Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald F. Scott Fitzgerald

Literary evolution

Novels

More so than most contemporary writers of his era, F. Scott Fitzgerald's authorial voice evolved and matured over time,[289] and his each successive novel represented a discernible progression in literary quality.[290] Although his peers eventually hailed him as possessing "the best narrative gift of the century," this narrative gift was not perceived as immediately evident in his earliest writings.[291] Believing that prose has a basis in lyric verse,[292] Fitzgerald initially crafted his sentences entirely by ear and, consequently, his earliest efforts contained numerous malapropisms and descriptive non sequiturs which irritated both editors and readers.[293] During these early attempts at writing fiction, he received over 122 rejection letters,[294] and the publishing house Scribner's rejected his first novel three times despite extensive rewrites.[295]

For his first novel, Fitzgerald used as his literary templates H. G. Wells' 1909 work Tono-Bungay and Sir Compton Mackenzie's 1913 novel Sinister Street,[296] which chronicled a young college student's coming-of-age at Oxford University.[297] Although Fitzgerald imitated the plot of Mackenzie's novel, his debut work differed remarkably due to its experimental style.[298] He discarded the stodgy narrative technique of most novels and instead unspooled the plot in the form of textual fragments, letters, and poetry intermingled together.[299] This atonal blend of different fictive elements prompted cultural elites to fête the young Fitzgerald as a literary trailblazer whose work modernized a staid literature that had lagged "as far behind modern habits as behind modern history."[300] His work, they declared, pulsed with originality.[301]

Although critics praised This Side of Paradise as highly original, they eviscerated its form and construction.[302] They highlighted the fact that the work had "almost every fault and deficiency that a novel can possibly have,"[303] and a consensus soon emerged that Fitzgerald's prosemanship left much to be desired.[304] He could write entertainingly, his detractors conceded, but he gave scant attention to form and construction.[305] Having read and digested these criticisms of his debut novel, Fitzgerald sought to improve upon the form and construction of his prose in his next work and to venture into a new genre of fiction altogether.[306]

For his sophomore effort, Fitzgerald discarded the trappings of collegiate bildungsromans and crafted an "ironical-pessimistic" [sic] novel in the style of Thomas Hardy's oeuvre.[307] With the publication of The Beautiful and Damned, editor Max Perkins and others commended the conspicuous evolution in the quality of his prose.[308][309] Whereas This Side of Paradise had featured workmanlike prose and chaotic organization, The Beautiful and Damned displayed the superior form and construction of an awakened literary consciousness.[310]

Although critics deemed The Beautiful and Damned to be less ground-breaking than its predecessor,[311][312] many recognized that the vast improvement in literary form and construction between his first and second novels augured great prospects for Fitzgerald's future.[313] John V. A. Weaver predicted in 1922 that, as Fitzgerald matured as a writer, he would become regarded as one of the greatest authors of American literature.[313] Consequently, expectations arose that Fitzgerald would significantly improve with his third work.[305]

When composing The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald chose to depart from the writing process of his previous novels and to fashion a conscious artistic achievement.[314] He eschewed the realism of his previous two novels and composed a creative work of sustained imagination.[315] To this end, he consciously emulated the literary styles of Joseph Conrad and Willa Cather.[316] He was particularly influenced by Cather's 1923 work, A Lost Lady,[317] which features a wealthy married socialite pursued by a number of romantic suitors and who symbolically embodies the American dream.[318][319]

With the publication of The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald had refined his prose style and plot construction, and the literati now hailed him as a master of his craft.[320][321] Readers complimented him that Gatsby "is compact, economical, polished in the technique of the novel,"[301] and his writing now contained "some of the nicest little touches of contemporary observation you could imagine—so light, so delicate, so sharp".[322] By eliminating the earlier defects in his writing, he had upgraded from "a brilliant improvisateur" to "a conscientious and painstaking artist."[323] Gertrude Stein posited that Fitzgerald had surpassed contemporary writers such as Hemingway due to his masterful ability to write in natural sentences.[324]

The realization that Fitzgerald had improved as a novelist to point that Gatsby was a masterwork was immediately evident to certain members of the literary world.[325][326] Edith Wharton lauded Gatsby as such an improvement upon Fitzgerald's previous work that it represented a "leap into the future" for American novels,[325] and T. S. Eliot believed it represented a turning point in American literature.[327] After reading Gatsby, Gertrude Stein declared that Fitzgerald would "be read when many of his well-known contemporaries are forgotten."[324]

