The Diamond as Big as the Ritz

F. Scott Fitzgerald
1922

INTRODUCTION

F. Scott Fitzgerald's story "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz" first appeared in the June 1922 issue of The Smart Set, a popular magazine of the 1920s. Fitzgerald had attempted to sell it to the Saturday Evening Post, which had published many of his other stories, but its harsh anticapitalistic message was rejected by the conservative magazine. In September 1922, the story appeared in his second collection, Tales of the Jazz Age.

The story was inspired by Fitzgerald's 1915 visit to the Montana home of a Princeton classmate, Charles Donahoe, and was one of Fitzgerald's few forays into the realm of fantasy. It tells of young John Unger, who is invited to visit a classmate at his impossibly lavish home in Montana. Gradually, Unger learns the sinister origins of his host's wealth and the frightening lengths to which he will go to preserve it.

In this story, Fitzgerald begins to explore many of the themes he used later when writing his best-known work, The Great Gatsby. The carelessness and immorality of the vastly wealthy and the American fascination with wealth are personified by Braddock Washington and his narcississtic family, who seem to believe that all others have been put on Earth for their amusement. The cataclysmic ending, in which the family and their home are destroyed, shows the result of their single-minded pursuit.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, on September 24, 1896, to Edward and Mary ("Mollie") Fitzgerald. In 1898, the family moved to upstate New York, where Edward worked as a salesman for Procter and Gamble. By the time the family returned to St. Paul, Fitzgerald was twelve years old, and his parents enrolled him at St. Paul Academy. Though Fitzgerald's family was by no means poor, they were not nearly as wealthy as most of the families that sent their sons to the academy, and it was here that Fitzgerald's lifelong fascination with the lives of the extremely wealthy began. At St. Paul Academy, he wrote stories for the school magazine and performed in school plays. After the academy, he went on to the Newman School in Hackensack, New Jersey, a Catholic prep school. He continued his writing at the Newman School.

In 1913, Fitzgerald entered Princeton, where he made important friendships that would last for years to come. He spent so much of his time writing stories and plays for college publications, however, that his academics suffered, and in 1916, he withdrew from Princeton due to low grades. In 1917, he entered the army but was disappointed that in his fifteen months' service, he was never sent overseas. One of the most significant results of Fitzgerald's military service was that, while stationed in Alabama, he fell in love with Zelda Sayre, the daughter of a judge on the Alabama Supreme Court. Also during this time, he wrote the first draft of his first novel, This Side of Paradise.

Fitzgerald was discharged from the army in 1919; in March 1920, This Side of Paradise was published. A week later he married Zelda Sayre. That same year, Fitzgerald's first collection of short stories was published, entitled Flappers and Philosophers. These two books established Fitzgerald's reputation as the official chronicler of the Jazz Age, the name used for the 1920s. He was especially known for his stories featuring flappers, young women exploring the new social and fashion freedoms and rebelling against the restrictive mores of the past.

In October 1921, Zelda Fitzgerald gave birth to the couple's first and only child, a girl named Frances Scott Key Fitzgerald, whom the couple called Scottie. Then in 1922, Fitzgerald had two more books published: The Beautiful

and Damned, a novel, and Tales of the Jazz Age, his second collection of short stories, which includes "A Diamond as Big as the Ritz."

Fitzgerald's relationship with his wife Zelda was a tempestuous one, even during their courtship, and the combination of their extravagant lifestyle, Fitzgerald's heavy drinking, and Zelda's gradually deteriorating mental health took a toll on their marriage. In 1924, the couple spent time in France, where Fitzgerald wrote his best-known novel, The Great Gatsby (1925). In France, Fitzgerald also became good friends with Ernest Hemingway.

After The Great Gatsby, the quality of Fitzgerald's work was erratic, affected by his continued drinking and his stressful relationship with Zelda. However, his 1926 collection of stories, All the Sad Young Men, garnered favorable reviews, though it did little to improve the Fitzgeralds' financial situation. Despite mounting debt, the couple lived extravagantly, much like the characters in Fitzgerald's fiction. In 1930, Zelda suffered a complete mental collapse and was hospitalized.

In an effort to get out of debt, Fitzgerald wrote dozens of short stories during this time, including many that were not up to the quality of his former work. In 1934, he finally finished his fourth novel, Tender Is the Night, which he had been working on sporadically since 1925. At the time of its release, critics were not fond of the book, feeling that it was a less successful treatment of the same themes explored in The Great Gatsby. Unsurprisingly, the antics of the fabulously wealthy were not as well received by a nation mired in economic depression. In 1935, Fitzgerald published a collection of short stories entitled Taps at Reveille, which was reviewed by few critics. Fitzgerald was aware of the decline of his work and wrote a series of essays on his own emotional decline as an artist, published in Esquire magazine.

In 1937, Fitzgerald moved to Los Angeles, California, to find work as a screenwriter. While working in the film industry, he began writing a novel set in Hollywood, to be titled The Last Tycoon. Before he could finish the book, however, Fitzgerald died suddenly of a heart attack on December 21, 1940. The unfinished novel was published posthumously in 1941. He was survived by his wife Zelda, who died in a hospital fire in 1948, and his daughter Scottie, who died in 1986.

PLOT SUMMARY

As "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz" opens, sixteen-year-old John T. Unger is leaving the small middle-class town of Hades to attend St. Midas School near Boston, "the most expensive and the most exclusive boys' preparatory school in the world." His mother packs his trunk, his father gives him money, and after a tearful goodbye, John T. Unger is off to attend school with boys from the country's wealthiest families.

In his second year at St. Midas, John meets Percy Washington. Well-dressed and reserved, Percy has little to say about his home or family, until he invites John to spend the summer at his family's home in Montana. On the train ride to Percy's home, Percy tells John that his father is "the richest man in the world" and that he has a diamond "bigger than the Ritz-Carlton Hotel."

The train stops in the dismal village of Fish, inhabited by twelve men who gape at the wealthy travelers. From here John and Percy take a buggy to another location, where an elaborate, luxurious car (which Percy dismisses as "an old junk") awaits them. At one point two black servants attach cables to the car, and it is hoisted over a rocky passage and set down on the other side. Percy tells John that his father has managed to prevent his land from ever being surveyed, and the only thing that could ever be used to find them is "aeroplanes"; fortunately, his father has anti-aircraft guns at the ready.

John is taken aback at this information until the sight of the Washingtons' impossibly lavish home sweeps all other concerns aside. As they walk through the halls, John discovers some are carpeted with fur, and some are made of crystal with tropical fish swimming beneath; at dinner, the family and their guest eat off plates made of solid diamond.

The next morning at breakfast, Percy tells John his family's history. Percy's grandfather, a direct descendant of George Washington, discovered the mountain-sized diamond when he went west to start his own ranch, just after the Civil War ended. He realized that if he tried to sell such a diamond, the bottom would fall out of the market. So after gathering a workforce of black slaves, whom he fooled into believing that the South won the Civil War, he set out to sell his diamonds in secret to assorted kings, princes, and other dignitaries. His son Braddock continued his work, and when he had amassed enough wealth to keep his family living in luxury for generations, he sealed up the mine.

After breakfast, John takes a walk on the property and runs into Kismine, Percy's younger sister, with whom he falls in love instantly. She tells him she likes him, as well. They walk back to the house together.

Later Percy and his father show John around the property. Mr. Washington shows him the slaves' quarters, housing descendants of his grandfather's original slaves. The current slaves still do not know that slavery has been abolished. He also points out the golf course, which is entirely a green, "no fairway, no rough, no hazards." Finally, they come to a deep pit, covered with an iron grating. Down in the pit, two dozen men are imprisoned. Mr. Washington tells John their crime: they are aviators who accidentally discovered the diamond mine and now must be prevented, at all costs, from revealing the Washingtons' secret.

As the end of summer nears, John and Kismine decide that they will elope the following June, since her father will never allow her to marry someone from John's lowly social and financial status. Kismine casually mentions some visitors she and her sister had. When John inquires further about these visitors, Kismine admits that her father had them murdered at the end of their visits, so they could not reveal the Washingtons' secret; she also admits that the same fate awaits John. Outraged, John tells Kismine they are not in love anymore and announces his intention to escape over the mountains before Mr. Washington can have him killed. Kismine tells him she wants to go with him, and John softens, realizing she must really love him. They plan to escape the next night.

Later that same evening, however, John is awakened by a noise, and thinking it is someone sent to kill him, he gets up and goes into the hall. He hears Mr. Washington urgently summoning his servants and realizes some crisis has occurred. He goes to Kismine's room; she tells him that there are at least a dozen airplanes over the property and that her father is going to open fire on them with his anti-aircraft guns. John and Kismine waken Jasmine, Kismine's older sister, and the three of them flee to a wooded area where they watch the battle.

By four in the morning, the planes have destroyed much of the Washingtons' property. John, watching from a distance, hears footsteps. Curious, he follows the sound and sees Braddock Washington on the mountain with two of his slaves, who are carrying an enormous diamond. Washington begins speaking, and John realizes he is talking to God—offering him the diamond as a bribe. He will give God the diamond if God will restore his life and property to its former glory.

The bribe does not work; the planes descend, and Washington and his wife flee underground, beneath the diamond mountain. When John tells Kismine and Jasmine this, the sisters scream. "The mountain is wired!" Kismine sobs. A few moments later, the mountain glows a brilliant yellow, and the Washingtons' lavish home explodes. Both the Washingtons and their riches are gone.

After fleeing to a distance safely remote from the scene of the battle, John asks Kismine to show him what jewels she has brought with her, to support them in the luxury to which she has become accustomed. After showing him the jewelry she brought with her, Kismine realizes she accidentally brought rhinestones she received from one of their ill-fated visitors. John gloomily tells her they will have to live in Hades. Thinking of their poor future, they go to sleep under the stars.

CHARACTERS

The Prisoners

Underneath his all-green golf course, Braddock Washington has imprisoned two dozen aviators who had the misfortune to discover his property. They are a spirited bunch, shouting curses and defiant insults at Washington when he stops by for a visit but also trying to talk him into releasing them. When they hear that one of their number managed to escape, they dance and sing in celebration.

John T. Unger

John T. Unger is a young man from the town of Hades, "a small town on the Mississippi River." His family is affluent, but not as fabulously wealthy as the other families whose sons attend the exclusive St. Midas School.

He is more sentimental than the ultra-narcissistic Washingtons (when he parts with his father to leave for school, there are "tears streaming from his eyes,") but his blind adoration of wealth and the wealthy reveal him to be almost as shallow. The few early misgivings he has about the Washingtons are quickly swept away by his hedonistic enjoyment of their riches.

He tells Percy, "The richer a fella is, the better I like him." He repeatedly brings up the Schnlitzer-Murphys, a very wealthy family he visited one Easter, describing their jewels and quoting Mr. Schnlitzer-Murphy. When John falls in love with Kismine, their relationship has all the maturity of two ten-year-olds at play. John's love for Kismine is based on her physical perfection: "He was critical about women. A single defect—a thick ankle, a hoarse voice, a glass eye—was enough to make him utterly indifferent."

Even after seeing the men Braddock Washington has imprisoned, John does not seem overly concerned. It is not until he learns that he himself will be murdered to prevent his revealing the Washingtons' secrets that John becomes outraged.

Braddock Washington

The patriarch of the Washington family and the most extreme example of its arrogance and self-importance, Braddock Washington is a cold, unfeeling man who is "utterly uninterested in any ideas or opinions except his own." He views people as either assets or liabilities, calculating what use can be made of them or what obstacle they might present. The most extreme example of this is his continued use of slave labor. Kismine echoes her father's attitude when the attacking aircraft destroy the slaves' quarters: "There go fifty thousand dollars' worth of slaves … at pre-war prices."

The pinnacle of Braddock Washington's arrogance comes near the end of the story when, with his home under attack, he climbs up the mountain along with two slaves carrying an enormous diamond, and offers the diamond to God as a bribe. In return, he requests that his life be restored to its former state. Even when speaking to God, Braddock is not humble; instead, he speaks with "a quality of monstrous condescension." Washington's idea of how life for himself and his family should progress is summed up in the design of his own golf course: "It's all a green, you see—no fairway, no rough, no hazards."

Jasmine Washington

Unlike Percy and Kismine, Jasmine shows small signs of being interested in people and events beyond herself. She had hoped to become "a canteen expert" during World War I, and near the end of the story, when it becomes clear that she, her sister, and John will all be poor, she volunteers to work as a washerwoman and support them all. However, the fact that she continues to invite guests to the Washington home, knowing their ultimate fate, and her great disappointment that the war ended before she could fulfill her "canteen expert" dream, indicate that Jasmine has not fully grasped the concept of compassion.

Kismine Washington

Percy's sister Kismine, who is about sixteen, is a curious combination of childlike innocence and callow self-absorption. Fitzgerald notes that both she and her brother "seemed to have inherited the arrogant attitude in all its harsh magnificence from their father. A chaste and consistent selfishness ran like a pattern through their every idea." While Kismine expresses sincere regret over the fate of visitors to the Washington home, her empathy is limited; she tells John she had not wanted to tell him about his impending assassination, because she knew it would make things "sort of depressing" for him.

TOPICS FOR FURTHER STUDY

• In telling the Washington family history, Fitzgerald refers to several actual historical figures. Research the following names and write a short paragraph for each one, indicating the relevance of the historic figure to the story: George Washington, Lord Baltimore, and General Forrest. In addition, Mr. Washington's first and middle names, Braddock Tarleton, have historic significance; include these names in your research.
• Research the size of the world's largest diamonds. How do they compare to the size of the Washington's diamond? Make a chart comparing the size of the top three diamonds to each other and to the fictional diamond in Fitzgerald's story. Given the monetary value of the world's largest diamonds, estimate how much a diamond as large as this fictional diamond would be worth.
• Using the description of the Washingtons' chateau as a guide, draw or paint your own representation of the outside of the chateau, the interior, or one of the rooms described (John T. Unger's room and bath, for example).
• Fitzgerald uses exaggeration to make the Washingtons' home and lifestyle as outrageously lavish as possible. Try the opposite: Use exaggeration to describe, in a few paragraphs, the smallest and most simple living quarters you can imagine.
• John T. Unger tells Kismine that it is impossible to be both free and poor. Do you agree with him? Write a short essay explaining your position.

Kismine's lack of empathy is somewhat understandable, however, given her complete ignorance of the world beyond her own home. She is clearly unfamiliar with the concepts of poverty and suffering; when John tells her they must flee her home to get away from the attacking airplanes, she cries, "We'll be poor, won't we? Like people in books … Free and poor! What fun!"

Percy Washington

Percy, John's friend from school, is much like the rest of the Washingtons: shallow, boastful, and arrogant. The first words he speaks in the story are: "My father … is by far the richest man in the world." He is fawned upon by his mother, who has little interest in her two daughters.

THEMES

Immorality of the Wealthy

A common theme in Fitzgerald's work is that extreme wealth often leads to immoral behavior. In the case of the Washingtons, this effect is compounded by their near complete isolation from the rest of the world. Percy, Kismine, and Jasmine were brought up to believe they are better than all others by virtue of their fortune, and they were sheltered from anyone who might challenge this notion.

Imprisoning or killing visitors who might divulge their secrets has become a routine business tactic for Braddock Washington. Kismine finds this mildly upsetting, but her own distorted moral views are revealed when John asks her when her father has summer visitors murdered: "In August usually—or early in September. It's only natural for us to get all the pleasure out of them that we can first." Braddock Washington shares this belief that others are intended to be enjoyed or used by his family. Percy tells John that to design the Washingtons' chateau and grounds, his father simply kidnapped a number of design professionals and put them to work.

