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

Pink” (a farcical one-act play), published earlier in The Smart Set ; and “The Camel’s Back,” originally published in the Post . In “Fantasies” he included “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz” and “Tarquin of Cheapside” (the latter originally published in Princeton’s Nassau Literary Magazine ) from The Smart Set ; “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” from Collier’s ; and “ ‘O Russet Witch’ ” from Metropolitan Magazine . Finally, in “Unclassified Masterpieces” he included “The Lees of Happiness,” from the Chicago Sunday Tribune , “Mr. Icky,” another one-act play, from The Smart Set , and “Jemina,” a story originally written while at Princeton and later published in Vanity Fair .
    Fitzgerald originally wanted the collection to be entitled Sideshow , a rubric that aptly describes this assortment of fictions, scenes, and vignettes ranging from an allegory about money, power, and corruption (“The Diamond as Big as the Ritz”) and a farcical tale of courtship (“The Camel’s Back”) to a novella that employs a technique reminiscent of Dos Passos’s historical panoramas as it conjoins the movements, crowds, street politicians, and socialites (“May Day”) and a fantasy about the social construction of identity in which a man is born in his sixties and “grows down” to infancy (“The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”). Yet there are commonalities amongst this menagerie of stories that reveal Fitzgerald’s ongoing concerns as well as his tendency toward experimentalism early in his career. Collectively, tales of the Jazz Age, they manifest the collision of modern historical forces or pressures and individual desire, of the social and the ego—an encounter that for Fitzgerald produces comic or ironic effects as often as it does tragedy. Indeed, many of the stories of Fitzgerald’s “sideshow” in Tales of the Jazz Age are written in the tragicomic mode, which, one might argue, is later reflected in the mature work of Gatsby and Tender Is the Night .
    As Fitzgerald continued to write stories and novels in the midst of declining fame and a chaotic life foreshortened by alcoholism, he expanded the range and improved the quality and consistency of his short stories while maintaining their marketability. In his third compilation, All the Sad Young Men , he collected stories such as “Winter Dreams” and “The Rich Boy” that reflect the obsessions with wealth and sex masked as romance which are the mainstays of The Great Gatsby . Taps at Reveille , the final collection Fitzgerald assembled, contains stories, such as “Crazy Sundays” and “Babylon Revisited,” replete with apocalyptic scenes of dissipation and breakdown that typify the “late” Fitzgerald culminating in the posthumous The Crack-Up (1945); but Fitzgerald also included in Taps several of the “Basil and Josephine” stories in which he returns to his own childhood and adolescence, tracing the sexual and social maturation of the two title characters. Toward the end of his life, Fitzgerald wrote a series of stories for Esquire about a Hollywood screenwriter (the “Pat Hobby” stories) that borrowed upon his own experiences in “Babylon,” working for MGM on such films as A Yank at Oxford and Gone With the Wind . At the time of his death, Fitzgerald had published over 150 stories, most of them written in the two decades that constitute his professional career as a writer.
    When Flappers and Philosophers was published a half year after the surprising success of This Side of Paradise , the wave of enthusiasm generated by Fitzgerald’s first novel was diminished somewhat by his first collection—admittedly, an assemblage of very uneven quality. It was greeted by many critics with cautious praise and was scorned by