Nine years after the publication of The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald completed his fourth novel Tender Is the Night in 1934. By this time, the field of literature had greatly changed due to the onset of the Great Depression, and once popular writers such as Fitzgerald and Hemingway who wrote about upper-middle-class lifestyles were now disparaged in literary periodicals whereas so-called "proletarian novelists" enjoyed general applause.[328]

Due to this change, although Fitzgerald showed a mastery of "verbal nuance, flexible rhythm, dramatic construction and essential tragi-comedy" in Tender Is the Night,[290] many reviewers dismissed the work for its disengagement with the political issues of the era.[329] Nevertheless, a minority opinion praised the work as the best American novel since The Great Gatsby.[290] Summarizing Fitzgerald's artistic journey from apprentice novelist to magisterial author, Burke Van Allen observed that no other American novelist had shown such "a constantly growing mastery of his equipment, and a regularly increasing sensitivity to the esthetic values in life."[290]

After Fitzgerald's death, writers such as John Dos Passos assayed Fitzgerald's gradual progression in literary quality and posited that his uncompleted fifth novel The Last Tycoon could have been Fitzgerald's greatest achievement.[330] Dos Passos argued in 1945 that Fitzgerald had finally attained a grand and distinctive style as a novelist; consequently, even as an unfinished fragment, the dimensions of his work raised "the level of American fiction" in the same way that "Marlowe's blank verse line raised the whole of Elizabeth verse."[330]

Short stories

In contrast to the discernible progression in literary quality and artistic maturity represented by his novels,[290] Fitzgerald's 164 short stories displayed the opposite tendency and attracted significant criticism.[331] Whereas he composed his novels with a conscious artistic mindset, money became his primary impetus for writing short stories.[332] During the lengthy interludes between novels, his stories sustained him financially,[333] but he lamented that he had "to write a lot of rotten stuff that bores me and makes me depressed."[332]

Realizing that slick magazines such as the Saturday Evening Post and Esquire were more likely to publish stories that pandered to young love and featured saccharine dénouements, Fitzgerald became adept at tailoring his short fiction to the vicissitudes of commercial tastes. [334][335] In this fashion, he quickly became one of the highest-paid magazine writers of his era and he earned $4,000 per story from the Saturday Evening Post at the apex of his fame.[333]

From 1920 until his death, Fitzgerald published nearly four pieces per year in the magazine and, in 1931 alone, he earned nearly $40,000 (equivalent to $801,400 in 2023) by churning out seventeen short stories in quick succession.[336]

Although a dazzling extemporizer, Fitzgerald's short stories were criticized for lacking both thematic coherence and quality.[337] Critic Paul Rosenfeld wrote that many of Fitzgerald's short stories "lie on a plane inferior to the one upon which his best material extends."[338] Echoing Hemingway's critique that Fitzgerald ruined his short stories by rewriting them to appease magazine readers,[168] Rosenfeld noted that Fitzgerald debased his gift as a storyteller by transforming his tales into social romances with inevitably happy endings.[338]

Commenting upon this tendency in Fitzgerald's short stories, Dos Passos remarked that "everybody who has put pen to paper during the last twenty years has been daily plagued by the difficulty of deciding whether he's to do 'good' writing that will satisfy his conscience or 'cheap' writing that will satisfy his pocketbook.... A great deal of Fitzgerald's own life was made a hell by this sort of schizophrenia."[339]

Fictive themes

Generational zeitgeist

Here was a new generation, shouting the old cries, learning the old creeds, through a revery of long days and nights; destined finally to go out into that dirty gray turmoil to follow love and pride; a new generation dedicated more than the last to the fear of poverty and the worship of success; grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken.

—F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise (1920)[340]

For much of his literary career, cultural commentators hailed Fitzgerald as the foremost chronicler of the Jazz Age generation whose lives were defined by the societal transition towards modernity.[341][342] In contrast to the older Lost Generation to which Fitzgerald and Hemingway belonged, the Jazz Age generation were younger Americans who had been adolescents during World War I and were largely untouched by the devastating conflict's psychological and material horrors.[n][344]

With his debut novel, Fitzgerald became the first writer to turn the national spotlight upon this generation.[345] He riveted the nation's attention upon the activities of their sons and daughters cavorting in the rumble seat of Bearcat roadster on a lonely road and sparked a societal debate over their perceived immorality.[345][346] Due to this thematic focus, his works became a sensation among college students, and the press depicted him as the standard-bearer for "youth in revolt".[347] "No generation of Americans has had a chronicler so persuasive and unmaudlin" as Fitzgerald, Van Allen wrote in 1934, and no author was so identified with the generation recorded.[290]