Does the acquisition of wealth lead to immoral behavior or is it that the people who pursue great wealth are already morally bankrupt? While Fitzgerald does not answer this question, he does illustrate how selfishness and delusions of self-importance are passed on from one generation to the next.

Freedom and Imprisonment

While most people equate greater wealth with greater freedom, this is not the case in "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz." Braddock Washington's prison is a luxurious one, to be sure, but it still isolates him from the rest of the world. He has no friends or colleagues, only slaves. He views others with suspicion. His children's visitors must be killed when their visit is over—certainly an impediment to their forming lasting friendships outside the family. His entire family is imprisoned by the diamond mountain they must protect at all costs.

There are numerous examples of imprisonment in the story. The most literal example is that of the aviators trapped under the Washingtons' golf course. Why does Braddock Washington imprison rather than kill the aviators? He seems to enjoy verbally sparring with them. Perhaps Washington, at some level, is so desperate for some peers of his own, some basic human connection, that he keeps them alive to fulfill that need.

Another example is the black slaves whom the Washingtons have tricked into believing that slavery was never abolished and that the South won the Civil War. Ironically, Washington's behavior towards the slaves, other than his obvious racism, is not much different than his behavior towards outsiders; since he views all people as commodities, it is not surprising he finds slave labor a sensible option.

When John and Kismine plan their escape from the Washingtons' property, Kismine is delighted at the prospect of being "free and poor." John tells her, "It's impossible to be both together." While there may be truth in this statement, it is also true that great wealth, for the Washingtons, has not resulted in complete freedom. The conclusion is that freedom is not a function of wealth or poverty at all, but rather a state of mind, a state of mind which, with their dependence on wealth and status, none of these characters has achieved.

American Idolatry of Wealth

John T. Unger personifies the fascination that the American middle class has with wealth and the wealthy. John quotes statistics about the number of millionaires in the United States, prattles on about the jewels owned by the Schnlitzer-Murphys, and sets aside his few reservations about the morals of the Washingtons when he sees their opulent home. According to Fitzgerald, John has been trained to feel this awe for wealth by his family and his hometown: "The simple piety prevalent in Hades has the earnest worship and respect for riches as the first article of its creed—had John felt otherwise than radiantly humble before them, his parents would have turned away in horror at the blasphemy." In the early 2000s, one can see the same fascination with the rich evinced by the success of tabloids that doggedly pursue rich celebrities, seeking to expose intimate details of their lives. One can imagine that John T. Unger would have been a big fan of the television show Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.

STYLE

Point of View

"The Diamond as Big as the Ritz" is told from the third person point of view, from the perspective of John T. Unger. Through Unger's perspective, Fitzgerald condemns not just the Washingtons' amoral lifestyle, but also the middle-class attitude towards wealth that makes their lifestyle possible. The reader waits in vain for Unger to speak out, to express some outrage or horror at the Washingtons' way of life, but until his own life is threatened, Unger seems willing to overlook almost anything to continue enjoying the luxuries and pleasures of their home. Because Unger is not as wealthy as his classmates at St. Midas, he is even more easily seduced by their lifestyle, and his astonishment at the home's extravagance is more in line with what the average reader might feel.

Mythical Allusions

Many references to myths and fables make the story seem more like a fable itself. On the first page, when the reader learns that John is from Hades—the underworld of the dead in Greek myth—the story veers from the path of realism into the realm of fantasy. Characters in the story repeatedly make reference to how hot it is in Hades ("Is it hot enough for you down there?"), and when John leaves to go to St. Midas—another reference to a fable—his father assures him that "we'll keep the home fires burning."

Other references to historical and mythical figures abound. When Percy and John near the Washingtons' property, John muses, "What desperate transaction lay hidden here? What a moral expedient of a bizarre Croesus?" Croesus was a Greek king known for his great riches. More than once, the Washingtons' property is referred to as "El Dorado," the name of a mythical South American kingdom fabled to be rich with gold. Finally, when Braddock Washington is offering his diamond bribe to God, Fitzgerald writes, "Prometheus Enriched was calling to witness forgotten sacrifices, forgotten rituals, prayers obsolete before the birth of Christ." This is a reference to Prometheus Bound, a drama based on myth by the Greek writer Aeschylus. Prometheus was a mythological character who defended men from the Greek god Zeus; Zeus punished him by chaining him to a rock and having an eagle endlessly eat his liver.

All these references to legend and myth cause the reader to think of the story as a symbolic fable, rather than a realistic story. Moreover, they suggest that the themes in this story are universal and ageless.

Hyperbole

Fitzgerald's use of hyperbole, or extreme exaggeration, increases the feeling of fantasy, and his descriptions of the Washingtons' home have a surreal quality. By making the chateau impossibly luxurious, Fitzgerald lets the reader know, once again, that this is not a literal or realistic story:

There was a room where the solid, soft gold of the walls yielded to the pressure of his hand, and a room that was like a platonic conception of the ultimate prison—ceiling, floor, and all, it was lined with an unbroken mass of diamonds, diamonds of every size and shape, until, lit with tall violet lamps in the corners, it dazzled the eyes with a whiteness that could be compared only with itself, beyond human wish or dream.

A diamond as big as an entire mountain, a clear crystal bathtub with tropical fish swimming beneath the glass, hallways lined with fur, dinner plates of solid diamond, a car interior upholstered in tapestries, gold and precious gems—all these extravagant, surreal elements add to the otherworldly character of the Washingtons' property. Furthermore, they seemed to suggest a sense that too much is indeed too much. The overkill is distasteful, even grotesque.

Religious Imagery

Fitzgerald uses religious images throughout the story to illustrate, among other things, the absolute corruption of the Washingtons, and to a lesser extent, the corruption of John Unger. From his hometown of Hades (Hell), John's parents send him to St. Midas School. It is easy to guess the priorities of a school that would elevate the mythical King Midas to sainthood and the priorities of the parents whose sons attend it. From there John goes on to the Washingtons' home, stopping on his way at the village of Fish, inhabited only by twelve men. The fish, of course, is a symbol of Christianity, and the twelve men recall Jesus' apostles. The twelve men of Fish, however, are "beyond all religion." They all turn out to watch the train come in and the wealthy passengers disembark. In this context, even the apostles are spellbound by wealth.

The Washingtons' chateau and property are described as a paradise rivaled only by Heaven itself:

The many towers, the slender tracery of the sloping parapets, the chiseled wonder of a thousand yellow windows with their oblongs and hexagons and triangles of golden light, the shattered softness of the intersecting planes of star-shine and blue shade, all trembled on John's spirit like a chord of music.

And, as with Heaven, John discovers that once he has arrived there, he cannot return to the mortal world, thanks to Braddock Washington, reigning god of this Eden. The climactic scene, in which Washington offers his bribe to God, illustrates that Braddock sees himself as God's equal, or even superior: "He, Braddock Washington, Emperor of Diamonds, king and priest of the age of gold, arbiter of splendor and luxury, would offer up a treasure such as princes before him had never dreamed of, offer it up not in suppliance, but in pride." When he finishes his proposal, he lifts his head up to the heavens "like a prophet of old." This perversion may be an allusion to Moses who in devotion goes up onto the mountain to receive the Ten Commandments.

COMPARE & CONTRAST

• 1920s: Though more women are joining the workforce (21 percent of women aged sixteen and over—though most of them hold clerical, domestic, or factory jobs), women are still generally discouraged from working, especially if they are mothers. Therefore, most women's standard of living depends solely on the income of their husbands, and fathers (such as Braddock Washington) are reluctant to allow their daughters to marry men with unimpressive incomes. The average age for a woman to marry is twenty. (Zelda Sayre first refuses Fitzgerald and agrees to marry him only after he achieves some success with his writing.)

  Today: Over 60 percent of women aged sixteen and over are part of the U.S. workforce, and in over half of the country's married couples with children, both parents work outside the home. The average age for a woman to marry is about twenty-five.

• 1920s: Following World War I, the United States retreats into isolationism. Congress votes against joining the League of Nations, paranoia about communism is rampant, and immigration is restricted.

  Today: Advances in communication technologies and global business trade make a policy of isolationism virtually impossible. In the latter half of the twentieth century and in the early 2000s, U.S. intervention in the affairs of other countries is common (though not always popular). One recent example of such intervention is the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003.

• 1920s: In 1920, the yearly tuition at Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, one of the country's most exclusive prep schools, is two hundred and fifty dollars. In the story, John T. Unger attends St. Midas School, "the most expensive and the most exclusive boys' preparatory school in the world."

  Today: The yearly tuition for day students at Phillips Exeter Academy is over twenty-five thousand dollars a year; boarding students pay nearly thirty-five thousand dollars a year.

These distorted, corrupted images of religion—apostles with no religion, a Heaven one can enter living but must die to leave, praying without supplication but with arrogance—are symbolic of the way the Washingtons' morals and values have become twisted by their own greed and materialism.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT

Isolationism and Prohibition

Before World War II (1939-1945), the United States had a tendency towards isolationism; Woodrow Wilson won reelection in 1916 running on the slogan, "He Kept Us Out of War." However, the next year the United States entered World War I, after German submarines sank the Lusitania, killing nearly twelve hundred people, among whom were over one hundred children and one hundred and twenty Americans.

By the time "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz" was published, the war had been over for almost four years, and the United States had retreated even further into isolationism. The Emergency Quota Act of 1921 became the first legislation to restrict immigration into the country, greatly reducing the number of immigrants allowed into the United States each year (immigration was even further restricted by the Immigration Act of 1924).

In addition to this retreat from the world community, Prohibition was in effect at this time. Ratified in 1919 and put into effect in 1920, the Eighteenth Amendment prohibited consumption of all alcoholic beverages. Also, the Sedition Act of 1918, which prohibited citizens from making public remarks critical of the government and its policies during war, had just recently been repealed in 1921. The combination of national isolation and restrictions of personal freedom caused many artists of the time to leave the country and spend time in Europe, most notably in Paris, where Fitzgerald himself lived while writing The Great Gatsby.

Postwar Economic Boom

The decade following World War I (1914-1918) was a prosperous time for the United States. More efficient methods of production had developed during the war to compensate for the reduced workforce. Now this increased productivity meant higher wages for workers and also shorter work hours, giving Americans both the means and the leisure to buy more goods. A new age of consumerism was born.

This was good news for Fitzgerald, whose stories often featured the antics of the extremely wealthy and frivolous. The popularity of his work declined considerably during the depression, in part because people struggling to make ends meet found these types of stories less entertaining and less relevant to their own lives.

New Freedoms for Women

Women won the right to vote in 1920, and they joined the workforce in greater numbers during this decade. These new freedoms, coupled with the prosperity of the times, gave birth to flappers, a term that refers to certain irreverent young women who challenged traditional mores with their shocking manner of dress, cropped hairstyles, and risqué attitudes towards men and romance. Fitzgerald first rose to fame with his stories about flappers, and stories such as "Bernice Bobs Her Hair," "The Offshore Pirate," and "The Jelly-Bean" are still reader favorites.

CRITICAL OVERVIEW

"The Diamond as Big as the Ritz" appeared in Fitzgerald's second volume of short stories, titled Tales of the Jazz Age (1922). Reviews of this collection were mixed, though many reviewers found it a definite improvement over his first collection, Flappers and Philosophers. In a review in the St. Paul Daily News, Woodward Boyd calls the collection "a better assemblage, on the whole, than Flappers and Philosophers." Hildegarde Hawthorne of the New York Times Book Review, writes that "There is plenty of variety in the new collection, more than in the Flappers and Philosophers."

However, many critics found the collection to be somewhat haphazard, featuring many lesser stories thrown in with a few of higher quality. A reviewer from the Times Literary Supplement notes, "none of the diverse elements in his book—fantastic, serious, or farcical—has been really mastered or drawn together." In agreement is a reviewer in the Baltimore Evening Sun, as quoted by Jackson Bryer in The Critical Reputation of F. Scott Fitzgerald, who writes that the stories "give the impression of being tossed off in rather debonair manner to show how easy it all is."

"The Diamond as Big as the Ritz" fared poorly with many critics. In her 1989 book,

Fitzgerald's Craft of Short Fiction: The Collected Stories 1920-1935, Alice Hall Petry writes: "So excoriating were the reactions to "Diamond" that one feels only relief that Fitzgerald did not use it as the title of the collection as he had briefly wished." Some of the critics were less harsh, however. As quoted in F. Scott Fitzgerald in His Own Time: A Miscellany, a 1922 article in the Minneapolis Journal, entitled "The Future of Fitzgerald," states, "‘The Diamond as Big as the Ritz’ is not perfect, but it is remarkable" and goes on to assert that Fitzgerald's strength lies in these imaginative types of stories, rather than in realism.

In hindsight, the story seems to occupy a more favorable light. First of all, attacking materialism, the American way of life, was unlikely to draw favorable reactions just a few short years after World War I. In addition, when seen in the context of Fitzgerald's entire career, "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz" stands out as a turning point in the development of a more mature style. James Miller, in his book F. Scott Fitzgerald: His Art and his Technique, explains: "‘May Day’ and ‘The Diamond as Big as the Ritz’ mark important steps in the development of Fitzgerald's fictional technique … he was using experimental techniques, and these experiments … were to prove valuable to him in his longer works."

Whatever the critics' reactions in 1922, the story remained a favorite of readers in the years following, and it was anthologized in numerous collections of Fitzgerald's work.

CRITICISM

Laura Pryor

Pryor has a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Michigan and over twenty years experience in professional and creative writing with special interest in fiction. In the following essay, she demonstrates how "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz" can be interpreted as an allegory for political events in Fitzgerald's time.

Because F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz" is written so like a fable, it is natural for the reader to try and ferret out a moral, a lesson to be learned. Is it a cautionary tale against greed and materialism? An indictment of the entire capitalist system? Or an allegory for something else entirely?

The time period in which this story was written (the early 1920s) was an eventful one in U.S. history. If Americans had materialistic tendencies, as the story would suggest, then the postwar boom of the time would have made these tendencies more obvious than ever. The end of World War I in 1918 helped boost the economy, women had just been given the right to vote (in 1920), and average wages increased, putting the country in the mood to celebrate. This made the restrictions of Prohibition (the Eighteenth Amendment, which made the consumption of alcoholic beverages illegal beginning in 1920) even more chafing to those who, like Fitzgerald, enjoyed high living.

WHAT DO I READ NEXT?

• Many of the same wealth-related themes presented in "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz" are explored in greater depth in Fitzgerald's most famous novel, The Great Gatsby (1925). Though the novel is more realistic, the main characters behave in a thoughtless, egocentric, and deadly manner, in some ways reminiscent of the Washingtons in "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz."
• "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz" was originally included in the short story collection Tales of the Jazz Age. It is also featured in The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald (2005), which includes selected stories from each of Fitzgerald's collections, explanatory notes, articles by Fitzgerald and his wife, and a short biography.
• Fitzgerald's life and troubles are told through his correspondence to friends and family in Life in Letters: A New Collection, edited and annotated by Matthew J. Bruccoli (1995). The letters are arranged in chronological order and discuss both his work and his difficult private life.
• While Fitzgerald was living in France, he became friends with fellow author Ernest Hemingway. The relationship was a complicated one, however, and in his book A Moveable Feast (1964), Hemingway paints a decidedly unflattering portrait of Fitzgerald and of his wife Zelda, whom Hemingway despised. The book is essentially a memoir of Hemingway's time in Paris and his friendships with luminaries such as Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, and, of course, Fitzgerald.
• Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald was also a writer, and while recovering from periods of schizophrenia in a mental hospital, she wrote a novel entitled Save Me the Waltz. Available from Vintage (2001), it is a thinly disguised account of her own life with F. Scott Fitzgerald.

