The volume comprises stories originally appearing in popular literary journals, but never authorized for collection by Fitzgerald during his lifetime.[2]
Stories
The stories in the collection are presented here chronologically by the date they were first published.[3]
"On an Ocean Wave by Paul Elgin" (Esquire, February 1941)
"The Woman From Twenty-One" (Esquire, June 1941)
"Discard [Director’s Special]" (Harper’s Bazaar, January 1948)
Background
“I have asked a lot of my emotions—one hundred and twenty stories. The price was high, right up with Kipling, because there was one little drop of something not blood, not a tear, not my seed, but me more intimately than these, in every story, it was the extra I had. Now it is gone and I am just like you now.” — “Our April Letter” from The Notebooks of F. Scott Fitzgerald (1978)[6][7][8]
After Fitzgerald’s death in 1940, six more volumes of as yet uncollected short fiction appeared: The Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald (1951), Afternoon of an Author (1957), The Pat Hobby Stories (1962), The Apprenticeship Fiction of F. Scott Fitzgerald (1965), The Basil and Josephine Stories (1973), and Bits of Paradise (1974).[10][11][12]
The Price Was High represents a selection of 49 of the remaining 57 previously uncollected works first published in magazines. Eight stories remain uncollected at the behest of Fitzgerald’s daughter Scottie Fitzgerald Smith, deemed too undistinguished for inclusion.[13] The volume adds a single piece, "On Your Own," one of nine stories never published so as to make The Price Was High an even fifty stories.[14] Biographer Matthew J. Bruccoli, editor of The Price Was High, acknowledges that these stories lack the "facility" that characterize Fitzgerald's most outstanding short fiction: "The Stories in this volume are not Fitzgerald’s best."[15]
Reception
Kirkus Reviews questions the judgment of editor Matthew J. Bruccoli in publishing works that Fitzgerald declined to collect in his own lifetime: "[N]ot a single one of these stories takes the time to stand back and really achieve the pause, gravity, and sweetness of Fitzgerald's best work."[16]
Literary critic Aaron Latham of the Washington Post terms the stories in The Price Was High as "bootleg" magazine fiction: "The best of Fitzgerald’s magazine work, of course, had been published from long ago." Latham argues that Fitzgerald would have benefited from writing less short fiction and finishing The Last Tycoon (1941), uncompleted when he died in 1940.[17]
Literary critic Malcolm Cowley in The New York Times, after reading all 50 stories, found merit in a number of them, and "almost all of them contain something to surprise us, if only a sentence or a passing observation…"[18] Cowley adds this caveat:
The sad fact remains that three-fourths of the stories in "The Price Was High" are below his usual level of achievement. In general they depend too much on coincidence, melodramatic turns of plot and information withheld from the reader until the last moment so as to end the story with an O. Henry twist.[19]
Critical appraisal
Fitzgerald approached his short stories as a means of financing his primary creative endeavor: to write novels.[20][21] As his short fiction was "written for money", he often despaired at his commercial relationship with The Saturday Evening Post and other "slick" journals. Writing to editor H. L. Menken in 1925, he complained that "my trash for the Post grows worse and worse as there is less and less heart in it...People don’t seem to realize that to an intelligent man writing down is about the hardest thing in the world."[22][23]
In a 1929 note to fellow fiction writer Ernest Hemingway, Fitzgerald identified himself with a sexual prostitute: "The Post now pays the old whore $4000 a screw. But now it’s because she’s mastered the 40 positions—in her youth, one was enough."[24]
Bruccoli notes that, despite Fitzgerald’s doubts as to the value of much of his short fiction, "he expended a major part of his talent on them".[25]
Critic Matthew J. Bruccoli reminds readers that Fitzgerald was fastidious about the work that was included in his collections. That the material in The Price Was High only appeared posthumously is a measure of his discrimination. Bruccoli writes: "Fitzgerald maintained a distinction between magazine and book publication, insisting that inclusion of a story in one of his collections gave it permanence and literary standing.}[26] Broccoli reminds readers that, during the Roaring Twenties, Fitzgerald was widely regarded as "a radical writer who announced the existence of new social values and new sexual roles."[27] With respect to women during the era of the Flapper, Bruccoli writes:
Fitzgerald’s girls are not dumb dolls. At their best they are courageous and self-reliant, determined to make the best of their assets in a man’s world. They are frankly sensual, though chaste—warm and promising. At an extreme there are man-eating women who dominate or destroy men, though this condition is unusual in his short stories.[28]
That Fitzgerald was fully aware of the cultural prohibitions concerning popular literature in the United States, and as a social conservation, was not unduly thwarted by these strictures. As to whether he "compromised or diluted his stories" to make them suitable for publication, this "remains an open question" according to Bruccoli.[29]
↑ Fitzgerald, 1979: the contents in The Price Was High does not conform perfectly to sequential dates in some cases
↑ Bruccoli, 1978 p. 256: See footnote on Bodley Head Scott Fitzgerald edition, 1963)
↑ Bruccoli, 1979 p. 591: Written in "early" 1935, rejected by Post and Ladies HJ. Esquire published an abridged version in 1971, the original 1935 manuscript appears in this volume.