Remarking upon the cultural association between Fitzgerald and the flaming youth of the Jazz Age, Gertrude Stein wrote in her memoir The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas that the author's fiction essentially created this new generation in the public's mind.[324] Echoing this assertion, critics John V. A. Weaver and Edmund Wilson insisted that Fitzgerald imbued the Jazz Age generation with the gift of self-consciousness while simultaneously making the public aware of them as a distinct cohort.[348][349]

The perception of Fitzgerald as the chronicler of the Jazz Age and its insouciant youth led various societal figures to denounce his writings.[350] They decried his use of modern "alien slang" and claimed his depiction of young people engaged in drunken sprees and premarital sex to be wholly fabricated.[351] Fitzgerald ridiculed such criticisms,[352] and he opined that blinkered pundits wished to dismiss his works in order to retain their outdated conceptions of American society.[353]

As Fitzgerald's writings made him "the outstanding aggressor in the little warfare" between "the flaming youth against the old guard,"[354] a number of social conservatives later rejoiced when he died.[355] Mere weeks after Fitzgerald's death in 1940, Westbrook Pegler wrote in a column for The New York World-Telegram that the author's passing recalled "memories of a queer bunch of undisciplined and self-indulgent brats who were determined not to pull their weight in the boat and wanted the world to drop everything and sit down and bawl with them. A kick in the pants and a clout over the scalp were more like their needing."[356]

Wealth inequality

Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are....

—F. Scott Fitzgerald, "The Rich Boy" (1926)[357]

A recurrent theme in F. Scott Fitzgerald's fiction is the psychic and moral gulf between the average American and wealthy elites.[358][359] This recurrent theme is ascribable to Fitzgerald's life experiences in which he was "a poor boy in a rich town; a poor boy in a rich boy's school; a poor boy in a rich man's club at Princeton."[360] He "sensed a corruption in the rich and mistrusted their might."[360] Consequently, he became a vocal critic of America's leisure class and his works satirized their lives.[290][361]

This preoccupation with the idle lives of America's leisure class in Fitzgerald's fiction attracted criticism.[362] H. L. Mencken believed Fitzgerald's myopic focus upon the rich detracted from the broader relevance of his societal observations.[305] He argued that "the thing that chiefly interests the basic Fitzgerald is still the florid show of modern American life—and especially the devil's dance and that goes on at the top. He is unconcerned about the sweating and suffering of the nether herd".[305]

Nevertheless, Mencken conceded that Fitzgerald came the closest to capturing the wealthy's "idiotic pursuit of sensation, their almost incredible stupidity and triviality, their glittering swinishness".[305] His works skewered those "who take all of the privileges of the European ruling class and assume none of its responsibilities".[363] For this reason, critics predicted that much of Fitzgerald's fiction would become timeless social documents that captured the naked venality of the hedonistic Jazz Age.[364]

Following Fitzgerald's death, scholars focused on how Fitzgerald's fiction dissects the entrenched class disparities in American society.[365] His novel, The Great Gatsby, underscores the limits of the American lower class to transcend their station of birth.[366] Although scholars posit different explanations for the continuation of class differences in the United States, there is a consensus regarding Fitzgerald's belief in its underlying permanence.[365] Although fundamental conflict occurs between entrenched sources of socio-economic power and upstarts who threaten their interests,[367] Fitzgerald's fiction shows that a class permanence persists despite the country's capitalist economy that prizes innovation and adaptability.[367] Even if the poorer Americans become rich, they remain inferior to those Americans with "old money".[368] Consequently, Fitzgerald's characters are trapped in a rigid American class system.[369]

Otherness

Much of Fitzgerald's fiction is informed by his life experiences as a societal outsider.[370][371] As a young boy growing up in the Midwest, he perpetually strained "to meet the standard of the rich people of St. Paul and Chicago among whom he had to grow up without ever having the money to compete with them".[372] His wealthier neighbors viewed the young author and his family to be lower-class, and his classmates at affluent institutions such as Newman and Princeton regarded him as a parvenu.[373][374] His later life as an expatriate in Europe and as a writer in Hollywood reinforced this lifelong sense of being an outsider.[375]

Consequently, many of Fitzgerald's characters are defined by their sense of "otherness".[376][377] In particular, Jay Gatsby, whom other characters belittle as "Mr. Nobody from Nowhere",[378] functions as a cipher because of his obscure origins, his unclear ethno-religious identity and his indeterminate class status.[379] Much like Fitzgerald,[380] Gatsby's ancestry precludes him from the coveted status of Old Stock Americans.[381] Consequently, Gatsby's ascent is deemed a threat not only due to his status as nouveau riche, but because he is perceived as an outsider.[382]