While the economy was booming, the political climate was one of isolationism and suspicion. In 1917 in Russia, communist revolutionaries called Bolsheviks overthrew the Russian government, and in 1918, they executed Czar Nicholas II and his family. In the United States, this action generated a so-called Red Scare, paranoia over communism that led to even more restrictions on Americans' freedom of expression. In addition, immigration restrictions drastically reduced the number of immigrants allowed into the United States. The country had become a moral dichotomy: On the one hand, there were the irreverent flappers, speakeasies, and wild behavior associated with the Jazz Age, but on the other hand, a puritanical segment sought to impose a rigid moral code on the country through Prohibition and other restrictions.

Read in the light of these historical events, "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz" can be interpreted as a political allegory in which the theme of imprisonment becomes more important than the indictment of materialism and greed. In such an interpretation, Braddock Washington's hidden Montana empire represents the United States and capitalism. Washington himself seems to consider his land a country unto itself; when they reach the property, Percy tells John, "This is where the United States ends, father says." Logically, John asks if they have reached Canada, but Percy tells him they are in the Montana Rockies, on "the only five square miles of land in the country that's never been surveyed." Washington's country has its own anti-aircraft defense system, political prisoners (the aviators), even the capability to start war. (When Jasmine is disappointed that World War I ends before she can become a "canteen expert," Washington takes steps "to promote a new war in the Balkans" for her benefit.) This country even has its own languages; the Washingtons' slaves, so long isolated from the rest of the world, have developed their own extreme version of their original southern dialect, which only they can understand.

Like the United States, Washington's country has beautiful vistas, great natural resources, and wealthy citizens. This fictional country has taken isolationism to its most extreme: anyone who dares enter must be killed or imprisoned. Obviously, the United States had not gone to such literal extremes in the 1920s, but this could be a symbolic representation of the increasingly restrictive immigration quota acts of the decade. Different nationalities and races are represented in the story: Mrs. Washington is Spanish, the teacher who escapes and brings on the Washingtons' downfall is Italian, and one of the imprisoned aviators offers to teach Washington's daughters Chinese. As in the United States, however, the power lies in the hands of the Anglo-Saxon majority. A proponent of the Immigration Act of 1924, Senator Ellison D. Smith of South Carolina, said, "Thank God we have in America perhaps the largest percentage of any country in the world of the pure, unadulterated Anglo-Saxon stock; certainly the greatest of any nation in the Nordic breed…. let us shut the door and assimilate what we have, and let us breed pure American citizens and develop our own American resources." Braddock Washington offers up his own blatant racism when he explains to John that he discontinued private baths for his slaves because "Water is not good for certain races—except as a beverage."

The exaggerated narcissism of the Washingtons could represent the U.S. refusal to become involved with the rest of the world, as when it declined to join the League of Nations or ratify the Treaty of Versailles. The country further isolated itself by placing tariffs on foreign goods, which greatly restricted foreign trade. The Washingtons are isolated not only geographically, but also by their wealth. Kismine shows how completely out of touch she is with the rest of the world when she says, "Think of the millions and millions of people in the world, laborers and all, who get along with only two maids."

Visitors to the Washington property must be killed, because they might talk; in the United States, the right of free speech had been seriously compromised during World War I by the Sedition Act of 1918 (which remained in effect until 1921).

Even as a political allegory, the story is still a cautionary tale against materialism and the idolization of wealth. As is often the case in his work, Fitzgerald seems to be cautioning against the very vices to which he had fallen victim. Fitzgerald and his wife were notorious for living well beyond their means, fraternizing with the types of people he negatively portrayed in his work, people like the Washingtons. Like John T. Unger, Fitzgerald was aware of the flaws in these people and their way of life but could not resist the magnetism of wealth. Ironically, this attraction is what led many immigrants to the United States in the first place, and it was a desire to retain that wealth, in part, that motivated the immigration restrictions. While Senator Ellison D. Smith spoke of preserving "Anglo-Saxon stock," he also expressed the fear that the waves of new immigrants entering the country would deplete U.S. resources, leaving less property for the current population. In other words, the more people, the less wealth to go around. The idea that a more diversified population would also give the country greater intellectual and creative resources was not considered by Smith, though even Braddock Washington acknowledges the necessity of new ideas, by kidnapping "a landscape gardener, an architect, a designer of state settings, and a French decadent poet," to help him design his chateau and grounds.

Fitzgerald usually took great pains to write stories that would be commercially viable, because with his way of life, he was frequently in debt. The irony of his writing "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz" (which was one of his personal favorites) was that because it so harshly criticized the capitalist system, Fitzgerald was unable to make much money from it; it was rejected by the conservative Saturday Evening Post, which had bought many of his stories, and instead Fitzgerald had to settle for three hundred dollars from The Smart Set, a lesser magazine.

Whether interpreted as political allegory or cautionary fable, the story clearly reflects a discontent with the American philosophy of life that was shared by many artists during this time; many left the country to live in Europe. High living and materialism was to be short lived, however, as in a few years the stock market would crash and plunge the United States into the Great Depression.

Source: Laura Pryor, Critical Essay on "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz," in Short Stories for Students, Thomson Gale, 2007.

William E. Rand

In the following essay, Rand compares F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz" and Richard Wright's "The Man Who Lived Underground" and discusses the concept of being an outsider that permeates the stories.

Discussions of expatriate United States writers of the early twentieth century generally include both Richard Wright and F. Scott Fitzgerald. However, the literary works of Wright and Fitzgerald are rarely compared directly. Fitzgerald is compared to Ernest Hemingway; Wright is discussed in terms of Langston Hughes or Dostoevsky. In referring to Richard Wright's story "The Man Who Lived Underground," for instance, Abraham Chapman sees an "obvious allusion in the title to the Dostoyevskyan Underground." Nevertheless, as writers, Fitzgerald and Wright have much in common.

Although their perspectives may have differed, both Fitzgerald and Wright saw themselves as cultural and political outsiders. Fitzgerald's attitude toward the wealthy, for example, was noted by Malcolm Cowley, who says of Fitzgerald:

His mixture of feelings toward the very rich, which included curiosity and admiration as well as distrust, is revealed in his treatment of a basic situation that reappears in many of his stories: … a rising young man of the middle class in love with the daughter of a very rich family.

Considered through the concept of the insider/outsider, Wright may be closer to Fitzgerald than to Dostoevsky, as Michel Fabre observes concerning Wright's story "The Man Who Lived Underground":

As for the situation of the man underground symbolizing that of the Negro in American society … [Wright] has painted it in a perspective which is exactly opposed to Dostoevsky's: rather than brooding over past humiliations, he sees his exclusion more as an opportunity to scrutinize his culture from the outside. Therefore, the underground rather clearly represents the marginal character of the black man's existence and his ambiguous rapport with American civilization.

Culture and race are typically seen to have produced Wright's feelings of alienation whereas social and economic class and culture are thought to have motivated Fitzgerald's views. Yet, political affiliations affected them both in ways that brought their fiction closer in structure and message. In the case of Wright, Katherine Fishburn asserts that there are several forces affecting the character Cross Damon in Wright's novel The Outsider:

Cross Damon is the double helix of American innocence and European nihilism. He is more alienated than his American predecessors and more influenced by his environment than his European contemporaries. Like Bigger Thomas [Native Son] before him, he is the result of a complicated battle among the forces of naturalism, Marxism, Freudianism, and existentialism.

Wright was a known Communist—for a time—but, interestingly, the word Marxism has also been associated with Fitzgerald.

Living in France, Fitzgerald could hardly have escaped some exposure to Marxist theories; however, Ronald Gervais asserts that Fitzgerald "developed in his work an attitude toward Marxism that was neither embrace nor rejection." Such an ambivalent perspective, combined with Fitzgerald's desire to be a part of the wealthy elite produced fiction with political and social statements similar to those in the later works of Wright. Gervais says the following of Fitzgerald's politics:

Fitzgerald uses Marxism as an outlet for his ideals and frustrations; his qualified sympathy for it represents his most extreme protest against the excesses and failings of the haute bourgeois class which he describes so charmingly and judges so scathingly, and to which he felt his loyalty pledged—even if it seemed to him that the class was historically doomed.

Although Fitzgerald's birth and initial success predates Wright's by about a decade, they are essentially of the same generation, and at least two of their short stories manifest their varied feelings of isolation in similar literary themes and structures. "The Diamond As Big As the Ritz," published by Fitzgerald in 1922, and "The Man Who Lived Underground," first published by Wright in 1942, show similarities in form, imagery, and theme, all related to the same concept of the outsider.

Both stories present protagonists who enter worlds different from their own. In both cases, the protagonist is a naive outsider who must learn some moral truth that has, as its basis, the politics of wealth. Fitzgerald's story opens with John T. Unger, who "came from a family that had been well known in Hades—a small town on the Mississippi River—for several generations." The syntactic structure of the sentence, with its hyphenated appositive, initially suggests at least two things. First is that Unger's family enjoys a certain amount of social status in the town of Hades. The second suggestion undermines the first, however, in the naming of Hades as a small Mississippi town. The effect is to make the Unger family seem like big fish in a little pond, an effect confirmed in the last sentence of the first paragraph: "Nothing would suit [John's parents] but that he should go to St. Midas' School near Boston—Hades was too small to hold their darling and gifted son." John Unger then begins his journey.

Events of the next two pages, including the "asbestos pocket-book stuffed with money," suggest that the Unger family, while comfortable financially, is definitely not part of the power and money elite. In the preparatory school, therefore, John becomes the outsider who aspires to become a member of the group. He responds naively to his friend Percy Washington upon learning details of his family's fabulous wealth: "‘He must be very rich,’ said John simply. ‘I'm glad. I like very rich people.’" What Unger must learn through the story is that Percy Washington's father is "a rampant capitalist who illustrates the ugliness of placing money and luxury above what Fitzgerald called ‘the old values’: moral integrity, self-discipline, love for one's family, and regard for one's fellow human beings." John Unger must learn to see the corruption beneath the facade.

Similarly, in Wright's story, Fred Daniels leaves one world for another of which he is unfamiliar. The narrative hook, "I've got to hide, he told himself," introduces a conflict between the protagonist and his society, stronger but not unlike the conflict in Fitzgerald's story. Both stories introduce a character who, for one reason or another, no longer belongs in his society and seeks another. John Unger seeks social and economic advancement; Fred Daniels seeks physical safety and escape as indicated by Wright's lines: "Either he had to find a place to hide, or he had to surrender." Unger leaves the comfort of his small town, ironically named Hades, for the disguised corrupted world of the wealthy, and Daniels leaves the dangerous, corrupt world above ground for the security of the sewer, "Wright's metaphor for the black ghetto," according to Susan Mayberry.

Both protagonists are, therefore, outsiders who must learn, but Wright's story differs in that his protagonist must, as an outsider, look back and become aware of the corruption in the society he has left. For both protagonists, however, little of their world is as it seems. Mayberry says that in Wright's story, "[t]he sewer water is described as warm, pulsing, womblike. Entering it, Man regresses to a world that offers both security and ignorance out of which he must finally climb." Daniels must climb out of his ignorance of the corrupted underbelly of society as must Unger. A superficial reading may suggest different sources of corruption in the stories: money in Fitzgerald's and racism in Wright's. Although the two concepts intertwine in both stories, the source of corruption in each case is wealth with its attendant power. Fred Daniel's fate, according to Patricia D. Watkins, is not primarily the result of his race:

Racial identity does not directly determine what happens to Fred Daniels. Rather, environment—specifically, economic and social forces—seems to be a more important determinant of Daniels' fortunes. Before his arrest Daniels worked at the home of Mrs. Wooten, presumably as a servant. Hence, Daniels is at the lower end of the economic and social scale, like the white night watchman who shares his fate.

It is interesting that Fitzgerald also sets Unger at the lower end of the social and economic scale at the St. Midas Preparatory School. This position seems typical—albeit not exclusive—for the position of outsider in the works of both authors. Such is the position of Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby and Bigger Thomas in Native Son.

In "The Diamond As Big As the Ritz" and "The Man Who Lived Underground," wealth not only initiates corruption, but it also provides the means of concealing it, leading to similar ironic juxtapositions by both Wright and Fitzgerald. Connotations associated with rising and descending, as well as those associated with light and darkness, are reversed. This technique is illustrated most strongly in Wright's oxymoron: "dark sunshine", Fitzgerald's ironic use of "Hades" for the name of Unger's home town and "Washington" for the name of the most corrupt and immoral—and richest—man in the world. In religious terms, one rises to Heaven and descends to hell or Hades. Yet in Fitzgerald's story, the bright god-like figure above Washington is evil. In Wright's story, the bright light from above means danger.

Other religious symbols appear in both stories, usually but not always in an ironic sense. Typically, for instance, the corrupt underworld is dark, and the pure world above displays a bright light. Yet in Wright's story, the light shining from above ironically represents the corrupt, violent society from which Daniels escapes, and in Fitzgerald's story Unger rises in an almost religious sense to the murderously corrupt Washington retreat:

At a resounding "Hey-yah!" John felt the car being lifted slowly from the ground—up and up—clear of the tallest rocks on both sides—then higher, until he could see a wavy, moonlit valley stretched out before him in sharp contrast to the quagmire of rocks that they had just left.

Unger and Percy Washington arrive at the estate to more images of rising, light and darkness: "Full in the light of the stars, an exquisite chåteau rose from the borders of the lake, climbed in marble radiance half the height of an adjoining mountain, then melted in grace, in perfect symmetry …" The twelve men of Fish who Percy and Unger encounter on their way to the estate present another religious image. They are, however, described by Marius Bewley as something other than ironic:

The Christian implications of the fish symbol are certainly intended by Fitzgerald, and these are enforced by the twelve solitary men who are apostles "beyond all religion." These grotesque and distorted Christian connotations are strengthened by their dream-like relation to Hades on the Mississippi where John was born. What we are given in these paragraphs is a queerly restless and troubled sense of a religion that is sick and expressing itself in disjointed images and associations, as if it were delirious.

A similar disjointed, delirious religious image appears in Fred Daniels' dream in the Wright story. In the dream, Daniels walks on water to rescue a drowning woman's baby. The dream is a realistic representation of his concern for the dead baby in the sewer and his feelings of helplessness in helping it, but the dream also reflects Watkins' observation: "As he sheds his aboveground identity, Fred Daniels acquires a godlike identity."

The Fred Daniels god-like image does, in certain contexts, resemble the Braddock Washington god-like image in Fitzgerald's story. Both men create their own world and seek to make changes in it. Both reject values and morals of the society they left. Daniels no longer values the exchange function of money and jewels; Washington no longer values human life and freedom. The two authors present their god-like characters in different ways, however.

Fitzgerald uses narrative techniques to show Washington as a god-like figure. His character is rarely seen, but his control is always felt. When seen, he dominates absolutely. Representative is the scene with the captured aviators. They argue with and appeal to Braddock Washington, high above, as if to a powerful Roman god. Washington responds in kind:

"I've offered to have all or any of you painlessly executed if you wish. I've offered to have your wives, sweethearts, children, and mothers kidnapped and brought out here. I'll enlarge your place down there and feed and clothe you the rest of your lives."

Later Washington appears like an all-knowing god along the path where John Unger and Kismine are talking: "Footsteps were coming along the path in their direction, and a moment later the rose bushes were parted displaying Braddock Washington, whose intelligent eyes … were peering in at them."

