Books in Brief

Six Tales of the Jazz Age and Other Stories, by F. Scott Fitzgerald (Scribner’s, $2.95). Slight, slick, sentimental, and occasionally acute, these nine stories—six from Tales of the Jazz Age, three from All the Sad Young Men—were written for such magazines as Collier’s and Cosmopolitan between 1920 and 1924, when Fitzgerald was in his mid-twenties. Although none is a memorable story, a few are brushed with Fitzgerald’s singular sense of what it is like to be young and upper-middle-class in a small American city, a social experience almost universally misapprehended in fiction; and a few others are touched with that unmistakable sense of the epic that would eventually make Fitzgerald’s Meyer Wolfsheim (“He’s the man who fixed the World Series back in 1919,” Gatsby tells Nick Carraway) seem peculiarly more probable than Arnold Rothstein himself. But despite Fitzgerald’s steady perceptions, these are careless stories: none is well-remembered because none is really good.

What is most interesting about them, in the end, is that they are the by-product of the same years that brought such solid stories as “The Rich Boy” and “Winter Dreams”—as well as The Great Gatsby, perhaps the best thing written in America so far this century. Immensely facile and uneven, Fitzgerald was making $20,000-$25,000 a year during those years, writing, according to the introduction to this collection, “half a dozen or more short stories, at least half a novel, a movie scenario or two, four or five articles, several book reviews, and possibly part of a play.” As his daughter, Frances Fitzgerald Lanahan, writes, “I’ve often wondered how there was a moment left for splashing in the Plaza fountain.”

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Six Tales of the Jazz Age and Other Stories, by F. Scott Fitzgerald (Scribner’s, $2.95). Slight, slick, sentimental, and occasionally acute, these nine stories—six from Tales of the Jazz Age, three from All the Sad Young Men—were written for such magazines as Collier’s and Cosmopolitan between 1920 and 1924, when Fitzgerald was in his mid-twenties. Although none is a memorable story, a few are brushed with Fitzgerald’s singular sense of what it is like to be young and upper-middle-class in a small American city, a social experience almost universally misapprehended in fiction; and a few others are touched with that unmistakable sense of the epic that would eventually make Fitzgerald’s Meyer Wolfsheim (“He’s the man who fixed the World Series back in 1919,” Gatsby tells Nick Carraway) seem peculiarly more probable than Arnold Rothstein himself. But despite Fitzgerald’s steady perceptions, these are careless stories: none is well-remembered because none is really good.

What is most interesting about them, in the end, is that they are the by-product of the same years that brought such solid stories as “The Rich Boy” and “Winter Dreams”—as well as The Great Gatsby, perhaps the best thing written in America so far this century. Immensely facile and uneven, Fitzgerald was making $20,000-$25,000 a year during those years, writing, according to the introduction to this collection, “half a dozen or more short stories, at least half a novel, a movie scenario or two, four or five articles, several book reviews, and possibly part of a play.” As his daughter, Frances Fitzgerald Lanahan, writes, “I’ve often wondered how there was a moment left for splashing in the Plaza fountain.”