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Tales of the Jazz Age

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Tales of the Jazz Age (1922) is a collection of 11 short stories by American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald. Divided into three separate parts, it includes one of his better-known short stories, "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button". All of the stories had first appeared, independently, in either Metropolitan Magazine, The Saturday Evening Post, Smart Set, Collier's, the Chicago Sunday Tribune, or Vanity Fair.

Tales of the Jazz Age
The cover of the 1922 first edition
AuthorF. Scott Fitzgerald
Cover artistJohn Held, Jr.
LanguageEnglish
GenreShort stories
PublisherCharles Scribner's Sons
Publication date
September 22, 1922
Publication placeUnited States
Media typePrint (hardcover & paperback)
ISBN1-4341-0001-4

Due to its adult theme, Fitzgerald did not consider the short story "May Day" to be suitable for the family oriented readership favored by the Saturday Evening Post. He offered this "masterpiece" to H. L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan, editors at The Smart Set, where it appeared in the July 1920 issue.[1] Fitzgerald termed the story "this somewhat unpleasant tale".[2][3]

Contents

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Fitzgerald provided his own annotated table of contents for the collection, providing commentary on each story. The works are presented in three categories: My Last Flappers, Fantasies, and Unclassified Masterpieces.[4][5] The original periodical publication and date are indicated below.[6][7]

My Last Flappers

Fantasies

Unclassified Masterpieces

Reception

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F. Scott Fitzgerald

Critic Hildegarde Hawthorne in The New York Times, October 29, 1922, commented on Fitzgerald's contemporary identification as a writer for slick magazines, in particular The Saturday Evening Post.[12] Hawthorne wrote that stories "give too much of the effect of samples... The book is more like a magazine than a collection of stories by one man, arranged by an editor to suit all tastes and meant to be thrown away after reading."[13]

Hawthorne closes with an upbeat assessment of Fitzgerald's potential as a fiction writer: "These stories are announced as beginning in the writer's second manner. They certainly show a development in his art, a new turn... this 'second manner' is surely the outcropping of a rich vein that may hold much wealth."[13]

Critical appraisal

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"F. Scott Fitzgerald's short stories remain a misunderstood and underrated aspect of his career. They have been dismissed as hackwork and condemned for impeding his serious work. Certainly they are uneven; but Fitzgerald's best stories are among the best in American literature."

—Biographer Matthew J. Bruccoli in The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald (1989)[14]

Biographer Kenneth Elbe ranks three stories—"The Rich Boy," "Winter Dreams," and "Absolution"—as "among the better ones in all his short fiction." The other selections are reminiscent of Fitzgerald's "contrived magazine fiction."[15]

According to Elbe, Fitzgerald characterized some of the short fiction as "cheap and without the spontaneity of my first work."[15] Elbe adds that "Tales of the Jazz Age suffers badly from the inclusion of some early writing which might better have remained in The Nassau Literary Review, where it first appeared."[16][17]

Several stories in Tales of the Jazz Age are notable for their "authorial self-consciousness" registered through Fitzgerald's editorial remarks directed towards the reader. Literary Critic John Kuehl writes:

[T]he author's voice tends to intrude upon and dominate the stories, whether narrated in the third-person or in the no less omniscient first-person. The characters tell neither their own stories nor other people's tales; with few exceptions, they are objects viewed through authorial eyes instead of filters through whom the action unfolds.[18]

Kuehl argues that this "egotistical foregrounding" tends to squander Fitzgerald's literary talents in favor of an intrusive approach that fails to adequately dramatize his narrative.[18]

Theme

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The stories comprising Fitzgerald's earliest professional fiction were largely concerned with inherited wealth and the "indolent rich."[19] These preoccupations transitioned, however, toward narratives involving a broader spectrum of social classes, including "businessmen, writers, performers, priests and white-collar workers." Critic John Kuehl reports that this emerging focus on essentially democratic concerns "reaches its apotheosis in ' May Day,' where various socioeconomic classes meet."[19]

References

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Citations

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  1. ^ Bruccoli 1998, pp. 15, 116, Epigraph.
  2. ^ Bruccoli 1998, p. 116, Epigraph.
  3. ^ Bryer 2000, p. 799: In "A Table of Contents: My Last Flappers"
  4. ^ Kuehl 1991, p. 26.
  5. ^ Fitzgerald 2000, pp. 799–802.
  6. ^ Kuehl 1991, p. 184, Selected Bibliography.
  7. ^ Bryer 2000, p. 1070, Note on the Texts.
  8. ^ Bryer 2000, p. 1070: As "Porcelain in Pink" (A One Act Play)
  9. ^ Bryer 2000, p. 1070: Published in Metro under the title "His Russet Witch."
  10. ^ Bryer 2000, p. 1070: Published in the CST as "Mr. Icky: The Quintessence of Quaintness in One Act"
  11. ^ Bryer 2000, p. 1070: Published in Vanity Fair under the title "Jemina, the Mountain Girl (One of Those Family Feud Stories of the Blue Ridge Mountains with Apologies to Stephen Leacock)"
  12. ^ Bruccoli 1998, p. 15.
  13. ^ a b Hawthorne 1922.
  14. ^ Bruccoli 1998, p. 13.
  15. ^ a b Eble 1963, p. 103.
  16. ^ Eble 1963, p. 54.
  17. ^ Bruccoli 1998, p. 17: "He did not have enough strong stories for Tales of the Jazz Age..."
  18. ^ a b Kuehl 1991, p. 27.
  19. ^ a b Kuehl 1991, pp. 30–31.

Sources

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