Wright, on the other hand, chooses both narration and symbols to show Daniels' god-like qualities. It is through Wright's narration of Daniels' god-like change that Daniels becomes the outsider: "Near the end of his second day underground, Daniels takes the first step toward creating himself and his world and hence becoming his own god: He begins rejecting his aboveground values and identity." The values he rejects are money and time, possibly the two things most valued by a capitalistic society.

Much has been made of Wright's affiliation with the Communist Party and his departure from the United States to live in Paris. For instance, Abraham Chapman notes: "His first writing was published in the Communist press, and for a while he was Harlem correspondent of The Daily Worker." Wright later left the Communist Party; nevertheless, that experience may have inspired the focus on money in "The Man Who Lived Underground" and Daniels' significant rejection of it in the story. Daniels comes to treat money and other forms of wealth with contempt from the dime payment he casts aside in the grocery store to the hundred dollar bills he casually uses as wallpaper in his cave. Patricia Watkins says, "His rejection of the valuation of money above ground is a liberating act." Watkins also notes that he rejects time in like fashion: "Daniels' enslavement to time ends when he prepares to nail valuable watches onto the same dirt wall on which he has just pasted the hundred dollar bills." These acts free Daniels from the entrapments of wealth. They also show him as god-like in his ability to remake his world and as such make him an outsider to the world aboveground.

As interesting, however, is the similarity that the message of his rejection has to Fitzgerald's story "The Diamond As Big As the Ritz." Fitzgerald creates two outsiders, John Unger and Braddock Washington, made such by the corrupting influence of excessive wealth. Unger, of course, is the admiring outsider to the wealthy elite. Washington is the self-imposed outsider to society who—in a god-like way similar to Daniels—has created his own world. Unlike Daniels, however, he has embraced wealth to an insane degree. While Fitzgerald is not telling a story that condemns wealth and power per se, he does, in his examination of their excesses, show the corrupting effects in a way similar to Wright. Bewley notes that "[t]he major part of [Fitzgerald's] story is concerned with giving us a series of glimpses of life in this American dream—a fantasy on the theme of material possibilities run wild." Daniels' rejection of corrupt, aboveground values and Washington's rejection of the moral values of society make both characters appear god-like in a similar way and deliver the same moral message to the reader.

In addition to narrative structures, Wright employs symbols heavily to make Daniels appear god-like. The first occurs after the movie theater scene when Daniels "went back to the basement and stood in the red darkness." The scene leads to a symbolic rendering of the washing of the hands by the priest at mass and the changing of the water and wine to Christ's blood. The ceremony is a re-creation of Christ's actions at the last supper, with Daniels' experience a corrupted version of the same:

He went to the sink and turned the faucet and the water flowed in a smooth silent stream that looked like a spout of blood. He brushed the mad image from his mind and began to wash his hands leisurely, looking about for the usual bar of soap.

The symbolism is carried further with the previously discussed dream in which Daniels walks on water. Both symbols occur immediately following events that further alienate Daniels from the world above, pushing him more into the role of outsider. The movie theater scene, in which Daniels experiences a renewed awakening to the world's corruption and in which he encounters the usher, leads into the washing of the hands. The walking on water dream is preceded by Daniels' eating the stolen sandwiches, his first meal and so the first sign of his self-sufficiency underground.

After Daniels hangs the watches and scatters the diamonds, signs of his rejection of aboveground values, he turns the radio on and subsequently has a god-like illusion:

A melancholy piece of music rose. Brooding over the diamonds on the floor was like looking up into a sky full of restless stars; then the illusion turned into its opposite: he was high up in the air looking down at the twinkling lights of a sprawling city. The music ended and a man recited news events. In the same attitude in which he had contemplated the city, so now … he looked down upon land and sea as men fought, as cities were razed, as planes scattered death upon open towns, as long lines of trenches wavered and broke.

The juxtaposition of high and low continues with the comparison of the diamonds to stars as well as Daniels' imagined and god-like position high above mankind. The symbolism parallels Fitzgerald's depiction of the boys ascending above the town of Fish and being lifted over the rock barricade before entering the valley of the estate. Also similar is Washington's stance above the imprisoned aviators.

Such god-like representation in both stories favors the outsider interpretation of the characters. The true nature of an outsider may not be known to the group. According to the Bible, Christ's true nature on Earth went unseen or disbelieved by many; the job of the Apostles was to open peoples' eyes. The analogy becomes clear in close comparison between Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway. For example, the truth of Jake Barnes' true bitterness goes unseen to his fellow expatriates—most notably, Brett—who see him as a happy friend to everyone in Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises. Likewise, in Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, many of Jay Gatsby's freeloading guests know little about him, and he allows them to create their own myths. Nick Carraway takes on the role of apostle, trying to open the eyes of the reader.

In "The Diamond As Big As the Ritz," Percy relates the almost biblical tale of his father's lineage to John Unger, yet neither Percy nor his sisters see the evil behind the god-like figure of Braddock Washington for what it truly is. Braddock Washington is a god-like outsider to a nation that does not know that his world exists. John Unger is an outsider to the wealth and power elite as well as to the truth of his intended fate. Fred Daniels is an outsider not only to his fate but also to most of the people of the aboveground society.

In Wright's story, the theater usher gives Daniels his first experience as an outsider from the aboveground perspective. By the time he enters the theater, Daniels has begun to awaken to the corruption that exists beneath society's facade, but the usher, who acknowledges Daniels' presence, is blind to his true nature. Wright symbolizes the usher's blindness through his innocuous question and directions: "‘Looking for the men's room, sir?’ the man asked, and, without waiting for an answer, he turned and pointed. ‘This way, sir. The first door to your right.’" The usher treats Daniels like any other movie theater patron, unable to see—or smell—the obvious signs of Daniels' time in the sewer, including "his shoes, wet with sewer slime." The usher is unable to note the condition of Daniels' clothing because the sewer foulness on his clothes symbolizes the corruption of his society, which he, like the rest of society, cannot see. That symbolic blindness then represents such a strong difference in perspective as to make Daniels a complete outsider. At this point, however, Daniels has not yet achieved his full awakening or, as Watkins describes it, his "godlike identity." Daniels simply dismisses the usher with the comment, "What a funny fellow!"

Daniels' realization really begins in the meat market. There the circumstance repeats when the white couple mistake him for a cashier, again failing to note the distinctive trappings of the sewer displayed by Daniels. Not surprisingly, money forms the catalyst for Daniels' irrevocable rejection of the world above and the formation of his new identity. In the story, the woman pays for the grapes with a dime, and, after some civilities, the couple leaves Daniels standing in the doorway: "When they were out of sight, he burst out laughing and crying. A trolley car rolled noisily past and he controlled himself quickly. He flung the dime to the pavement with a gesture of contempt and stepped into the warm night air."

However, Daniels' laughter signals a less-than-total awakening, Mayberry notes that this laughter recurs and reveals a growing awakening:

This laughter occurs throughout the story at every significant event or lesson in Man's process of enlightenment. It marks his growing awareness of the vulnerable human condition and the universal human culpability that renders human life and love highest absolutes. Thus it becomes the ultimate signifier of the distance between these real values and the symbols substituted for them by members of society.

These symbols are, of course, the same as those used by Fitzgerald: money, jewels, and other blatant signs of wealth, all of which Daniels rejects in his awakening, and the characters in Fitzgerald's story lose.

Not only does Daniels laugh at certain painfully partial points of awakening, but others laugh as well. Wright uses laughter, joy and song ironically in the story to show ignorance or a gradual sense of awakening. The first instance occurs early in the story when Daniels comes upon the people happily singing at the church service. His first impulse on seeing them through the wall is to laugh, but guilt stops him. He is in the earliest stages of awakening and realizes only that something is wrong:

They oughtn't to do that, he thought. But he could think of no reason why they should not do it. Just singing with the air of the sewer blowing in on them…. He felt that he was gazing upon something abysmally obscene, yet he could not bring himself to leave.

The laughter of the theater patrons has a similar effect on Daniels, and his own laughter is uneasy, guilty. At that point, Daniels has not yet come to terms with his new, developing identity, and, as Mayberry suggests, a feeling of superiority accompanies the laughter.

Fitzgerald uses the same technique, albeit not as often and with a bit more subtlety. The reason probably rests in the nature of the story. John Unger acquires his realization not by degrees like Daniels, but abruptly through Kismine's slip of information. His reaction is, therefore, different: "‘And so,’ cried John accusingly, ‘and so you were letting me make love to you and pretending to return it, and talking about marriage, all the time knowing perfectly well that I'd never get out of here alive.’" Also in Fitzgerald's story, in addition to more abrupt awakenings, characters typically undergo relatively less of a personality change.

The first significant instance of expressed joy or laughter parallels the church service scene in Wright's story. During Percy's narrative of the family history, the elder Fitz-Norman Washington deceives his slaves into believing that the Southern armies have won the war: "The negroes believed him implicitly. They passed a vote declaring it a good thing and held revival services immediately." Fitzgerald's tone and direction suggest an intuition sufficient to intend an implication similar to Daniels' response to the church singing he witnesses: "Pain throbbed in his legs and a deeper pain, induced by the sight of those black people groveling and begging for something they could never get, churned in him." The second instance in the story, also regarding the slaves, suggests the conclusion to the first. It occurs when Braddock and Percy Washington show John Unger the slave quarters. Braddock Washington makes a racist statement to which John Unger reacts:

"I discontinued the baths for quite another reason. Several of [the slaves] caught cold and died. Water is not good for certain races—except as a beverage."

John laughed, and then decided to nod his head in sober agreement. Braddock Washington made him uncomfortable.

Unger's mixed reaction reflects the higher moral, and less racist, character of his family clashing with his desire as an outsider to fit in with the Washingtons.

The next instance occurs when Washington tells the trapped aviators of the man who escaped. This instance signifies an important turning point in the story. Up to this point, the chaos in the characters' lives in both Fitzgerald's and Wright's stories has been shown in large measure by ironic reversals of the signifiers of symbols: up leads to corruption and down leads to enlightenment; light is corrupt and evil, and darkness is soothing and safe; laughter reflects pain and ignorance. Washington, intending to manipulate and deceive, tells his captives that one of their number has escaped. They react as expected: "A wild yell of jubilation went up suddenly from two dozen throats and a pandemonium of joy ensued. The prisoners clog-danced and cheered and yodled and wrestled with one another in a sudden uprush of animal spirits." In Washington's mind, the prisoners laugh in ignorance; however, subsequent events show their rejoicing to be genuine, for the Italian really had escaped.

Both Fitzgerald and Wright employ this double reversal, a strange kind of return to normalcy, to signal the story's turning point. Another turning point occurs with the coming of the air attack; once again, that which is high above is seen as good. When things look bad for the survival of his hidden empire, Braddock Washington prays, offering the ridiculous bribe to God. He is no longer god-like; he has reverted to the human appealing to God above. Finally, the evil Washington and his family go below into the mountain in a symbolic descent into hell. At the turning point of Wright's story, "the world above ground acquires the quality of darkness, and the world underground acquires the quality of light." This happens when Daniels rigs the electric lighting in the cave. That signifies his moment of psychological illumination. These respective literary turning points then lead to an inevitable confrontation of an outsider with society, bringing Braddock Washington and Fred Daniels to the same end as Jay Gatsby and Bigger Thomas.

Their endings seem quite different, with Wright's heavy message in the form of Lawson and Fitzgerald's almost lighthearted and certainly happy ending with Kismine grabbing the wrong jewels. Fitzgerald may be seen as reflecting the modernism of the Jazz Age, whereas Wright's anti-hero Daniels may be seen to nudge his story into post-modernism. Nevertheless, the awakening of Daniels and John Unger to the truth of their societies is similar. It seems, therefore, that the structure and techniques of the two writers are close enough to suggest the possibility that Fitzgerald could have influenced Wright's work in a positive way.

Wright began to write seriously in 1925, the same year that Fitzgerald published The Great Gatsby. Wright was a self-educated man, widely read, and it is improbable that he did not read Fitzgerald's work. He difinitely read Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, and Edgar Allan Poe. Also, as already mentioned, the lives of Wright and Fitzgerald took certain parallel tracks. It is therefore not unreasonable to conclude that Wright saw a model in Fitzgerald as did both Fitzgerald and Hemingway in Gertrude Stein, Sherwood Anderson, and Jack London. Then, as with the other writers, Wright incorporated Fitzgerald's influence into his own maturing style and voice.

Source: William E. Rand, "The Structure of the Outsider in the Short Fiction of Richard Wright and F. Scott Fitzgerald," in CLA Journal, Vol. 40, No. 2, December 1996, pp. 230-45.

Ruth Prigozy

In the following essay, Prigozy gives a critical analysis of F. Scott Fitzgerald's work.

Although for the general reader F. Scott Fitzgerald's fame rests primarily on one novel, The Great Gatsby (1925), his creative life, from youth to early death, found full expression in some 160 short stories. These works not only provided the income that sustained Fitzgerald when writing his novels, but they also enhanced the legend that grew up around Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald after his first novel, This Side of Paradise (1920), appeared at the beginning of the Jazz Age. For ten years thereafter the pages of the Saturday Evening Post, Redbook, Woman's Home Companion, and other mass-circulation magazines were filled with romantic tales of young lovers, of dreamers and doers, of madcap heroines and sad young men, many of whom seemed to reflect aspects of the lives of their creator and his wife.

Fitzgerald is one of the most widely recognized names in American literature, yet the legend he so carefully cultivated has, paradoxically, tended to obscure the writer as well as his work. Fitzgerald was a major novelist, but at least a dozen of his stories rank among the very best short fiction written in the twentieth century. Fitzgerald's whole life was bound up with his short stories; indeed, the story of his life cannot be told without them. Only through an acquaintance with his career as a short-fiction writer can the complex man who now occupies a major position in the literary and mythic life of the nation be understood.

Perhaps no other American writer has felt himself as inextricably tied to the history of his country as F. Scott Fitzgerald. Born in 1896, at the end of an era of unprecedented national growth, he lived to see the traditions that had guided his parents' generation and his own childhood cast aside; indeed, he was said by his contemporaries to have precipitated the upheaval in manners and morals that accompanied the end of World War I. Never as "lost" as the members of his generation described in Paris by Gertrude Stein, Fitzgerald nevertheless experienced and even personified the "boom" of the 1920s and the "bust" of the 1930s. America had sloughed off its past and headed for, as Fitzgerald said, the "greatest, gaudiest spree in history"; when it was over, he realized that the nation had been living on borrowed time, "a short and precious time—for when the mist rises … one finds that the very best is over."

The elegiac note that characterizes his reminiscences of the 1920s is typical of Fitzgerald's writing; its origins were in his early childhood and struggling adolescence. He felt himself always to be an outsider—from the elite society of the St. Paul, Minnesota, of his boyhood, from the spectacular achievements of the athletes of his school days, from the glittering social world of his young manhood, from the wealth and power of the American aristocracy, and even, at the end, from the literary life of his nation.

