Product Description

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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #474068 in Books
• Published on: 1998-04-15
• Released on: 1998-04-15
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: 1.63" h x 6.44" w x 9.58" l, 2.43 pounds
• Binding: Hardcover
• 800 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Bruccoli's ( Some Sort of Epic Grandeur ) collection of 43 Fitzgerald stories includes 23 not featured in Malcolm Cowley's landmark 1951 collection, expanding the canon of a peerless American writer who was deeply ambivalent about the role of short fiction in his art. Published in commercial magazines (e.g., the Saturday Evening Post ), the stories brought their author as much as $4000 each--but also exacted a price, distracting Fitzgerald from work on his novels. Regardless, many of the stories are unequalled in achievement--inspirited with a delicate wit, a shrewd perception of character and a poetic sense of place--and lead us through Fitzgerald's rich creative chronology, from unforgettable evocations of the enchanting but ruthless social whirl of the young in the 1920s ("Bernice Bobs Her Hair") to the exhaustion of spirit chronicled 16 years later in "Afternoon of an Author." Among the 23 stories, nearly all of which have appeared previously in magazines, is one--"Last Kiss"--published for the first time in the author's final revision. Invaluable to Fitzgerald admirers, Bruccoli's collection should also capture a new generation of readers. BOMC alternate, QPB main selection .
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
This collection of 43 stories--culled from some 160 in the Fitzgerald canon--is designed to replace Malcolm Cowley's 1951 selection of 28 stories. Bruccoli has prefaced each story briefly and reasserted his conviction that Fitzgerald is of paramount importance as a short-story writer. Those already thus persuaded may welcome this new edition. Others, less enchanted by such claims, will not. So much of Fitzgerald seems hopelessly dated, so much O. Henry-ized, so much twisted into easy magazine-acceptability that the occasionally brilliant sentence that Fitzgerald could always unexpectedly produce serves more as a gauge of the normal mediocrity of his imagination than the mark of any enduring value.
- Earl Rovit, City Coll., CUNY
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review
"Bruccoli gives [us]...a virtually new and vastly amplified Fitzgerald." -- Joseph Coates, Chicago Tribune

"This is a valuable collection, whether one reads the stories to delight in Fitzgerald's style, to conjure up a lost era, to learn more about the career of a great American novelist, or simply to gain insight into the human condition." -- Leonard A. Podis, The Cleveland Plain Dealer

"One pleasure of rereading Fitzgerald's stories now is to rediscover just how good some of them in fact are, and how brilliant a handful." -- Jay McInerney, The New York Review of Books

"More than enough to re-establish Fitzgerald as a master of the American short story." -- Mark Caldwell, The Philadelphia Inquirer