F. Scott Fitzgerald's Short Stories
Novelist's Most Prolific Writing Was For Popular Magazines
Sep 5, 2008
Notable American author F. Scott Fitzgerald is most closely associated with the "jazz age," a term he coined, as well as his novels which chronicled that 1920's era of flappers and frivolity: This Side of Paradise, The Beautiful and the Damned, and especially The Great Gatsby. The other common association is that of young Scott & Zelda, good-looking and famous, extravagantly partying their way down the streets of Manhattan and Paris, burning brightly for awhile, then out.
Fitzgerald Sold More Than 150 Stories
While these pictures are accurate, what is less well-known is the fact that Fitzgerald was a prolific and terrific short story writer, and that the sales of these stories -- more than 150 of them -- to the popular magazines of the day were what made that lifestyle possible. At his creative heighth, the middle to late years of the 1920's, Scott was earning up to 4000 dollars per story (equivalent to nearly $50,000 in 2008) in periodicals like "Colliers" and "The Saturday Evening Post." At up to a dozen stories a year, the stories accounted for the vast majority of his income.
Novels Sold Poorly During His Lifetime
It is hard to imagine today, but in fact Fitzgerald's novels sold relatively poorly during his lifetime, a period, pre-television, when a much higher percentage of the public read novels than today. By the end of the 20's, the annual royalties for all of his books was less than $100. The author died in 1941, but it wasn't until the 1950's as scholars "rediscovered" his work and dubbed Gatsby the "Great American Novel", that his books began to enjoy the widespread sales and admiration that has continued into the 21st century.
Scott and Zelda's extravagant lifestyle, marked by worldwide travel, living out of hotels, expensive food and much drink, required a great deal of money. Even with the handsome sums paid by the magazines, the Fitzgerald's could rarely stay afloat. But Scott wasn't just tossing off stories for fast cash. In his book A Fortune Yet: Money in the Art of F. Scott Fitzgerald's Short Stories, Bryant Mangum states that the stories "functioned as moneymakers, as proving ground for his ideas, as workshops for his craft, and as dictators of his popular fiction."
Short Stories Were Practice For Novels
Essentially, the author was practicing for his novels in the composition of these stories. As readers will note, many of the themes of class, wealth, waste, and emptiness, those that pervade his novels, are present in the stories. One can even detect characters, the forerunners to Daisy Buchanan, Nicole Diver and others in stories such as "The Ice Palace", "Diamond As Big As the Ritz" and "Bernice Bobs Her Hair".
While Fitzgerald himself was his own worst critic and felt that most of his short stories were of little literary merit, more than a few scholars beleive that his short fiction often outweighed his novelistic output in terms of overall quality.
Of more than 150, all the known short stories have now been published in various collections (many of them overlapping, containing some of the same stories), though there is no single complete collection. For the reader who wishes to investigate further, reccommended are:
- Flappers and Philosophers
- Tales of the Jazz Age
- Taps At Reveille
- The Basil and Josephine Stories
- The Price Was High:The Last Uncollected Stories of FSF
Had F. Scott Fitzgerald never created the infamous Jay Gatsby, or written a single novel, the quality of the majority of these stories prove him to be the great writer his reputation now claims.
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