerald, Babylon Revisited and Other Stories, New York: Scribner's, 1996. p. 260.

[2] F. Scott Fitzgerald, Babylon Revisited and Other Stories with a new afterword by James L. W. West, New York: Scribner's, 2000. p. 259.

[3] Edith H. Walton, "Scott Fitzgerald's Tales", The New York Times , March 31, 1935.

[4] Sarah Churchwell, "Babylon Revisited: When the money runs out", The Telegraph , 28 January 2011. (Churchwell draws an implicit economic connection between the early twenty-first century slowdown and 1930s Paris and America: "'Babylon Revisited' clearly chimes with Fitzgerald’s own life in late 1930: the extravagant dissipation of life in Paris during the boom years; the wife lost to illness; a fortune frittered away in the confidence that 'even when you were broke, you didn’t worry about money,' as Fitzgerald later wrote about the rampant spending in the Twenties, 'because it was in such profusion around you.'”)