F. Scott Fitzgerald

Though most widely known for the novella The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald gained a major source of income as a professional writer from the sale of short stories. Over the course of his career, Fitzgerald published more than 160 stories in the period's most popular magazines. His second short fiction collection, Tales of the Jazz Age (1922), includes two masterpieces as well as several other stories from his earlier career. One, "May Day," depicts a party at a popular club in New York that becomes a night of revelry during which former soldiers and an affluent group of young people start an anti-Bolshevik demonstration that results in an attack on a leftist newspaper office. "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz" is a fantastic satire of the selfishness endemic to the wealthy and their undying pursuit to preserve that way of life. All of these stories, like his best novels, meld Fitzgerald's fascination with wealth with an awareness of a larger world, creating a subtle social critique. With his discerning eye, Fitzgerald elucidates the interactions of the young people of post-World War I America who, cut off from traditions, sought their place in the modern world amid the general hysteria of the period that inaugurated the age of jazz. This new edition reproduces in full the original collection, stories that represent a clear movement in theme and character development toward what would become The Great Gatsby. In introducing each story, Fitzgerald offers accounts of its textual history, revealing decisions about which stories to include.

Flappers and Philosophers contains some of Fitzgerald's best early short stories, including "Bernice Bobs Her Hair" and "The Offshore Pirate". First published in 1920, Flappers and Philosophers marked F. Scott Fitzgerald's entry into the realm of the short story, in which he adroitly proved himself "a master of the mechanism of short story technique" (Boston Transcript). Several of his most beloved tales are represented in this collection of eight, including "Bernice Bobs Her Hair" and "Head and Shoulders," with their particularly O. Henry-like twists; the poignant "Benediction" and "The Cut-Glass Bowl"; and "The Offshore Pirate," the octet's opening and most romantic story. It is a collection of masterful short works from an American literary icon that led The New York Times Book Review to note that " no one] can fail to recognize Mr. Fitzgerald's talent and genius." This edition includes: -A concise introduction that gives readers important background information -A chronology of the author's life and work -A timeline of significant events that provides the book's historical context -An outline of key themes and plot points to help readers form their own interpretations -Detailed explanatory notes -Critical analysis, including contemporary and modern perspectives on the work -Discussion questions to promote lively classroom and book group interaction -A list of recommended related books and films to broaden the reader's experience

Fitzgerald’s second collection of short stories, Tales of the Jazz Age (1922), includes two masterpieces - ‘May Day’ and ‘The Diamond as Big as the Ritz’ - as well as other stories from his earlier career. Tales of the Jazz Age and Other Stories reproduces Tales of the Jazz Age in full, along with several uncollected stories from the early 1920s, including ‘Dice, Brassknuckles and Guitar’, a 1923 narrative which closely anticipates the themes and characters of The Great Gatsby. In his introduction James L. W. West III offers an account of the textual history of the stories, reconstructs Fitzgerald’s decisions about which stories to include and exclude, and examines reproductions of surviving manuscripts and typescripts. He supplies a full record of variants, tracing Fitzgerald’s extensive revisions to the stories, and he provides detailed historical notes, references and glosses.

Scott Fitzgerald's second novel, The Beautiful and Damned (1922), is a savage and haunting satire of the young, rootless post-war generation who live intent only on the pursuit of wealth and decadent pleasure. Anthony Patch's marriage to the beautiful but selfish Gloria is idyllic at first but the union slowly disintegrates as reality sets in and their goal becomes Adam Patch's fortune. Gloria's beauty fades, and Anthony's drinking takes its toll. Charting the corrosive attraction of wealth and its malign influence, The Beautiful and Damned is also a vivid portrait of early twentieth-century New York and the sights and sounds of the city's burgeoning night life.

Unfinished at the time of his death, F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Last Tycoon is a story of doomed love set against the extravagance of America's booming film industry. This Penguin Modern Classics edition is edited with an introduction by Edmund Wilson. The studio lot looks like 'thirty acres of fairyland' the night that a mysterious woman stands and smiles at Monroe Stahr, the last of the great Hollywood princes. Enchanted by one another, they begin a passionate but hopeless love affair, starting with a fast-moving seduction as slick as a scene from one of Stahr's pictures. The romance unfolds, frame by frame, watched by Cecilia, a thoroughly modern girl who has taken her lessons in sentiment and cynicism from all the movies she has seen. Her buoyant humour and satirical eye perfectly complement Fitzgerald's panorama of Hollywood at its most lavish and bewitching. F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) has acquired a mythical status in American literary history, and his masterwork The Great Gatsby is considered by many to be the 'great American novel'. In 1920 he married Zelda Sayre, dubbed 'the first American Flapper', and their traumatic marriage and Zelda's gradual descent into insanity became the leading influence on his writing. As well as many short stories, Fitzgerald wrote five novels This Side of Paradise, The Great Gatsby, The Beautiful and the Damned, Tender is the Night and, incomplete at the time of his death, The Last Tycoon. After his death The New York Times said of him that 'in fact and in the literary sense he created a "generation" '. If you enjoyed The Last Tycoon, you might enjoy Fitzgerald's The Beautiful and the Damned, also available in Penguin Classics.'Wonderful ... a novel about Hollywood, written from the inside'Helen Dunmore, Sunday Times

Published in 1920, F. Scott Fitzgerald's first novel, This Side of Paradise, became the novel that defined an era and launched his literary career. This is the story of Amory Blaine, "romantic egotist," and his journey from prep school to Princeton to the First World War. This dazzling chronicle of youth and the Jazz Age remains bitingly relevant decades later.