Fitzgerald's sense of estrangement was rooted in his family background. He never forgot that he was related, however distantly, to Francis Scott Key, a name that conjured up images of America's heroic past. He listened attentively to the tales his father, Edward Fitzgerald, told of the family's Confederate past. He noted the connection between his father's family and, through marriage, Mary Surratt, hanged as a conspirator in Lincoln's assassination. And on the side of his mother, Molly McQuillan, although the ancestry was not as patrician as his father's, he could point to the vitality of his grandfather, an Irishman who epitomized the self-made American merchants in the decades immediately following the Civil War. Fitzgerald admitted in 1933 in a letter to John O'Hara, "I am half black Irish and half old American stock with the usual exaggerated ancestral pretensions. The black Irish half of the family had the money and looked down upon the Maryland side of the family who had, and really had, that … series of reticences and obligations that go under the poor old shattered word ‘breeding.’" When his own father experienced serious business failures during Fitzgerald's childhood, the boy was distraught. He experienced such severe anxieties that he expected the family to be taken to the poorhouse, and his later financial insecurity reinforced these childhood traumas. His life suggests that perhaps unconsciously he had to live on a financial brink.

The Fitzgerald family became increasingly dependent on the mother's relatives in St. Paul after moves to Buffalo, Syracuse, and back to Buffalo, with several different residences in each city. They moved several times in St. Paul, too, but always lived in rented houses or apartments in the Summit Avenue neighborhood where railroad tycoon James J. Hill kept his residence. The years of Fitzgerald's childhood and early youth were marked in his memory indelibly: he was the outsider, the poor relation, dependent on his grandmother and his aunt, admitted to but never really part of the social center of St. Paul life. That sense of estrangement so characteristic of his formative years marks much of his fiction, from the first short stories, written when he was about thirteen, to his last efforts in Hollywood. Similarly, despite his father's weaknesses and failures Fitzgerald was never to relinquish his loyalty to him and to the traditions he represented.

Fitzgerald was admitted to the St. Paul Academy, a private high school, in 1908, where he remained for three years. It was there, from 1909 to 1911, that he published his first short stories, in the school literary magazine Now and Then. In the late 1920s he re-created these years in the Basil Duke Lee stories, which depict the painful rejections Fitzgerald experienced at St. Paul Academy where he was disliked and socially unsuccessful. He attempted to use sports as a path to acceptance, but he did not have the physique for football stardom. His most cherished memories of the St. Paul experience were those connected with the stage. Fitzgerald always loved drama, and his earliest writing efforts were either in the form of short plays or stories with strong theatrical elements. When his poor grades at St. Paul Academy necessitated his changing schools, he was enrolled at the Newman School in Hackensack, New Jersey, where he could indulge his taste for the theater with a few thrilling trips to New York City, less than an hour away. Here he felt the glamour and excitement he had dreamed about in St. Paul. For the rest of his life New York City would hold a special magic for Fitzgerald: success, vitality, and enchantment.

His popularity improved slowly at Newman, but his opportunities to escape from an unpleasant reality were greater than they had ever been. And it was perhaps the color and excitement of the Broadway theater, particularly the musicals, that so captured Fitzgerald's imagination that he aspired throughout his life to achieve fame as a playwright or librettist. He continued to write short stories at Newman, where the school magazine, the Newman News, published three of his efforts. His Newman career was not the failure that the St. Paul Academy had been. At the beginning of his second year he met the person who would become the most influential figure in his early life, both creatively and personally, Father Sigourney Fay, who would become director of the school. Father Fay was a sophisticated, lively esthete, a friend of many well-known figures in arts and letters, including writer Shane Leslie. Fay revealed to Fitzgerald a far more attractive Catholicism than he had ever known and opened a world to him that suggested the beauty and richness of experience he would always try to capture in his writing.

Fitzgerald entered Princeton University in 1913, and although he never graduated, his years there were the most important to his development as a writer. He never lost his interest in sports, but knowing that he could not succeed as a participant, he sought other roads to success and the popularity he would always crave. His major activities at Princeton were in the Triangle Club, the Tiger, and the Nassau Literary Magazine.

In the first of the two periods he spent at Princeton (he left in his junior year as a result of poor grades and illness, returning the following year only to enlist in the army after the United States entered World War I) he contributed the plot and lyrics to a Triangle show and the lyrics to another, and he wrote a one-act play and a short story, "The Ordeal" (Nassau Literary Magazine, June 1915). In 1917, when he returned to Princeton, he wrote five stories and one short play as well as one Triangle show. The stories from this period reveal a growing maturity in the author. Three were later revised for publication in H. L. Mencken's Smart Set, two were incorporated into Fitzgerald's first novel, This Side of Paradise, and one, "Tarquin of Cheapside" (Nassau Literary Magazine, April 1917), later appeared in his second collection of stories, Tales of the Jazz Age (1922). Clearly these years were of major importance to his development as a writer.

At Princeton he expanded his literary horizons considerably, largely through his friendships with John Peale Bishop, who introduced him to poetry, particularly that of John Keats, and with Edmund Wilson, who would become the "intellectual conscience" of his life. He admired Christian Gauss, the teacher who recognized the unique quality of Fitzgerald's prose. In the richest intellectual environment he had ever experienced he read Oscar Wilde, Ernest Dowson, Algernon Charles Swinburne, and Compton Mackenzie, whose Sinister Street (1913-1914) made a marked impression on him. Later at Princeton he read Bernard Shaw, Rupert Brooke, and H. G. Wells and dabbled in socialist theory. His social life broadened, too. He was elected to the Cottage, one of the most elite Princeton clubs, largely because his standing among his classmates was enhanced by his successes with the Triangle productions.

And it was while at Princeton that Fitzgerald met the girl who would become the prototype for so many of the beautiful but elusive women who appear in his stories and novels, Ginevra King. His meeting with Ginevra was so important that he used it, and his memories of her, in the Basil and Josephine stories over a decade later.

After receiving his army commission, Fitzgerald was stationed in Montgomery, Alabama, where he met the girl who was to become the single most important person in his life, Zelda Sayre. Like Ginevra, Zelda appears throughout Fitzgerald's fictional world. She is Sally Carrol in "The Ice Palace" (Saturday Evening Post, 22 May 1920; collected in Flappers and Philosophers,’ 1920), the heroine of "The Last of the Belles" (Saturday Evening Post, 2 March 1929; collected in Taps at Reveille, 1935), and Jonquil in "The Sensible Thing" (Liberty, 5 July 1924; collected in All the Sad Young Men, 1926); she is the model for most of the women in his stories and novels until the late 1930s. Zelda was the most popular, daring, and vital girl in Montgomery. For Fitzgerald she represented the glamour of the unattainable, and he fell deeply in love with her. In the ledger that he kept until 1937 (published as F. Scott Fitzgerald's Ledger, 1973) Fitzgerald reported that his twenty-second year was "The most important year of life. Every emotion and my life work decided. Miserable and ecstatic but a great success." In the entry for September of that year he notes, "Fell in love on the 7th." Fitzgerald also wrote the first version of This Side of Paradise while in the army.

Much has been written about the relationship between Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. It was stormy, passionate, fierce, often ugly. Despite their quarrels and mutual self-destructiveness, the bond between them was so strong that long after her mental illness had kept them apart he could not divorce her, even when he fell in love with Sheilah Graham during his last years in Hollywood. Zelda lacked any principle of order; she threw herself into the heady celebrations that marked her husband's early success. She competed with him; she goaded him; she joined him in showing the world how an attractive and successful young American couple could defy convention and live for the thrill of the moment.

Zelda wrote many poignant letters after her illness, and, indeed, she has emerged as a pitiable figure. particularly in recent years when she has come to be regarded as a casualty of the American system of marriage—a woman who needed artistic fulfillment of her own, struggling against the domination of a male-oriented society. That kind of conclusion is simplistic; the truth of the relationship cannot really be known. Zelda Fitzgerald, whatever anguish she experienced and caused in those around her, is inseparable from her husband's career. His initial struggle for literary success in 1920 was caused by Zelda's refusal to marry him because he did not have enough money to support them. Subsequently, he kept on writing the short stories that would provide the money for them to maintain the style of life they desired, to maintain her throughout years of medical care and hospitalization, and to pay for their daughter, Scottie's, care and education.

Fitzgerald wrote nineteen short stories in the spring of 1919, all of them rejected by magazines. In June Smart Set bought "Babes in the Woods," first published in the Nassau Literary Magazine in May 1917, for thirty dollars. (It appeared in the September 1919 Smart Set and was later incorporated into This Side of Paradise.) Fitzgerald was living in New York, working in advertising, and struggling to finish his novel.

In the summer of 1919 Fitzgerald left New York City for St. Paul, where he finished This Side of Paradise and resubmitted it to Scribners, who had previously rejected it but now accepted it for publication in the spring of 1920. While waiting, he sold six stories to the Smart Set for $215 in October and two more in November for $300. His big break came when his new agent, Harold Ober, sold "Head and Shoulders" to the Saturday Evening Post, where it appeared in the 21 February 1920 issue, for $400. Ober later sold the film rights to the story for $2,500. In the early months of 1920, soon after the publication of This Side of Paradise, Fitzgerald wrote one of his best stories, "May Day," which was rejected by the Post but admired by Mencken, who included it in the July 1920 Smart Set. On 3 April 1920 Scott and Zelda were married in New York.

Scribners followed publication of the novel with Fitzgerald's first collection of short stories, Flappers and Philosophers. Although only three of the stories may be considered among his best ("The Ice Palace," "The Offshore Pirate" [Saturday Evening Post, 29 May 1920], and "Bernice Bobs Her Hair" [Saturday Evening Post, 1 May 1920]), the volume appealed to the audience that had embraced his novel. The collection sold 15,325 copies by 1922, with six printings. The reviews were not as enthusiastic as those for This Side of Paradise; indeed, Mencken made note of the two-sidedness of Fitzgerald's creative life—the serious writer and the popular entertainer. This view of Fitzgerald was to characterize critical judgments of his fiction, particularly in relation to the short stories, from the 1920s to the present day. From this point in his life short stories would provide Fitzgerald's major income. He never made much money from his novels, including This Side of Paradise which, despite its success, never achieved the sales of a best-seller. During the next twelve years the Saturday Evening Post was Fitzgerald's main outlet for short stories, his fees increasing to $4,000 per story for the years 1929 through 1932.

There is a popular conception about Fitzgerald's work for the Post—that his stories were written to slick-magazine specifications, and therefore they represent the commercial side of his talent. It is a common belief that Fitzgerald bartered his gifts by writing short stories acceptable to the Post, which was edited from 1899 to 1936 by George H. Lorimer. Lorimer demanded an unusually high standard from his Post writers, allowing them wide latitude in choice of subject and form. There were certainly standards of commercial acceptability to which he subscribed, but they depended on professional smoothness, readability, and verve. The Post encouraged, but did not demand, strong plots, leisurely narrative, a good mixture of dialogue and action, and vivid characters. These requirements, while not stimulating radical departures from convention, also did not necessarily constrict or hamper creative instincts. And they were characteristics of Fitzgerald's fiction long before the Post ever accepted one of his stories. Happy endings were not prescribed, as proved by the publication in the Post of "Babylon Revisited" (21 February 1931; collected in Taps at Reveille), "The Rough Crossing" (8 June 1929), "Two Wrongs" (18 January 1930; collected in Taps at Reveille), and "One Trip Abroad" (11 October 1930).

Fitzgerald's letters underscore his independence as well as his dedication to his work. Although commercial writing is, he admitted in a 1940 letter to Zelda, a "definite trick," he felt he brought to it the "intelligence and good writing" to which a sensitive editor like Lorimer might respond. In Wesley W. Stout, Lorimer's successor, "an up and coming young Republican who gives not a damn about literature," he placed the blame for the plethora of "escape stories about the brave frontiersmen … or fishing, or football captains, nothing that would even faintly shock or disturb the reactionary bourgeois." He conceded that he had tried but could not write such stories. "As soon as I feel I am writing to a cheap specification my pen freezes and my talent vanishes over the hill…." To Harold Ober he confessed that he was unable to "rush things. Even in years like '24, '28, '29, '30, all devoted to short stories, I could not turn out more than 8-9 top-price stories a year. It simply is impossible—all my stories are conceived like novels, require a special emotion, a special experience—so that my readers … know that each time it'll be something new, not in form but in substance."

After their marriage the Fitzgeralds rarely remained in one place more than six months to a year. After a whirlwind descent on New York City, they retreated to Westport, Connecticut, and then to Europe. Back in America, they lived briefly in St. Paul where Fitzgerald revised his novel The Beautiful and Damned (1922) and put together Tales of the Jazz Age, in which only two pieces, "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz" (Smart Set, June 1922) and "Two for a Cent" (Metropolitan Magazine, April 1922), had been written after 1920.

The collection contained eleven stories, divided into three sections: "My Last Flappers," "Fantasies," and "Unclassified Masterpieces." The John Held cartoon cover and Fitzgerald's annotated table of contents made it an attractive volume. Sales were good: eight thousand copies sold in the first printing, followed by two more printings in the same year. Readers liked the collection more than the critics did; most of them regarded the stories as diversions and failed to recognize the merit of "May Day" or "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz."

During the next few years the Fitzgeralds moved frequently: from Great Neck to France, to Italy, to Delaware, and even to Hollywood, where Fitzgerald was invited to try his hand at screenwriting. He was, at the same time, writing the major novels for which he received critical acclaim, The Great Gatsby and Tender Is the Night (1934). During these years Fitzgerald was at the top of his form as a short-story writer not only in the quantity but also in the quality of the fiction he produced. Because he needed money to finance the writing of The Great Gatsby, he produced eleven short stories in just four months.

He was able to put together another collection in 1926, and this one, All the Sad Young Men, contained some of his finest work: "The Rich Boy" (Redbook, January, February 1926), "Winter Dreams" (Metropolitan Magazine, December 1922), "Absolution" (American Mercury, June 1924), and "The Sensible Thing." As was his practice, he meticulously edited the magazine versions, careful to remove passages that he had "stripped" from them for use in The Great Gatsby. It was characteristic of Fitzgerald to mine his stories for particularly felicitous passages which could be used in the novels.) This volume, too, was relatively successful, considering that short-story collections rarely sold well. It went into three printings, totaling 16,170 copies in 1926. The critics were decidedly more impressed with this collection than either of the two that had appeared earlier, yet in retrospect it is clear that few recognized its level of artistry.

Just as his months in Europe had provided Fitzgerald with new friendships and influences—Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Gerald and Sara Murphy—his two-month sojourn in Hollywood in early 1927 introduced him to a world to which he would return in fiction and in reality many times before his death. In "Jacob's Ladder" (Saturday Evening Post, 20 August 1927) the young heroine is clearly patterned after actress Lois Moran, whom Fitzgerald met in Hollywood. As he would continue to do for the rest of his life, Fitzgerald used his own personal experience, particularly his marriage, as subject matter for his stories and novels. Zelda Fitzgerald's mental breakdown did not allow Fitzgerald to suspend his short-story writing to take care of her. Instead, he combined visits to her in various sanatoriums with bouts of writing that would provide the funds necessary for her care and treatment.

During the worst years of economic and emotional crisis Fitzgerald wrote some of his most eloquent stories. As Zelda moved in and out of clinics and he struggled to meet his responsibilities to her and to his daughter, he wrote the Basil Duke Lee stories (1928-1929), the Josephine Perry stories (1930-1931), and the story which is today regarded as an unqualified masterpiece, "Babylon Revisited." The stories from this period are retrospective, meditative, elegiac, certainly sadder than those he had written for the Post during the previous ten years, and the Post editors did not like them.

