Tales of the Jazz Age explained

Tales of the Jazz Age
Author:F. Scott Fitzgerald
Cover Artist:John Held, Jr.
Country:United States
Language:English
Genre:Short stories
Media Type:Print (hardcover & paperback)
Pub Date:September 22, 1922
Publisher:Charles Scribner's Sons
Isbn:1-4341-0001-4

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.

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. Fitzgerald termed the story "this somewhat unpleasant tale".[1]

Contents

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. The original periodical publication and date are indicated below.

My Last Flappers

Fantasies

Unclassified Masterpieces

Reception

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. 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."

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."

Critical appraisal

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."

According to Elbe, Fitzgerald characterized some of the short fiction as "cheap and without the spontaneity of my first work." 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."[6]

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:

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.

Theme

The stories comprising Fitzgerald's earliest professional fiction were largely concerned with inherited wealth and the "indolent rich." 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."

References

Sources

External links

Notes and References

  1. In "A Table of Contents: My Last Flappers"

  2. As "Porcelain in Pink" (A One Act Play)

  3. Published in Metro under the title "His Russet Witch."

  4. Published in the CST as "Mr. Icky: The Quintessence of Quaintness in One Act"

  5. 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)"

  6. "He did not have enough strong stories for Tales of the Jazz Age..."