Because of such themes, scholars assert that Fitzgerald's fiction captures the perennial American experience, since it is a story about outsiders and those who resent them—whether such outsiders are newly-arrived immigrants, the nouveau riche, or successful minorities.[367][377] Since Americans living in the 1920s to the present must navigate a society with entrenched prejudices, Fitzgerald's depiction of resultant status anxieties and social conflict in his fiction has been highlighted by scholars as still enduringly relevant nearly a hundred years later.[367][383]

Criticism

Alleged vacuity

Although many contemporary critics and literary peers regarded Fitzgerald as possessing "the best narrative gift of the century."[291] they nonetheless contended that his fiction lacked engagement with the salient socio-political issues of his time,[384] and he lacked a conscious awareness of how to use his considerable talent as an author.[384]

Poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, who met Fitzgerald during his years abroad in Paris, likened him to "a stupid old woman with whom someone has left a diamond; she is extremely proud of the diamond and shows it to everyone who comes by, and everyone is surprised that such an ignorant old woman should possess so valuable a jewel".[385] His friend Edmund Wilson concurred with Millay's assessment and averred that Fitzgerald was a gifted writer with a vivid imagination who did not have any intellectual ideas to express.[386] Wilson argued that Fitzgerald's early works such as This Side of Paradise suffer from the defects of being meaningless and lacking intellectual substance.[387]

Wilson attempted to convince Fitzgerald to write about America's social problems, but Fitzgerald did not believe that fiction should be used as a political instrument.[388] Wilson also pressed Fitzgerald to support causes like the defense of Sacco and Vanzetti, but Fitzgerald had no interest in activism,[388] and he became annoyed to even read articles about the politically-fraught Sacco and Vanzetti case, which became a cause célèbre among American literati during the 1920s.[389] Largely indifferent to politics, Fitzgerald himself ascribed the lack of ideational substance in his fiction to his upbringing, as his parents were likewise uninterested in such matters.[390][391]

Fitzgerald partly justified the perceived lack of political and intellectual substance in his fiction by arguing that he was writing for a new, largely apolitical, generation "dedicated more than the last to the fear of poverty and the worship of success; grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken."[392] "Nobody was interested in politics," Fitzgerald declared of this particular generation,[393] and, as "it was characteristic of the Jazz Age that it had no interest in politics at all",[394] Fitzgerald's fiction reflected the contemporary zeitgeist's perfunctory cynicism and aversion to political crusades in the wake of Prohibition.[395]

Appropriative tendency

Throughout his literary career, Fitzgerald often drew upon the private correspondence, diary entries, and life experiences of other persons to use in his fiction.[396][397] While writing This Side of Paradise, Fitzgerald quoted verbatim entire letters sent to him by his Catholic mentor, Father Sigourney Fay.[398] In addition to using Fay's correspondence, Fitzgerald drew upon anecdotes that Fay had told him about his private life.[399] When reading This Side of Paradise, Fay wrote to Fitzgerald that the use of his own biographical experiences told in confidence to the young author "gave him a queer feeling."[399]

Fitzgerald continued this practice throughout his life. While writing The Beautiful and Damned, Fitzgerald inserted sentences from his wife's diary.[400] When his friend Burton Rascoe asked Zelda to review the book for the New-York Tribune as a publicity stunt,[401] she wrote—partly in jest—that it "seems to me that on one page I recognized a portion of an old diary of mine which mysteriously disappeared shortly after my marriage, and also scraps of letters, which, though considerably edited, sound to me vaguely familiar."[o][401][403] Similarly, Fitzgerald borrowed biographical incidents from his friend, Ludlow Fowler, for his short story "The Rich Boy".[397] Fowler asked that certain passages be excised prior to publication.[397] Fitzgerald acquiesced to this request, but the passages were restored in later reprints after Fitzgerald's death.[397]

Perhaps the most striking example of this tendency lies at the core of The Great Gatsby.[404] As a parting gift before their relationship ended, Ginevra King—the inspiration for Daisy Buchanan—wrote a story that she sent to Fitzgerald.[404] In her story, she is trapped in a loveless marriage with a wealthy man, yet still pines for Fitzgerald, a former lover from her past.[404] The lovers are reunited only after Fitzgerald has attained enough money to take her away from her adulterous husband.[404] Fitzgerald frequently re-read Ginevra's story, and scholars have noted the plot similarities between Ginevra's story and Fitzgerald's novel.[404]