By the early 1930s Fitzgerald had lost his taste for writing the stories of young love which had brought him to the top of the magazine pay scale by 1929. Of the forty-two stories written in the six years from 1929 to 1935, eight (the Basil and Josephine stories) draw on autobiographical events and cultural attitudes that reflect the years from World War I through the 1920s. Five of the remaining stories are so trivial as to demand only wonder that they managed to find their way into print. ("The Passionate Eskimo" [Liberty, June 1935] and "Zone of Accident," [Saturday Evening Post, 13 July 1935] are among them.) But the other twenty-nine provide important insight into Fitzgerald's artistic crisis, when his subjects were as serious as his and the nation's trials demanded, but his plots were outworn, stale, mechanical—unintentional parodies of the exuberant accounts of young love and romantic longing that so captivated audiences during the boom years. These stories show Fitzgerald groping with painful subjects and achieving only intermittent success but on at least two occasions, with "Babylon Revisited" and "Crazy Sunday" (American Mercury, October 1932), producing masterpieces that incorporate the matter, if not the manner, of his more commercial contemporary work. In these two stories and in those that began to appear in Esquire in the mid 1930s, Fitzgerald was able to resolve his problems with plot and style, and to find a form suitable to the serious subjects that now interested him.

By 1934 Fitzgerald was writing one story a month and drinking excessively, until finally he collapsed. At this low point (he had been disappointed by the poor sales, despite critical praise, of Tender Is the Night, which had been published in April) he suggested to his editor at Scribners, Maxwell Perkins, a new collection of short stories, Taps at Reveille. The volume contained eighteen stories, including such Basil Duke Lee stories as "The Freshest Boy" (Saturday Evening Post, 28 July 1928) and "He Thinks He's Wonderful" (Saturday Evening Post, 29 September 1928), the Josephine Perry stories "First Blood" (Saturday Evening Post, 5 April 1930) and "A Woman with a Past" (Saturday Evening Post, 6 September 1930), and other first-rate examples of his art: "Crazy Sunday," "The Last of the Belles," and "Babylon Revisited." The first printing was 5,100 copies, and the reviews were generally good, but short-story collections at any time were luxuries, and in the Depression, with a $2.50 cover price, the volume did not attract a wide readership. Fitzgerald's Post price had dropped to $3,000 per story, and of the nine he wrote in 1935, the magazine accepted only three. His primary outlet in the late 1930s was Esquire, whose editor, Arnold Gingrich, encouraged Fitzgerald, agreeing to accept anything he wrote. The stringent space limitations of the magazine coincided with Fitzgerald's search for a new form and a new style, but its low fees ($250 per story) were insufficient to support him. In 1936 he wrote nine stories, semi-fictional sketches, and articles for Esquire, including "Afternoon of an Author" (August 1936) and "Author's House" (July 1936), but they brought him only $2,250. These were Fitzgerald's most anguished years: Zelda was hopelessly ill; his own health had deteriorated badly; his income had shrunk to $10,000 by 1937; and he suffered a serious breakdown, physically and emotionally.

In 1937 Ober secured a contract for Fitzgerald as a screenwriter for M-G-M studios. Although he worked on many films and screenplays, only Three Comrades (1937) gives him screen credit (as cowriter). Nevertheless, these last years were among Fitzgerald's most artistically creative and personally satisfying. Despite his family problems and his poor health, he found personal happiness in his relationship with Hollywood gossip columnist Sheilah Graham. In addition to the uncompleted novel The Last Tycoon (1941), Fitzgerald wrote a series of stories for Esquire about a Hollywood hack writer, Pat Hobby. Fitzgerald had a heart attack in November 1940 and died on 21 December after suffering a second attack. In his hand was the Princeton Alumni Weekly. At his death he was almost forgotten as a writer; his royalty statement for the summer of 1940 was $13.13. Since the 1950s his reputation has grown steadily, and today he is ranked among the most important writers of the century. And the short stories, long neglected or undervalued, are at last receiving the kind of serious attention they have always deserved. But Fitzgerald always knew their value: "I have asked a lot of my emotions—one hundred and twenty stories. The price was high, right up with Kipling, because there was one little drop of something—not blood, not a tear, not my seed, but me more intimately than these, in every story, it was the extra I had."

Fitzgerald did not have a notably idiosyncratic linguistic style, as did Hemingway or William Faulkner, but a Fitzgerald story is recognizable by its romantic rhetoric, characters, settings, and social concerns. Fitzgerald experimented frequently with plots, subjects, and characters. The late stories are markedly different from the early group; both in style and substance they are innovative and experimental. For example, from Hollywood and his experience as a scriptwriter, Fitzgerald borrowed techniques, such as fade-outs and the camera angle as point of view.

The stories reveal a pattern of development and fall into three groups: the early tales about golden flappers and idealistic philosophers; the middle, embarrassingly sentimental, often mawkish stories; and finally, the late works, marked by new techniques—ellipsis, compression, suggestion—curiously enervated, yet deeply moving. Similar to these, yet distinctly separate, stand the Pat Hobby stories, where the old vitality had become corrosive bitterness in a literature of humiliation.

Most of his stories employ standard fictional techniques used in the novels: central complication, descriptive passages, dramatic climaxes and confrontations, reversals of fortune. And like the novels, the stories rarely turn on one action; more often, even in the shortest, slightest story, there are several actions of equal weight. His major problem is with plot; Fitzgerald will often begin with a good idea, create dramatic scenes, and then let the story limply peter out, or resolve the complications mechanically. An ending technique he used often was to blanket the resolution in lyrical prose, thus concealing the weakness of the story's resolution. Another weakness in the stories is related to point of view and distance, particularly in relation to the protagonists. Fitzgerald is most successful when his central character is both a participant and an observer of the action, weakest when the protagonist is simply a member of the upper class or an outsider.

Fitzgerald's gifts as a writer were primarily lyric and poetic; lapses in plot and characterization did not concern him nearly as much as using the wrong word. His revisions show that he edited primarily for phrase or rhythm in a sentence. Thus, his stories, whatever their plots, are almost always notable for the grace and lyricism of his rhetoric. His descriptive gifts are strikingly apparent; with a few selected details, usually in atmosphere or decor, he creates a mood against which the dramatic situation stands out in relief. In "News of Paris," a late sketch (probably written in 1940, published posthumously in Furioso in 1947), merely two lines, "It was quiet in the room. The peacocks in the draperies stirred in the April wind," provide the background for a brief but haunting retrospective account of dissolution, apathy, and tired sexuality in the pre-Depression boom.

Through language Fitzgerald created another world in his stories, a fairy-tale world replete with its own conventions and milieus, free of the tensions in his own all-too-depressingly familiar environment; he projected his imagination through the rhetoric of nostalgia into the past, creating a never-never land of beauty, stupefying luxury, and fulfillment. Fitzgerald's other world is a refuge from fear and anxiety, satiety and void; it is his answer to death and deterioration. Through a profusion of words, images—especially the sights, sounds, smells of luxury—perhaps existence itself might take on new meaning and possibility. The words themselves, for Fitzgerald, may have provided refuge from the storms of his own life. His infusions of charged rhetoric throughout the stories offer unshakable evidence of his belief in and commitment to that other world beyond his own, a world of possibility, hope, and beauty. Through imagery, through sensory appeals, through the evocative re-creation of an idealized past and a fabulous future, Fitzgerald's stories as a whole have the effect of lifting and transporting the reader past the restrictions of his own world. Fitzgerald was not simply playing on the facile sensibilities of his readers. The stories testify to his abiding faith in the possibility, somewhere, of living a graceful life. That this life might be made up of questionable values—of riches, of Hollywood-like romance, of tinselly fairgrounds and gilded mansions—is less important than that Fitzgerald asks his readers to share, perhaps ingenuously, his dedication to a dream.

His prose is filled with imagery, sensory in the Keatsian manner. He describes bridges, "like dancers holding hands in a row, with heads as tall as cities, and skirts of cable strand" ("The Sensible Thing"); trees, "like tall languid ladies with feather fans coquetting airily with the ugly roof of the monastery … delicate lace on the hems of many yellow fields" ("Benediction," Smart Set, February 1920; collected in Flappers and Philosophers); and moonlight, "That stream of silver that waved like a wide strand of curly hair toward the moon" ("Love in the Night," Saturday Evening Post, 14 March 1925). And his stories are filled with colors, bright blue and gold, white and silver, occasionally coalescing in a symbol that evokes a range of meanings beyond the purely decorative. In "May Day" the "great plate-glass front had turned to a deep creamy blue, the color of a Maxfield Parrish moonlight—a blue that seemed to press close upon the pane as if to crowd its way into the restaurant. Dawn had come up in Columbus Circle, magical, breathless dawn, silhouetting the great statue of the immortal Christopher, and mingling in a curious and uncanny manner with the fading yellow electric light inside."

The world of Fitzgerald's stories is most frequently the world of the very rich. The milieus and manners constitute the backdrop against which a rags-to-riches story may unfold, a struggling young man is rescued by a benevolent tycoon, or a beautiful Cinderella meets her handsome, wealthy prince. Even in the more somber stories, manners and milieu are as important as the plot or the characters.

Although most of the stories can be classified as stories of manners, there are several that fall into the category of fantasy, using supernatural devices, suspense and mystery, and fabulous, fabricated milieus as critical elements of plot. In "The Adjuster" (Redbook, September 1925; collected in All the Sad Young Men) Fitzgerald combines a realistic surface, homiletic intention, and supernatural agent in a unique, yet not entirely successful, mixture. Dr. Moon, the supernatural figure, is introduced purely as a deus ex machina in a story which is concerned with the growth of maturity and responsibility in a selfish young married woman. Dr. Moon is a strange amalgam, half-psychiatrist, half fortune-teller. He appears at regular intervals when the plot begins to falter, reordering the events. Thus he prevents the woman, Luella, from deserting her sick husband; he compels her to take up the irksome, neglected role of wife, mother, and housekeeper; and he rewards her at the end by confessing that he has never really existed: she has merely grown up, and he symbolizes her growth. He is on hand, also, to deliver to her a final homily on performing one's duties unselfishly. In a portentous declamation at the end he reveals, "Who am I? I am five years."

Similarly, in another morality tale, "One Trip Abroad," the supernatural element again enters the plot, but here it is worked more closely into the fabric of the story. In this Dorian Graylike situation a young couple, Nicole and Nelson Kelly, on the path of dissolution and degeneration, see themselves at crucial moments in the process of their decay in the guise of another young couple. The dissipation of which they are unaware in themselves they notice in their doubles. The most vivid scene occurs at the end, where in one horrifying moment the Kellys recognize themselves in the other couple. What adds to the impressiveness of this story is the suggestion of supernatural elements functioning in the background. All nature seems to reflect the tumult and disorder of the Kellys' lives, suggests, in fact, a primordial force surrounding and eventually engulfing them. It follows them through the pleasure haunts of Europe, where nature is majestic and threatening; and in a powerful storm the two supernatural elements, the other couple and the malign forces which seem to have been released into the universe, meet—and in their meeting, the Kellys realize at last that they have lost not only "peace and love and health" but their souls as well.

Whatever the form of the story, Fitzgerald's range of subjects is wide and varied. Within the larger themes of life, love, death, and the American myth of success there are incalculable shades and variations. Many of his later subjects are adumbrated in his juvenilia, collected as The Apprentice Fiction of F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1909-1917 (1965). "A Debt of Honor" (Now and Then, March 1910) is a young boy's exploration of the meaning of heroism as embodied in conventional notions of self-sacrifice and military glory. "Reade, Substitute Right-Half" (Now and Then, February 1910) is a classic wish-fulfillment sketch of an underdog who makes good on the football field, whose speed and dexterity outclass his teammates' greater brawn. "Sentiment—and the Use of Rouge" (Nassau Literary Magazine, June 1917) contrasts the new, relaxed wartime morality with older, tested values. It touches on the breakdown of sexual codes, on personal morality, on religion and belief, and on the boredom and ritualistic emptiness of upper-class life. In "Shadow Laurels" (Nassau Literary Magazine, April 1915) Fitzgerald mourns the unlived life and celebrates the power of the romantic imagination; in "The Spire and the Gargoyle" (Nassau Literary Magazine, February 1917) he regrets wasted opportunity and unfulfilled potential. "The Ordeal" (later revised and published as "Benediction") presents a spiritual conflict in the soul of a novitiate between the call of "the world … gloriously apparent" and "the monastery vaguely impotent." "The Debutante" (Nassau Literary Magazine, January 1917) and "Babes in the Woods" treat class distinctions, young love, manners, morals, and the generation gap. In "The Pierian Springs and the Last Straw" (Nassau Literary Magazine, October 1917) the themes are the artist's source of inspiration and the cruelty and hatred that can accompany love.

Most of the stories are brief; the themes are suggested or superficially explored. In "Sentiment—and the Use of Rouge," however, Fitzgerald develops his theme with fictional sophistication. "Sentiment" is about Clay Harrington Syneforth, a soldier in World War I who returns to his home in England for a two-day leave. What he encounters on his visit forms the core of the story. The central theme is change: between the England Clay knew, was raised in, and loved and the new world to which he returns, its looser morals, neglect of conventions, and disillusion with the old ideals of heroism and love, a world totally committed to the present moment and dedicated to pleasure and momentary satisfactions. The war has created a new sexual license; the women who cannot be the wives of the soldiers must discard conventional morality and be as much as they can to the soldiers in the little time they have.

But Clay does not understand. In the last section of the story, on the battlefield, Flaherty, an Irish-Catholic soldier, brings up the question of faith. Flaherty excoriates the English talent for prettying up reality. "Blood on an Englishman always calls rouge to me mind." The English, he says, see death as a game, but "the Irish take death damn serious." Fitzgerald is saying at the end that Clay's devotion to outward forms and conventions prevents him from perceiving what is really important in life. Because he lives and worships the surface symbols of a bygone era, he is incapable of recognizing that underneath the rouge, people have been genuinely and profoundly moved by the events behind the big, important words. Thus he dies uncomprehending, bewildered, frightened—of sex and sexual license, of the new morality, of the unexpected depths of feeling in his contemporaries—more afraid of life than of the death which awaits him on the battlefield.

There are many flaws in the story, particularly its schoolboy seriousness and its consciously "arty" narrative. But it is a very early example of Fitzgerald's concern with a major theme—social change and the accompanying dislocation of values—which he treats memorably years later in "Babylon Revisited."

The major subjects of Fitzgerald's short stories are the sadness of the unfulfilled life and the unrecapturable moment of bliss, the romantic imagination and its power to transform reality, love, courtship and marriage, problems in marriage, the plight of the poor outsider seeking to enter the world of the very rich, the cruelty of beautiful and rich young women, the generation gap, the moral life, manners and mores of class society, heroism in ordinary life, emotional bankruptcy and the drift to death, the South and its legendary past, and the meaning of America in the lives of individuals and in modern history. To these subjects which intrigued him from adolescence, he added Hollywood, where the American dream seemed to so many of his generation to have reached its apotheosis.

Many of Fitzgerald's finest stories date from the early 1920s. "Bernice Bobs Her Hair" is an early story, slight in intent but animated by an authentic and minute representation of manners and social milieu in which newly emancipated young American women live. It was the kind of story that Fitzgerald came to be associated with, for it typified the changes overtaking the new postwar generation. The central action is the transformation of a socially inept, unpopular girl, Bernice, into a much-sought-after, socially sophisticated "flapper." In the course of Bernice's education, Fitzgerald reveals the intricate system of manners on which social success depends. The plot hinges on Bernice's daring threat to bob her hair and invite her whole crowd to witness the momentous event. In the relationship between Bernice and her cousin Marjorie, Fitzgerald exposes the cruelty underlying the social conventions of young people, the competition for popularity which impels Marjorie to jibe at and cruelly taunt Bernice until she must carry out the threat Marjorie knows she had initially made as a joke. But Marjorie herself is an example of the newly emancipated woman who desires only to shake free from the limitations imposed upon her by society and to face life courageously, unhampered and unfettered. In a short, fervent speech she confesses to Bernice her abhorrence of society's hypocritical expectations of women and exhorts her cousin to relinquish the morals of a defunct generation. In this spirited story Fitzgerald sums up more accurately than any sociological analysis the rebelliousness and determination of the new generation and, particularly, of the new heroine.

