The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald Read Free

effortless and painless, which of course it was not. After the Armistice Fitzgerald had returned to New York from Montgomery, where he had been stationed during the war, and took a job with the Barron Collier advertising agency, doing work that he later admitted detesting. In his spare time he continued to revise and submit the novel that would eventually become
This Side of Paradise,
as well as revising old undergraduate stories, but his submissions resulted in a disheartening stream of rejection slips. His one success, the sale of “Babes in the Woods” in 1919 to
The Smart Set,
depressed him because it brought only $30 and because it was an old undergraduate piece written two years earlier, a fact which, he said, made him feel that he “was on the down-grade at twenty-two.” 3 In the midst of these personal crises and also during a time in America when events leading up to and away from the May Day riots had left his generation, as he said, “cynical rather than revolutionary,” 4 Zelda broke their engagement, and when Fitzgerald’s frantic and unsuccessful trips from New York to Montgomery in the spring of 1919 failed to persuade her to change her mind, he concluded that he was “in love with a whirlwind and I must spin a net big enough to catch it out of my head.” 5 When Zelda threw him over, he “went home [to St. Paul] and finished my novel.” 6 Perkins’s letter accepting
This Side of Paradise
arrived in mid-September 1919. Then, in just under six months, came a letter from Zelda that began, “Darling Heart, our fairy tale is almost ended, and we’re going to marry and live happily ever afterward” 7 —the first two parts of which were in fact soon to come true.
    Perkins’s letter and finally Zelda’s acceptance of Fitzgerald’s proposal became bookends for the formative and most important period in Fitzgerald’s development as a professional writer. In
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Ledger,
which contains a detailed diary and auto-bibliography that Fitzgerald kept religiously for most of his professional life, he wrote these words at the top of the page for 1919, his twenty-second year: “The most important year of life. Every emotion and my life work decided. Miserable and ecstatic but a great success.” 8 Looking back from the vantage point of 1937, he would characterize the months leading up to September 1919 in more pragmatic terms: “While I waited for the novel to appear, the metamorphosis of amateur into professional began to take place—a sort of stitching together of your whole life into a pattern of work, so that the end of one job is automatically the beginning of another.” 9 The earliest phase of his professional life, that two-year period from which the stories in this volume emerge, was a time when life, for Fitzgerald, was literally a dream; and the beauty of the stories comes from the conviction—not altogether different from Jay Gatsby’s conviction just before he kissed Daisy and “wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath” 10 —that, in the forty-one-year-old Fitzgerald’s words about the twenty-two-year-old dreamer, “life is a romantic matter.” 11
    It was on the solid rock or butterfly’s wing, depending upon one’s perspective, of this view that life is a romantic matter that Fitzgerald entered the profession of authorship in late September 1919. The first two stories he wrote after the acceptance of his novel, “Benediction” and “Head and Shoulders,” show him confronting the central dilemma of professional authorship—the problem of how one who is a serious literary artist manages to earn his living through his writing. After the numerous rejection slips that he had received during the demoralizing spring and summer of 1919, one can imagine Fitzgerald’s quandary as he pondered the direction to take in his story writing after the acceptance of his novel. In the end he followed an understandable impulse to return to his already published