Tales of the Jazz Age
By F. Scott Fitzgerald
In 1922 the publication of Tales of the Jazz Age confirmed the conventional wisdom of the time that F. Scott Fitzgerald was the most popular, most widely read author in the United States. Like any marketing agent intent on influencing popular culture, Fitzgerald’s publisher, Scribner & Sons, rightfully capitalized on the demand for the author’s work by publishing the bound collection of eleven stories written between 1920 and 1922, and during Fitzgerald’s undergraduate days at Princeton. The difference between Tales of the Jazz Age and other more recent examples of “rush-to-print” product by artists of lesser stature is that F. Scott Fitzgerald was and remains one of America’s greatest writers. And the eleven stories that comprise Tales of the Jazz Age evidence that fact. Sometimes writers compare writing with breathing: The quick exhalation is a poem; the deep breath is a short story, and breathing in the steady sinus rhythm of life is akin to a novel. In his twenties, and even later when hard living began to take its toll, Fitzgerald breathed deeply, and these short stories exhibit the inevitability of his genius, what Hemingway realized was the tautology of his gift – that his gifts were his, having been given to him, virtually whole and complete. (Summary by Michael Hogan)