Ardita Farnham, the heroine of "The Offshore Pirate," is the prize wealthy young Toby Moreland seeks because she possesses courage and independence, the most valuable attributes of Fitzgerald's flappers and philosophers. The story traces Toby's disguise as a jazz bandleader, Curtis Carlyle, who pirates the Farnham yacht with Ardita on board. A bored, spoiled debutante, she longs for someone with "imagination and the courage of his convictions." She refuses to meet anyone her family proposes and intends to run off with an older playboy. Toby's ruse works; he and Ardita fall in love on the ship, moored in a cavernous alcove, while "Curtis's" band plays music that enchances the romantic possibilities of the tropical paradise. The story seems bathed in the blue, silver, and gold of the sky and sun, and hero and heroine's paeans to courage, conviction, and the possibilities of the romantic imagination seem appropriate to the mood and milieu established by the opening lines:

This unlikely story begins on a sea that was a blue dream, as colorful as blue-silk stockings, and beneath a sky as blue as the irises of children's eyes. From the western half of the sky the sun was shying little golden disks at the sea—if you gazed intently enough you could see them skip from wave tip to wave tip until they joined a broad collar of golden coin that was collecting half a mile out and would eventually be a dazzling sunset.

Fitzgerald sustains both rhetoric and idea—the power of the romantic imagination—throughout in a story that is among the best of his early works. Curtis Carlyle's tale of lost illusions parallels Fitzgerald's exploration of the meaning of natural aristocracy. The conflict within Fitzgerald between rival claims—aristocracy of the spirit versus aristocracy of wealth—is omnipresent throughout the stories. In his disillusionment he seeks to replace the values common to his society with a completely personal ethical standard; he ultimately exchanges moribund social values for a personal brand of heroism—in itself an aristocracy of the spirit.

Among the early stories, "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz" is notable not only because of the fine writing and historical resonances but because Fitzgerald's gift for fantasy is at its best. John Ungar, a middle-class boy, is invited by his classmate, Percy Washington, to spend his vacation at the latter's home "in the West." En route, Percy reveals that his father has a diamond "bigger than the Ritz-Carlton Hotel." John falls in love with Percy's sister, discovers the secret of the Washington wealth, and is almost killed before he can escape from a lavish and terrifying world. In this story Fitzgerald does not contain his subject and theme within a realistic setting. Here is an American West bigger and more extravagant than in the wildest Western tall story it subtly parodies. As the reader willingly suspends disbelief, the world of Fitzgerald's imagination takes on the colorations of the Oriental kingdom belonging to "some Tartar Khan." The Washington chateau is very like the pleasure dome of Kubla Khan, and the sights, smells, and sounds of luxury assault and ultimately deaden the senses until the lavish phantasmagoria moves as in a waking dream.

Remarkably, Fitzgerald sustains this geographic flight from the opening in Hades, "a small town on the Mississippi River," to St. Midas School near Boston, to the twelve wizened old men in the wasteland town of Fish, Montana, to the diamond mountain retreat of Braddock Washington. Yet the action, which departs wildly from probability, is so rooted in the familiar, recognizable patterns of human behavior that after the initial shock has receded and the reader has accepted the fanciful premise, he is forced to make invidious comparisons between the rise of American big business in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and the growth of Braddock Washington's fortune.

Just as Fitzgerald used the American West in "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz" to explore American values in the context of American history, Fitzgerald used the American South to express the need for tradition, as embodied in his own father's values and manners. "The Ice Palace" is about the differences between the South—which stands for warmth, carelessness and generosity, feeling, tradition, and life—and the North—cold, hard materialism, selfishness, and death. The action involves heroine Sally Carrol Happer's desire for something more than the swimming, dancing, and playing that fill up her languid, somnolent, lazy summer days.

The opening of the story establishes the mood of the South, and at the end of part two, as Sally Carrol walks with her northern suitor, Harry Bellamy, through a Confederate graveyard, she defines the tradition she treasures:

I've tried in a way to live up to those past standards of noblesse oblige—there's just the last remnants of it, you know, like the roses of an old garden dying all round us—streaks of strange courtliness and chivalry in some of these boys an'stories I used to hear from a Confederate soldier who lived next door…. Oh, Harry, there was something, there was something!

The tempo of the story quickens with the introduction of the northern element, Harry Bellamy, "tall, broad, and brisk." The warm summer is over; it is November and time for the serious business of life. Sally Carrol becomes engaged to Harry, and they plan to go North to meet his family. From the first line in part three—"All night in the Pullman it was very cold"—and for all the scenes laid in the North, it is penetratingly cold. There is no relief for Sally Carrol who cannot, for as long as she remains in the alien environment of Harry's home, get warm. The icy weather symbolizes a way of life: no sense of play, no social badinage, no graciousness, no heritage of manners and style, only a chilling obedience to the forms of life. Even the people are gray and desiccated. Harry's "cold lips" kissing her reinforce the pervasive, unrelenting chill.

In the next part the relationship between Sally Carrol and Harry hardens after a quarrel at dinner when Harry refers to southerners as "lazy and shiftless," and later when the vaudeville orchestra plays "Dixie," she is painfully reminded of what she has left behind. Part five again takes up the motif of iciness, and the action builds to an apocalyptic climax as Sally Carrol loses her way in the glittering cavernous maze of the "ice palace, like a damp vault connecting empty tombs." Here, ice, snow, and palace are symbolically linked as death. As she falls down in the palace, she dreams of rejoining the dead Margery Lee, at whose grave she had sat and pondered the southern past back in Tarleton, her home town. The ice palace itself functions brilliantly as a symbol of the imminent death of the spirit, the inevitable accompaniment to life in a new, raw, mercantile northern city.

The last section returns to the original scene; it is April in Sally Carrol's southern town, and "the wealth of golden sunlight poured a quite enervating yet oddly comforting heat over the house where day long it faced the dusty stretch of road." Sally Carrol has experienced a purgatory in ice; chastened, contented, even indolent, she takes up her old life. There is much in the texture of the story that adds to its effectiveness: the decor, like the new but charmless library in Harry's house; dialogue, at the dinner-party where Sally Carrol first experiences disappointment and disillusionment with Harry; characters, the men—hard, brisk, athletic, and the women—faded, dull, apathetic; social position, shades and nuances of class distinction and throughout, wealth of goods going hand in hand with poverty of spirit, death and snow versus life and lilacs.

One of Fitzgerald's most effective and popular stories in which the primary emphasis is on social criticism is "May Day," yet he never wrote another story quite like it. Although the main character's story is characteristically Fitzgerald, the social / political criticism, developed in a subplot, is more overt than in most of his stories. He did salvage several structural and technical devices from the story—contrasting and parallel episodes, kaleidoscopic impressions, shifting rhetorical patterns—for use in other short stories but turned to the more expansive novel form to develop the multilevel plot.

Fitzgerald often opens a story with a philosophical passage that sets the tone and adumbrates the theme. In "May Day" the opening lines are heavily ironic, measured, musical, and solemn, with unmistakably biblical overtones.

There had been a war fought and won and the great city of the conquering people was crossed with triumphal arches…. Never had there been such splendor in the great city, for the victorious war had brought plenty in its pain, and the merchants had flocked thither from the South and West with their households to taste of all the luscious feasts and witness the lavish entertainments prepared—and to buy for their women furs against the next winter and bags of golden mesh and varicolored slippers of silk and silver and rose satins and cloth of gold.

The passage serves to unify under a common subject the diverse episodes which follow. And, by offering moral commentary which is supported by the ensuing action, it raises that action to a level beyond its immediate significance.

The opening scenes of this story establish the setting and introduce the characters and major action—Gordon Sterrett's drift to death. The action is constructed around a series of contrasts between Gordon and a former Yale classmate, Philip Dean. Dean's social world, to which Gordon tries frantically to cling, is epitomized in expensive clothes and bodily well-being, the "trinkets and slippers," the "splendor" and "wine of excitement" of the invocation. Gordon asks Dean for a three-hundred-dollar loan that will enable him to extricate himself from the demands of a lower-class young woman with whom he has become involved. Dean, paying careful attention to his body and his wardrobe, listens to Gordon and refuses the loan. Gordon, like so many other poor young men whose dreams have been betrayed by a fiercely competitive system, is unprepared for the cold New York City which tosses people like him to their deaths.

His plight, made more poignant by beautiful Edith Braden's initial interest and subsequent rejection, is contrasted with that of two war veterans, unintentionally caught up in a socialist protest rally in the crowded streets. One of the soldiers, Carrol Key, whose name suggests that "in his veins, however thinly diluted by generations of degeneration, ran blood of some potentiality," is accidentally killed when he is swept up in the embattled crowd determined to put the Bolsheviks to rout. The last part of the story turns into a kind of social parable. The action moves from the Biltmore Hotel to Child's 59th Street restaurant, and to the Biltmore elevator, where the ascent of Mr. In and Mr. Out serves as an ironic counterpoint to the descent of Gordon Sterrett and Carrol Key—and possibly to the struggle upward for success in America.

"Winter Dreams" was written three years before The Great Gatsby, "The Rich Boy" immediately after. Both stories are among Fitzgerald's best, and both plots turn on conflicts between the very rich and a representative of the middle class—a contrast explored in the minutiae of social gestures, moods, conventions, and customs. In the former, Dexter Green is the protagonist of the story. In the latter, Anson Hunter is "the rich boy," the subject of the story, which is narrated by an observer-participant in the action, a friend of Anson's who all his life has lived among the rich.

In "Winter Dreams" Dexter Green is a golf caddy at the luxurious club patronized by the wealthy inhabitants of Sherry Island. He meets Judy Jones, from one of the club's leading families, and she and her summer world become the focus of his winter dreams. Judy Jones epitomizes the very rich. She is beautiful, cold, imperious, and maddening. Dexter pursues her, but she eludes him; the struggle to attain Judy Jones becomes for him the struggle to realize his dream of entering the glittering world of those enchanted summers. But the world of Judy Jones—who comes to symbolize both the beauty and the meretriciousness of Dexter's dreams—is clearly revealed as cruelly, coldly destructive. Dexter, listening to the music wafting over the lake at Sherry Island, felt "magnificently attuned to life." His winter dream, simply, was to recapture the ecstasy of that golden moment: the sensation that "everything about him was radiating a brightness and a glamour he might never know again."

The story is richly evocative, containing some of Fitzgerald's bestwriting. The change of seasons throughout the story reflects and coincides with Dexter's moods; like other Fitzgerald characters, he is extraordinarily sensitive to the natural world, and it is in terms of its effects upon people's lives that nature fascinates Fitzgerald. Dexter's spirits soar with the "gorgeous" Minnesota autumn; October "filled him with hope which November raised to a sort of ecstatic triumph." That ecstasy, linked with the image of Judy Jones, is finally Dexter's vision of immortality, just as Daisy Buchanan was Gatsby's. If he could have had Judy he could have preserved his youth and the beauty of a world that seemed to "withstand all time." When the beauty of Judy Jones fades, his hopes fade with it, and that sense of wonder he cherished over the years is lost "in the country of illusion … where his winter dreams had flourished."

"The Rich Boy" is the story of Anson Hunter, who lives in a world of "high finance, high extravagance, divorce and dissipation, of snobbery and privilege." The narrator immediately establishes his relationship to Anson. Brought together by chance as officers in the war, their backgrounds are totally dissimilar. Anson is the easterner, raised without "idealism or illusion," who accepts without reservation the world into which he was born. The narrator is from the West and thoroughly middle class, but he has lived among the "brothers" of the rich. He is thus capable of observing the nuances of upper-class manners and morals. His famous introduction, "Let me tell you about the very rich," clearly distinguishes the narrator from Anson and from the reader, thus effecting the necessary separation between subject and point of view which characterizes Fitzgerald's best stories. As though determined to prove for once that "the country of the rich" need not be "as unreal as fairyland," the narrator traces with clinical care the events and implications of Anson's life to their inevitable end.

Following a series of incidents chronicling Anson's courtship with Paula Legendre, the narrator returns to fill in the events and analyze the changes the last years have wrought in his friend. He is with Anson after the latter had learned of Paula's death in childbirth, and Anson, "for the first time in their friendship," says nothing of how he feels, shows no sign of emotion. The narrator wonders why Anson is never happy unless someone is in love with him, promising him something, perhaps "that there would always be women in the world who would spend their brightest, freshest, rarest hours to nurse and protect that superiority he cherished in his heart."

"Absolution" is one of the very few Fitzgerald stories that focuses directly on religion. Eleven-year-old Rudolph Miller is forced by his parents to go to confession, where the "half-crazed priest," Father Schwarz, listens to the boy's story. It is a tale of a young boy's fears and passions in an environment of rugged austerity and grim religiosity, ending with a lie in the confessional booth. When the confession is over, the priest's complete breakdown reinforces the significance of the boy's story. The pressure of Rudolph's environment has driven him onto the "lonely secret road of adolescence." Father Schwarz had once followed that lonely road to the end years ago, suppressing along the way the natural passions aroused by the rustle of Swedish girls along the path by his window and in Romberg's Drug Store "when … he had found the scent of cheap toilet soap desperately sweet upon the air."

Flashback adds dramatic intensity to the encounter by supplying the details leading up to Rudolph's spiritual crisis and connecting Rudolph's background with Father Schwarz's. It also points up the resemblances among apparently dissimilar characters by tying the quality in which Rudolph's father is deficient, the romantic imagination, to Rudolph's conviction that "there was something ineffably gorgeous somewhere that had nothing to do with God," and to Father Schwarz's dream of an amusement park where "things go glimmering." But Rudolph's life is just beginning, and his imagination restores him by providing an outlet for his buried life. He becomes Blatchford Sarnemington, a figure who exists outside of Father Schwarz's world, far from the confessional. Fitzgerald suggests that in Rudolph's perception of Father Schwarz's insanity and in Rudolph's commitment to his own dreams lie freedom and the possibility of romantic fulfillment.

In 1934 Fitzgerald told a critic that "Absolution" "was intended to be a picture of [Gatsby's] early life, but that I cut it because I preferred to preserve the sense of mystery." Fitzgerald told Maxwell Perkins that the story was salvaged from an earlier, discarded version of Gatsby; the 1923 start of the novel included a section on Gatsby's childhood, so it is likely that Rudolph is a preliminary version of a character who would become Jay Gatsby.

One of the most moving stories of the early 1920s, "The Sensible Thing" draws upon Fitzgerald's courtship of Zelda Sayre, as he describes George O'Kelly's rejection by Jonquil Cary because of his poverty and her subsequent acceptance after a year during which he has achieved the success that will now make their marriage possible. Again for Fitzgerald, the glow that first love imparts cannot be recaptured. In her acceptance of conventional advice by her parents, and, indeed, following her own convictions, Jonquil turned away George because he was not financially ready for her at the moment when they realized how much they were in love. Two months later, she tells him, "now I can't because it doesn't seem to be the sensible thing."

