Due to its adult theme, Fitzgerald did not consider “May Day” suitable for the family oriented readership favored by the Post He offered this “masterpiece” to H. L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan, editors at The Smart Set, where it appeared in the July 1920 issue.[1] Fitzgerald termed the story “this somewhat unpleasant tale…”[2][3]
Stories
Fitzgerald provided his own annotated table of contents for the collection, providing commentary on each story The works are presented in three categories: My Last Flappers, Fantasies, and Unclassified Masterpieces.[4][5]
The original periodical publication and date are indicated below.[6][7]
Critic Hildegarde Hawthorne in The New York Times, October 29, 1922 reflects Fitzgerald’s identification as a writer for Slicks, in particular The Saturday Evening Post.[12] Hawthorne wrote that stories “give too much of the effect of samples…The book is more like a magazine than a collection of stories by one man, arranged by an editor to suit all tastes and meant to be thrown away after reading.”[13]
Hawthorne closes with an upbeat assessment of Fitzgerald’s potential as a fiction writer: “These stories are announced as beginning in the writer's second manner. They certainly show a development in his art, a new turn...this "second manner" is surely the outcropping of a rich vein that may hold much wealth.”[14]
Critical appraisal
“F. Scott Fitzgerald’s short stories remain a misunderstood and underrated aspect of his career. They have been dismissed as hackwork and condemned for impeding his serious work. Certainly they are uneven; but Fitzgerald’s best stories are among the best in American literature.” —Biographer Matthew J. Bruccoli in The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald (1989)[15]
Biographer Kenneth Elbe ranks three stories—“The Rich Boy,” “Winter Dreams,” and “Absolution”—as “worth including” in the collection and “among the better ones in all his short fiction.” The other selections are reminiscent of Fitzgerald’s “contrived magazine fiction.” According to Elbe, the author himself characterized some of the short fiction as “cheap and without the spontaneity of my first work.”[16] Elbe adds: “Tales of the Jazz Age suffers badly from the inclusion of some early writing which might better have remained in The Nassau Literary Review, where it first appeared.”[17][18]
Several stories in Tales of the Jazz Age are notable for their “authorial self-consciousness” registered through Fitzgerald’s editorial remarks directed towards the reader. Literary Critic John Kuehl writes:
[T]he author’s voice tends to intrude upon and dominate the stories, whether narrated in the third-person or in the no less omniscient first-person. The characters tell neither their own stories nor other people’s tales; with few exceptions, they are objects viewed through authorial eyes instead of filters through whom the action unfolds.[19]
Kuehl argues that this “egotistical foregrounding” tends to squander Fitzgerald’s literary talents in favor of an intrusive approach that fails to adequately dramatize his narrative.[20]
Theme
The stories comprising Fitzgerald’s earliest professional fiction were largely concerned with inherited wealth and the “indolent rich.” These preoccupations transitioned, however, toward narratives involving a broader spectrum of social classes, including “businessmen, writers, performers, priests and white-collar workers.” Critic John Kuehl reports that this emerging focus on essentially democratic concerns “reaches its apotheosis in “ May Day,” where various socioeconomic classes meet.”[21]
↑ Bryer, 2000 p.1070: As “Porcelain in Pink” (A One Act Play).
↑ Bryer, 2000 p. 1070: Published in Metro under the title “His Russet Witch.”
↑ Bryer, 2000 p. 1070: Published in the CST as “Mr. Icky: The Quintessence of Quaintness in One Act”
↑ Bryer, 2000 p. 1070: Published in Vanity Fair under the title “Jemina, the Mountain Girl (One of Those Family Feud Stories of the Blue Ridge Mountains with Apologies to Stephen Leacock.”
Bryer, Jackson R. 2000: Chronology and Notes in F. Scott Fitzgerald: Novels and Stories, 1920-1922. pp. 1057-1071. Library of America, New York. ISBN1-883011-84-1
Eble, Kenneth E. 1963. F. Scott Fitzgerald.Twayne Publishers, Boston, Massachusetts. Library of Congress Card Number: 63-10953
The Great Gatsby is a 1925 novel by American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald. Set in the Jazz Age on Long Island, near New York City, the novel depicts first-person narrator Nick Carraway's interactions with mysterious millionaire Jay Gatsby and Gatsby's obsession to reunite with his former lover, Daisy Buchanan.
Zelda Fitzgerald was an American novelist, painter, playwright, and socialite. Born in Montgomery, Alabama, to a wealthy Southern family, she became locally famous for her beauty and high spirits. In 1920, she married writer F. Scott Fitzgerald after the popular success of his debut novel, This Side of Paradise. The novel catapulted the young couple into the public eye, and she became known in the national press as the first American flapper. Due to their wild antics and incessant partying, she and her husband became regarded in the newspapers as the enfants terribles of the Jazz Age. Alleged infidelity and bitter recriminations soon undermined their marriage. After traveling abroad to Europe, Zelda's mental health deteriorated, and she had suicidal and homicidal tendencies which required psychiatric care. Her doctors diagnosed Zelda with schizophrenia, although later posthumous diagnoses posit bipolar disorder.
