The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Other Jazz Age Stories Read Free

long-lived popularity as a story writer can in part be attributed to his spectacular early success and the magnetism of the authorial personality that he cultivated; but it is equally true that during the hard months of 1919 he began to learn how to write entertaining, saleable stories that caught the imagination and reflected the desires and anxieties of the large public that read those popular literary and cultural magazines which are only partially comparable to today’s New Yorker or Harper’s . From the beginning, many of these stories shattered the stereotype of the popular story written for money in terms of their quality and complexity, and it is clear that Fitzgerald was perfecting his craft as a story writer at the same time that he was successfully marketing his work.
    Fitzgerald’s career and, in many senses, his life reached its epitome in March 1920 with the publication of This Side of Paradise . Scribner’s quickly followed the novel’s success with the publication of Flappers and Philosophers in October of that year, a collection that included “Dalyrimple Goes Wrong” and “Benediction,” published first in The Smart Set edited by H. L. Mencken; “The Offshore Pirate,” “Bernice Bobs Her Hair,” “Head and Shoulders,” and “The Ice Palace,” published only months previously in The Saturday Evening Post ; and “The Cut-Glass Bowl” and “The Four Fists,” published in Scribner’s own Scribner’s Magazine . The collection not only brought together most of Fitzgerald’s significant early efforts—ranging from “Benediction,” originally drafted during his time at Princeton, to stories he had written during the dark days of 1919, such as “Dalyrimple Goes Wrong”—it also reflects the concerns that would come to typify the Jazz Age as defined by Fitzgerald: the idealism of adolescence and disillusions of adulthood, the downward slope of life’s career, the evanescence of romance. While many of these are clearly apprentice fictions, some written hurriedly and under pressure, they embody themes and issues that Fitzgerald would continue to explore in the long succession of stories and novels to follow.
    The rapidity and volume of publication continued through 1922 as Fitzgerald, now a new father with the birth of his daughter, Scot-tie, on October 26, 1921, serialized his second novel, The Beautiful and Damned in the Metropolitan Magazine , while he continued to publish several stories each year. Some of them—“May Day,” “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz,” “Winter Dreams”—are among the best stories he would write. The Beautiful and Damned , published in book form by Scribner’s in March 1922, relates the story of the failed marriage of Anthony and Gloria Patch; in its depiction of the crash of romance and the ravages of dissipation, it amplifies many of the themes Fitzgerald was exploring in the stories of this period. As with This Side of Paradise , within six months Scribner’s followed the publication of Fitzgerald’s second novel with the release of Tales of the Jazz Age in September 1922. Hurried by the publisher to rush his second volume of stories into publication, Fitzgerald was forced to include in this collection—about one-fifth longer than Flappers and Philosophers —an uneven assemblage of very early work, stories from the 1919-1920 period that for reasons of length were not included in the earlier volume, and stories recently published in the magazines.
    Fitzgerald divided this second collection into parts and composed for the table of contents comments upon the writing and publication history of each story (see Appendix). In the section entitled “My Last Flappers,” Fitzgerald included “The Jelly-Bean,” originally published in the Metropolitan Magazine ; “May Day” and “Porcelain and