Master the 40: The Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald

Imagine F. Scott Fitzgerald in the afterlife, some thirty-six years after his premature passing, discovering to his dismay that the cheesiest TV producer ever has copped the title to a little-known short story of his and turned it into a landmark of cultural kitsch. That's the premise of this episode, in which we dissect the creepiest story Fitzgerald ever wrote, called, unfortunately "The Love Boat." Yes, we'll soon be making another run of endless Isaac and Gopher jokes as we explore this t...

Published in the August 27, 1932, issue of the Saturday Evening Post, "What a Handsome Pair!" clearly reflects F. Scott Fitzgerald's dour view of marital relationships amid the relapse that took Zelda to the Phipps Clinic in Baltimore. The story of two couples, Stuart and Helen Oldhorne and Teddy and Betty Van Beck, "Pair!" insists that for men to enjoy domestic contentment they must pick wives who will not compete with them in their chosen métier. In other words, not exactly a feminist story...

Published on July 5, 1924 as F. Scott Fitzgerald was writing The Great Gatsby, this Liberty short story has always been seen as a key rehearsal for his magnum opus. In the story of George Rollins (or George O'Kelly in the version that appeared in 1926 in All the Sad Young Men) as he pursues the Tennessee belle Jonquil Cary we have yet another variation on Fitzgerald's quintessential "golden girl" theme. The story's reputation has been somewhat inflated by its compositional proximity...

Appearing in the June 1936 issue of Esquire, "The Ants at Princeton" is by any measure a singularly kooky entry in F. Scott Fitzgerald's short-story corpus. A fantasy about a human-sized ant who steps onto the field to save the game between heated rivals Princeton and Harvard (you can probably guess who FSF roots for), the text has always baffled scholars: is it a short story or is it, as Fitzgerald wrote in his ledger, a mere "satire"? And does that even matter? Behind the peculiar and ...

Published in fall 1934 in the Saturday Evening Post, "Her Last Case" is one of F. Scott Fitzgerald's most important stories about the South. Indeed, it challenges consensus opinions about the writer's regard for the region that the Tarleton stories of the 1920s set. Far from a pastoral evocation of antebellum gentility, the story insists the South must exorcise its lingering obsession with the Lost Cause---and it does so through a variety of Gothic strum und drang featuring the literal book t...

A contender for one of the strangest Fitzgerald titles ever, "Diamond Dick and the First Law of Woman," published in April 1924, tells the story of a maverick young debutante, Diana Dickey, who returns from the Western front where she served as a canteen girl to spend the next five years wondering what to do with her life. Only when wounded aviator Charlie Abbott returns from a long convalescence in Paris does Diana seem to reenact her decidedly masculine persona of "Diamond Dick," the ...

In late 1930 as Zelda Fitzgerald remained hospitalized in a sanitarium trying to regain her sanity her husband cranked out a frenzied series of stories to pay for her treatment. Out of this whirlwind of effort came "Babylon Revisited," which appeared originally in the February 21, 1931, issue of the Saturday Evening Post and later anchored the fourth and final story collection of his life, Taps at Reveille (1935). "Babylon" is the mack daddy of all Fitzgerald stories, wide...

As spring turned to summer in 1920 and This Side of Paradise was making a celebrity of F. Scott Fitzgerald, the periodical published by his very own publisher, Scribner's Magazine, featured an atypical story by him: "The Four Fists," whose premise is---no, seriously---that we would all be better off if in moments of moral impurity we took a knuckle sandwich to the chiclets. Four times in this odd tale the hero, Samuel Meredith, gets punched in the face, and four times he becomes a b...

In late 1931 F. Scott Fitzgerald traveled to Hollywood for a second attempt to crack the lucrative movie market. While there he attended a party at the home of MGM studio chieftain Irving Thalberg and his wife, Norma Shearer, at which he performed a bit of drunken doggerel and embarrassed himself. Never one not to avail himself of autobiographical material, he quickly shaped a story about an emotional triangle between a "hack" screenwriter (Joel Coles) and a charismatic director (Miles Calman...

Of all the commercial genres F. Scott Fitzgerald attempted in his stories (romance, moral tales, even fantasy and supernatural fiction), he was probably least adept at crime writing. That may seem odd considering The Great Gatsby's influence on the gangster tales and film noir and given the fact the crime fiction was racing toward its hardboiled peak when the unfortunately titled "The Fiend" appeared in Esquire in January 1935. Rather than a Dashiell Hammett or Raymond Chandler ode...