This Side of Paradise is the debut novel by American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald, published in 1920. It examines the lives and morality of carefree American youth at the dawn of the Jazz Age. Its protagonist, Amory Blaine, is an attractive middle-class student at Princeton University who dabbles in literature and engages in a series of romances with flappers. The novel explores the theme of love warped by greed and status-seeking, and takes its title from a line of Rupert Brooke's poem Tiare Tahiti.
The Beautiful and Damned is a 1922 novel by American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald. Set in New York City, the novel's plot follows a young artist Anthony Patch and his flapper wife Gloria Gilbert who become "wrecked on the shoals of dissipation" while excessively partying at the dawn of the hedonistic Jazz Age. As Fitzgerald's second novel, the work focuses upon the swinish behavior and glittering excesses of the American social elite in the heyday of New York's café society.
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.
Flappers and Philosophers is a collection of eight works of short fiction by F. Scott Fitzgerald, published in 1920 by Charles Scribner's Sons. Each of the stories had originally appeared, independently, in either the Saturday Evening Post,Scribner's Magazine, or The Smart Set.
"The Cut-Glass Bowl" is a short story by American author F. Scott Fitzgerald, first published in the May 1920 issue of Scribner's Magazine, and included later that year in his first short story collection Flappers and Philosophers. The story follows the lives of a married couple, Evylyn and Harold Piper, through various difficult or tragic events that involve a cut glass bowl they received as a wedding gift. In a copy of Flappers and Philosophers which he gave to literary critic H. L. Mencken, Fitzgerald wrote that he deemed the story to be "worth reading" in contrast to others in the volume which he dismissed as either "amusing" or "trash."
"Benediction" is a short story by American author F. Scott Fitzgerald, first published in 1920 in the February 1920 issue of The Smart Set. It was republished shortly thereafter in Fitzgerald's short story collection Flappers and Philosophers.
"The Ice Palace" is a modernist short story written by F. Scott Fitzgerald and published in The Saturday Evening Post on May 22, 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.
Francis Scott Key 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.
All the Sad Young Men is a collection of short fiction by F. Scott Fitzgerald. The stories originally appeared independently in popular literary journals and were first collected in 1926 by Charles Scribner’s Sons.
"The Offshore Pirate" is a short story written by F. Scott Fitzgerald in 1920. It is one of eight short stories included in Fitzgerald's first published collection, Flappers and Philosophers. The story was first published in the May 29, 1920 issue of The Saturday Evening Post and illustrated by Leslie L. Benson.
Taps at Reveille is a collection of 18 short stories by F. Scott Fitzgerald, published by Charles Scribner’s Sons in 1935. It was the fourth and final volume of previously uncollected short stories Fitzgerald published in his lifetime. The volume appeared the year after his novel Tender is the Night (1934) was published. The collection includes several stories featuring autobiographical creations derived from Fitzgerald’s youth, namely Basil Duke Lee and Josephine Perry.
The Vegetable or From President to Postman, more commonly known simply as The Vegetable, is a 1923 play by American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald. It is his only play and is based on one of his short stories that he developed into a play.
"May Day" is a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald published in The Smart Set in the July 1920 issue. The story was included in his 1922 short story collection Tales of the Jazz Age. The plot follows a blithe coterie of privileged Yale alumni who meet for a social dance during the May Day riots of 1919. The riots erupted in multiple cities including Cleveland, Ohio and New York City after socialists protested the conviction of Eugene Debs. The story has been compared to J.D. Salinger's "A Perfect Day for Bananafish."
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.
"Echoes of the Jazz Age" is a short essay by American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald that was first published in Scribner's Magazine in November 1931. The essay analyzes the societal conditions in the United States which gave rise to the raucous historical era known as the Jazz Age and the subsequent events which led to the era's abrupt conclusion. The frequently anthologized essay represents an extended critique by Fitzgerald of 1920s hedonism and is regarded as one of Fitzgerald's finest non-fiction works.
“Myra Meets His Family” is a work of short fiction by F. Scott Fitzgerald first appearing in The Saturday Evening Post on March 20, 1920. The story was collected in The Price Was High: Fifty Uncollected Stories by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1979) by Harcourt, Brace & Company “Myra Meets His Family” was among the first stories accepted by The Saturday Evening Post for publication. Fitzgerald would sell the bulk of his short fiction to the Post during the next 20 years, until his death n 1940.
The Price Was High: Fifty Uncollected Stories by F. Scott Fitzgerald is a volume of short fiction by F. Scott Fitzgerald published by Harcourt Brace & Company in 1979.
“The Lees of Happiness” is a work of short fiction by F. Scott Fitzgerald first appearing in The Chicago Tribune, December 12, 1920. The story was first collected in Tales of the Jazz Age (1922) published by Charles Scribner’s Sons.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