↑ Kuehl, 1991 p. 186: See Nonfiction, from The Notebooks of F. Scott Fitzgerald (1979)
↑ Fitzgerald, 1979: Epigraph, opposite title page.
↑ Bruccoli, 1979 p. xi Kuehl, 1991 p. 184-185: Selected Bibliography Cowley, 1979: "Fifty stories, then - or nearly one-third of Fitzgerald's magazine work - are collected for the first time in The Price Was High."
Bruccoli, Matthew J.. 1979. Introductions to the stories in The Price Was High: Fifty Uncollected Stories by F. Scott Fitzgerald. MJF Books, New York. ISBN1-56731-106-7
Zelda Fitzgerald was an American novelist, painter, 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. Because of 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 Zelda traveled abroad to Europe, her mental health deteriorated, and she had suicidal and homicidal tendencies, which required psychiatric care. Her doctors diagnosed her with schizophrenia, although later posthumous diagnoses posit bipolar disorder.
Matthew Joseph Bruccoli was an American professor of English at the University of South Carolina. He was an expert on F. Scott Fitzgerald; his biography of Fitzgerald, published in 1981, was considered the standard biography for decades. He also wrote about other writers, including Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe, and John O'Hara, and was editor of the Dictionary of Literary Biography.
Tender Is the Night is the fourth and final novel completed by American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald. Set in French Riviera during the twilight of the Jazz Age, the 1934 novel chronicles the rise and fall of Dick Diver, a promising young psychiatrist, and his wife, Nicole, who is one of his patients. The story mirrors events in the lives of the author and his wife Zelda Fitzgerald as Dick starts his descent into alcoholism and Nicole struggles with mental illness.
"Bernice Bobs Her Hair" is a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald. It was first published in May 1920 in The Saturday Evening Post. It was Fitzgerald's first short story to achieve national prominence. The original publication featured interior illustrations by May Wilson Preston. The work later appeared in the September 1920 short story collection Flappers and Philosophers published by Charles Scribner's Sons.
Flappers and Philosophers is a collection of eight short stories by American writer 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."
"Head and Shoulders" is a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald. It was his first story to be published in the Saturday Evening Post, with the help of Fitzgerald's agent, Harold Ober. The story appeared in the February 21, 1920 issue and was illustrated by Charles D. Mitchell. It later appeared in his short story collection Flappers and Philosophers.
"Winter Dreams" is a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald that was first published in Metropolitan magazine in December 1922 and later collected in All the Sad Young Men in 1926. The plot concerns the attempts by a young man to win the affections of an upper-class woman. The story, frequently anthologized, is regarded as one of Fitzgerald's finest works "for poignantly portraying the loss of youthful illusions."
"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.
Tales of the Jazz Age (1922) is a collection of 11 short stories by American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald. Divided into three separate parts, it includes one of his better-known short stories, "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button". All of the stories had first appeared, independently, in either Metropolitan Magazine, The Saturday Evening Post, Smart Set, Collier's, the Chicago Sunday Tribune, or Vanity Fair.
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.
All the Sad Young Men is a collection of short fiction by American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald. The stories originally appeared independently in popular literary journals and were first collected in February 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 American writer 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 a year after his novel Tender is the Night was published. The collection includes several stories featuring autobiographical creations derived from Fitzgerald's youth, namely Basil Duke Lee and Josephine Perry.
"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.
"First Blood" is a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald, originally published in the April 5, 1930 issue of The Saturday Evening Post, illustrated by Harry Russell Ballinger. It was later included in his 1935 short story collection Taps at Reveille.
"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. "The Rich Boy" originally appeared in two parts, in the January and February 1926 issues of Redbook. In the January installment, the story is described on the front cover as: "A great story of today's youth by F. Scott Fitzgerald".
"Absolution" is a short story by American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald. It was included in his 1926 collection All the Sad Young Men.
"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 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.
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