Although George does win her after a year in which a series of lucky breaks reward him with the success he had found so elusive previously, he learns that something rare and precious has been lost. "The sensible thing—they had done the sensible thing. He had traded his first youth for strength and carved success out of despair. But with his youth, life had carried away the freshness of his love." Thus, his lament at the end for that loss, "never again an intangible whisper in the dusk, or on the breeze of night.…," conveys Fitzgerald's deepest conviction that the golden moment in one's life comes only once, and that subsequent fulfillment in love or in work can only be second best. Thus he ends the story on a note of both regret and acceptance: "Well, let it pass…. April is over, April is over. There are all kinds of love in the world, but never the same love twice."

From 1928 through 1931 Fitzgerald wrote fourteen stories in two series, the first, about Basil Duke Lee (1928-1929), comprising nine stories, one posthumously published, and the second featuring Josephine Perry (1930-1931). The Basil stories, for which Fitzgerald plumbed his own adolescence, take the character from his early school days, age eleven, through his entrance into college. From the beginning, Basil is never wholly accepted by the other youngsters. Because of his sensitivity, intensity, and competitiveness, he differs from them; they know it and resent it. He is frequently the butt of their jokes and recipient of their insults. Fitzgerald handles Basil's anguish and humiliation by bringing to bear the perspective of the adult on the loneliness and misery of an adolescent. Basil not only endures but even learns from each of his painful experiences: upstaging by Hubert Blair, that paragon of youthful charm and virtuosity; rejection by Imogene Bissel, a juvenile femme fatale; and, more seriously, ostracism and debasement by his prep-school classmates.

Basil's fatal flaw is his loquacity; he cannot resist pointing out his own superiority and his fellows' deficiencies. It is a hard lesson, but he finally learns, after years of misery, the value of discretion. He is, however, destined to remain the outsider, "one of the poorest boys in a rich boys' school." By adopting Basil's hyperbolic evaluation of the situation, the narrative forms an ironic but not unkind commentary on the young hero's driving ambition. Because Fitzgerald understands and takes seriously the problems of adolescence and because he remembers the pain of his own youth, he remains always the detached but totally sympathetic observer.

The central situation in each Basil story is a two-fold struggle, within Basil for mastery over himself and between Basil and society for social acceptance. In each situation, although rebuffed and humiliated by his own fatal penchant for self-advertising and an unwillingness to temper his romantic illusions about others, Basil grows in awareness and perceptivity, particularly of his own character and motives. In "The Freshest Boy" he concludes that "he had erred at the outset—he had boasted, he had been considered yellow at football, he had pointed out people's mistakes to them, he had shown off his rather extraordinary fund of general information in class." The Basil Duke Lee stories treat the pain of adolescence without the sentimentality so characteristic of the popular Booth Tarkington stories.

Josephine Perry is an embodiment of the alluring yet cruel flapper, and Fitzgerald manages to convey the tragedy inherent in a totally self-absorbed life. Women like Josephine are doomed, he implies; momentary perception of their tragic destinies impels them to strike out at their world, and particularly at the young men who idolize them.

In "First Blood" Josephine is introduced during an argument with her family. Supremely self-confident in her budding beauty, Josephine sets her sights beyond the limits suggested by age and inexperience. She pursues and captures the most eligible "older" man in her set, only to reject his slavish devotion when it is finally proffered. The object of her desires, once attained, loses its fascination. Josephine must go on to ever more thrilling and elusive conquests.

In the first stories Fitzgerald's tone is unvaryingly indulgent toward the young woman and her romantic forays. But as the stories continue, Josephine's successes invariably prove empty. Perpetually seeking new thrills, she longs for the ideal man who she thinks might satisfy once and for all her craving for romance and novelty. In each story, however, the young man disappoints her. She gradually grows numb with satiety (in Fitzgerald's day promiscuity usually meant only kissing), until a kiss fails to arouse her.

The youthful flirtations of "A Nice Quiet Place" (Saturday Evening Post, 31 May 1930; collected in Taps at Reveille) deepen in "A Woman with a Past" into a frantic search for fulfillment in love, but each conquest brings Josephine only boredom and ennui. In "Emotional Bankruptcy" (Saturday Evening Post, 15 August 1931), the saddest and most serious story of the group, by the time Josephine finally meets the perfect man, a war hero, it is too late for her. She no longer has the capacity to feel anything for anyone. She is emotionally bankrupt, no longer appealingly flirtatious and amusing either to the author or the reader, but empty, frozen, slightly repellent. Fitzgerald drops his ironic detachment at the end and moralizes on the human waste which might be tragic were it associated with someone less trivial and self-centered than Josephine Perry.

From the time Fitzgerald made his first trip to Hollywood in the late 1920s, he was fascinated by what he described as "a tragic city of beautiful girls." By 1940 he reported that there is "no group, however small, interesting…. Everywhere there is … either corruption or indifference." Hollywood was to provide Fitzgerald with the subject of some of his important fiction, notably the short story "Crazy Sunday," based upon his own experience at actress Norma Shearer's party, and partly inspired by her husband, M-G-M chief Irving Thalberg.

"Crazy Sunday" is a story about Hollywood and about one extraordinary man, Miles Calman, as observed by Joel Coles, a young writer. From the outset Hollywood, a "damn wilderness," vies with Joel and Miles for center stage. Hollywood transcends, compels, structures the plot. The rhythm of the story is the rhythm of Hollywood life, from crazy Sunday, "not a day, but rather a gap between two other days," to the other six days of frantic irrelevancy in a plastic wasteland.

The action begins and ends in Miles Calman's house where the ambience promotes the wildly exhibitionist performance which wins Joel instant notoriety. When Joel regards the assemblage, he is driven in a moment of semi-drunken, lavish goodwill to entertain them, and the tensions within him, suggested earlier, become insistent and are released in his outrageous performance. The focus of the story, however, is the intricate relationship between Miles and Stella Calman which ensnares Joel. The Calmans fight with one another but remain, to the end, self-sufficient, tightly insulated by mutual desire and mutual dependency. Joel can never really matter to them.

The story culminates, after Miles's death, in the circuslike parade Joel observes at the theater as he waits for Stella. Everything seems tinselly, tawdry, as artificial as a Hollywood B-picture. At the end Joel leaves the Calman house and bitterly takes up his life made empty and futile after the death of "the only American-born director with both an interesting temperament and an artistic conscience." "Crazy Sunday" is a haunting vignette of Hollywood, and it is measure of Fitzgerald's artistry that he succeeds despite the flaw of conflicting centers of interest, Miles and Joel. Joel is able both to evaluate and at the same time participate in events, and Fitzgerald's narration is often indistinct from Joel's observations. Yet the fascination lies, for Joel and for the reader, in Miles Calman, an early version of Monroe Stohr, the subject of Fitzgerald's last, incomplete novel, The Last Tycoon.

Many critics and scholars regard "Babylon Revisited" as the best of Fitzgerald's short stories. Written in 1930, at a particularly low point in his own life, it reflects the meditative sadness of a man looking back, in the Depression, on the waste and dissipation of the boom. More than perhaps any of his stories, it blends personal and historical elements to form a commentary on an era. It is about Charlie Wales, who, through indiscretions resulting in the death of his wife, made himself an outsider to the "good" people, represented by his sister-in-law and her husband, Marion and Lincoln Peters. In order to win back his child, Honoria, from the Peterses, who have been caring for her, he must establish for them his new stability and adherence to their values. The difficulty of his task is compounded by Marion Peters's dislike and distrust of him. Fitzgerald constructs the plot around a series of contrasts: between Charlie and the Peterses, past and present, illusion and reality, dissipation and steadiness, gaiety and grimness, Paris and America, adults and children. The author's tone, detached, critical, and ironic, merges with Charlie's self-critical but not self-pitying awareness, heightening the contrasts and adding meaning to even the briefest observation. "I spoiled this city for myself. I didn't realize it, but the days come along one after another, and then two years were gone, and everything was gone, and I was gone."

Charlie Wales of the Depression is no longer the same young man who coasted along on the joyride of the boom years. The story is about his exploration of the problems of character and responsibility, particularly the power of one's past to shape and determine his future. Against a background of change and dislocation wrought by social upheaval, the story of Charlie Wales is a search for latent values residing within the individual, values that provide the courage and resiliency to remake a squandered life. And it is all based on character, the "eternally valuable element." Charlie is left to examine the ruin of the past, to discover what, if anything, is worth the survival. He admits, "I lost everything I wanted in the boom," and his one hope for the future is continuity of character, as if by passing on to his daughter some lesson from his past, he will thus preserve part of himself in her.

"Babylon Revisited" is not a simple morality tale. Charlie is acutely sensitive to himself and to the Peterses, and he is eager to assume responsibility for Honoria's life and for his own. But "character" does not insure happiness for Charlie Wales. In this story, perhaps his most moving statement on the subject, Fitzgerald indicates that it is strictly a mode of individual survival, that not only may character not bring Charlie happiness along with his newly discovered values, but it may even intensify his despair and corrode his hopes.

In his late works, dating from 1936 to his death in 1940, Fitzgerald's style was markedly different from the early lyrical prose. The tone becomes flat, almost essayistic; narrative is unemotional and economical, yet strangely haunting in its dry precision. These are brief, autobiographical sketches, semifictional attempts to reinterpret his life and his art. In "Afternoon of an Author" the protagonist prepares to go outside for a walk, the first one in many days. His thoughts are of mental and physical fatigue—his own and others. On the bus ride, in the barber shop, he ruminates over what he is now, what he once was, what he might have become, his struggles and especially his weariness and inertia. There are no highs and lows, only a quiet drift toward death. The faint note of self-pity stems from physical debility rather than emotional outrage.

The author in "Author's House" surveys his youth, his illness, his mistakes and failures, and waits for death. All he has left is despair, knowing he can never dwell again in the turret of his symbolic house, knowing that success has ultimately eluded him.

In "An Author's Mother" (Esquire, October 1936) the title character, with her "high-crowned hat," incipient cataracts, and air of hopeless bewilderment, is a touching relic of another era. The modern world is obviously too much for her. She is proud of but cannot understand her son's success, for she associates "authors" only with Mrs. Humphry Ward, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Edna Ferber, and especially the sentimental poetesses Alice and Phoebe Cary. Uncomplaining and uncomprehending, she, too, retreats from life through the back door of her memories. For her there is nothing left but death.

Fitzgerald's vitality did burst forth again in his last years with a series of stories about Pat Hobby, a has-been screenwriter. Pat Hobby is among Fitzgerald's most intriguing characters, perhaps because the author was exorcizing the dark, defeated side of his own nature. Pat is an incompetent, an alcoholic, a petty blackmailer, a dreamer, a would-be lecher, a leech, a whiner, a conniver, a thief, a scab, a coward, an informer, an eternal outsider. He is lazy, ubiquitous, and dishonest. Although he is rigidly excluded from the Hollywood power center, his perverted sense of justice leads him to identify with the producers rather than their hireling writers like himself and the exploited or discarded actors and directors. He aspires to every flashy Hollywood-American success symbol—Filipino servants, swimming pools, liquor, girls, and meals at the Brown Derby. Pat is a firm ally of the status quo, or more properly, the past, into which he seeks to escape the sordid present.

Fitzgerald's technique in the Pat Hobby stories is to devise situations in which Pat, faced with alternatives, consistently selects the action most likely to degrade him further. In one story after another, Pat sinks to lower and lower levels of activity; trickery and connivance are his tools. But for all his duplicity, Pat is pathetically unsuccessful in his attempts to "put one over on them." Each situation ends in debacle, humiliation, and further degradation. And yet, for all his faults, he is a strangely moving figure in these stories of the absurd: the eternal fall guy who admits honestly in a moment of painful clarity, "I've been cracked down on plenty." The language of these stories is racy and colloquial, and the tone consistently ironic and detached. The stories were published in Esquire during the last year of Fitzgerald's life and in 1941, after his death. He worked on them as carefully as he could, often sending Arnold Gingrich telegrams requesting minor revisions even after a story had been set in print. At the same time Fitzgerald was working on his other Hollywood story, The Last Tycoon. It is probable that the Pat Hobby stories served as a release for his black vision of Hollywood and of his own career, allowing a final blossoming of his artistry.

F. Scott Fitzgerald's reputation as a short-story writer has risen considerably since his death, and at least a dozen of his stories rank with the most notable in American literature. And though his reputation as a major American writer rests primarily on his novels, especially The Great Gatsby, in variety, in range, and in stylistic excellence, his short stories are an intrinsic part of his fictional world.

Source: Ruth Prigozy, "F. Scott Fitzgerald," in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 86, American Short-Story Writers, 1910-1945, First Series, edited by Bobby Ellen Kimbel, Gale Research, 1989, pp. 99-123.

SOURCES

"American Short Stories," in Times Literary Supplement, April 19, 1923, p. 264.

Boyd, Woodward, "Tales of the Jazz Age: The Fitzgerald Legend," in F. Scott Fitzgerald in His Own Time: A Miscellany, edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli and Jackson R. Bryer, Kent State University Press, 1971, p. 340, originally published as "The Fitzgerald Legend," in Daily News (St. Paul), December 10, 1922.

Bryer, Jackson, The Critical Reputation of F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Bibliographical Study, Archon Books, 1967, p. 41.

Fitzgerald, F. Scott, "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz," in The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald, edited by Bryant Mangum, Modern Library, 2005, pp. 191-229.

"The Future of Fitzgerald," in F. Scott Fitzgerald in His Own Time: A Miscellany, edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli and Jackson R. Bryer, Kent State University Press, 1971, p. 413, originally published in Journal (Minneapolis), December 31, 1922.

Hawthorne, Hildegarde, Review of Tales of the Jazz Age, in New York Times Book Review, October 29, 1922, p. 12.

Miller, James E., Jr., "Transition," in F. Scott Fitzgerald: His Art and His Technique, New York University Press, 1964, p. 59.

Petry, Alice Hall, "Tales of the Jazz Age," in Fitzgerald's Craft of Short Fiction: The Collected Stories 1920-1935, UMI Research Press, 1989, p. 61.

Smith, Ellison D., "‘Shut the Door’: A Senator Speaks for Immigration Restriction," in Congressional Record, Vol. 65, pp. 5961-62, http://www.historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5080 (accessed October 29, 2006).

FURTHER READING

Bruccoli, Matthew J., Fitzgerald and Hemingway: A Dangerous Friendship, Manly, 1994.

Bruccoli, considered one of the foremost experts on Fitzgerald's life and work, uses the correspondence between these two authors to analyze their friendship. He documents the progress of the relationship from its amiable early days in Paris in 1925 to its more contentious times in the 1930s, when Hemingway became increasingly critical of Fitzgerald.

Bruccoli, Matthew J., and Scottie Fitzgerald Smith, Some Sort of Epic Grandeur: The Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald, University of South Carolina Press, 1981.

This book is considered by many to be the definitive biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald, written by Fitzgerald expert Bruccoli and Fitzgerald's own daughter. An unsentimental and thorough examination of Fitzgerald's life, including his alcoholism and his wife's mental deterioration, the book includes examples of Fitzgerald's correspondence to friends and relatives.

Fitzgerald, F. Scott, The Crack-Up, edited by Edmund Wilson, New Directions Publishing, 1945.

This collection of confessional essays, letters, and journal entries describes Fitzgerald's gradual decline, both emotionally and professionally. The title essay was first published in Esquire magazine in 1936. The collection was edited by Edmund Wilson, a longtime friend of Fitzgerald.

Mangum, Bryant, A Fortune Yet: Money in the Art of F. Scott Fitzgerald's Short Stories, Garland, 1991.

In this book, Bryant Mangum, a professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University, explores Fitzgerald's depiction of wealth and the wealthy in his short fiction, and the writer's simultaneous fascination with, and disdain for, the very rich.