FOR THE FIRST TIME, all the commercially published short stories F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote before and during his work on what would become his great American novel, The Great Gatsby, have been collected in one volume. Published between 1919 and 1923, these twenty-six stories - most of which appeared in the Saturday Evening Post and in two Fitzgerald volumes, Flappers and Philosophers and Tales of the Jazz Age - document the striking development of Fitzgerald's professionalism and short-story craftsmanship during his twenties. Edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli, the foremost expert on Fitzgerald, the annotated and generously illustrated collection reproduces magazine artwork, manuscripts, advertisements, and photographs that provide a rich contextual backdrop for understanding the ways American life shaped Fitzgerald's fiction.

Amory Blaine, intent on rebelling against his staid, Midwestern upbringing, longs to acquire the patina of Eastern sophistication. In his quest for sexual and intellectual enlightenment, he progresses through a series of relationships, until he is cast out into the real world.

In 1924 F. Scott Fitzgerald sent the typescript for his novel titled ""Trimalchio"" to his editor. In the following months Fitzgerald rewrote the text in galley proof and selected a retitled it - ""The Great Gatsby"". This text shows how Fitzgerald progressed from the first draft to the finished novel.

Young, handsome and fabulously rich, Jay Gatsby is the bright star of the Jazz Age, but as writer Nick Carraway is drawn into the decadent orbit of his Long Island mansion, where the party never seems to end, he finds himself faced by the mystery of Gatsby's origins and desires.

Definitive novel of the "Lost Generation" focuses on the coming of age of Amory Blaine, a handsome, wealthy Princeton student. He exemplifies the young men and women of the 20s who grew up to find "all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken." Fitzgerald's first novel and an immediate, spectacular success.

This is Fitzgerald's second novel, published in 1922. The story displays that 'touch of disaster' which is at the centre of his work. Young, beautiful and wealthy, Gloria and Anthony want their marriage to be a 'live, glamorous performance'. Seemingly perfectly matched, their love begins to deteriorate as each discovers imperfections in the other. In a desperate search for happiness, they spend recklessly and live riotously, until the final crackup comes. In his portrayal of individualfailure, Fitzgerald illustrates the corrupting power of money and the fleeting nature of beauty. He explores a preoccupying theme - the need for illusion and the tragedy that springs from its inevitable breakdown.

"This Side of Paradise, " F. Scott Fitzgerald's romantic and witty first novel, was written when the author was only twenty-three years old. This semiautobiographical story of the handsome, indulged, and idealistic Princeton student Amory Blaine received critical raves and catapulted Fitzgerald to instant fame. Now, readers can enjoy the newly edited, authorized version of this early classic of the Jazz Age, based on Fitzgerald's original manuscript. In this definitive text, "This Side of Paradise" captures the rhythms and romance of Fitzgerald's youth and offers a poignant portrait of the "Lost Generation."

First published in 1920, This Side of Paradise marks the beginning of the career of one of the greatest writers of the first half of the twentieth century. In this remarkable achievement, F. Scott Fitzgerald displays his unparalleled wit and keen social insight in his portrayal of college life through the struggles and doubts of Amory Blaine, a self-proclaimed genius with a love of knowledge and a penchant for the romantic. As Amory journeys into adulthood and leaves the aristocratic egotism of his youth behind, he becomes painfully aware of his lost innocence and the new sense of responsibility and regret that has taken its place. Clever and wonderfully written, This Side of Paradise is a fascinating novel about the changes of the Jazz Age and their effects on the individual. It is a complex portrait of a versatile mind in a restless generation that reveals rich ideas crucial to an understanding of the 1920s and timeless truths about the human need for--and fear of--change. "A very enlivening book indeed, a book really brilliant and glamorous, making as agreeable reading as could be asked . . . There are clever things, keen and searching things, amusingly young and mistaken things, beautiful things and pretty things . . . and truly inspired and elevated things, an astonishing abundance of each, in THIS SIDE OF PARADISE. You could call it the youthful Byronism that is normal in a man of the author's type, working out through a well-furnished intellect of unusual critical force."--The Evening Post, 1920"An astonishing and refreshing book . . . Mr. Fitzgerald has recorded with a good deal of felicity and a disarming frankness the adventures and developments of a curious and fortunate American youth. . . . [It is] delightful and encouraging to find a novel which gives us in the accurate terms of intellectual honesty a reflection of American undergraduate life. At last the revelation has come. We have the constant young American occupation--the 'petting party'--frankly and humorously in our literature."--The New Republic, 1920

This is a limited edition facsimile of the musical Fitzgerald wrote in 1914, published now as part of the Fitzgerald Centenary Celebration. It features photographs from the original production together with the original songbook. The writing and production of the play are reconstructed in context.

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F. Scott Fitzgerald's extraordinary career as a novelist ended abruptly and unhappily, but it began with one of the most brilliant first novels in the history of American literature. Published when its author was just twenty-three, This Side of Paradise is about the education of a youth, and to this universal story Fitzgerald brought the promise of everything that was new in the vigorous, restless America during the years following World War I. Amory Blaine-egoistic, versatile, callow, and imaginative-inhabits a book that is interwoven with songs, poems, playscripts, and questions and answers. His growth from self-absorption to sexual awareness and personhood is described by means of a continuous improvisatory energy and delight. Far from being distracting, Fitzgerald's formal inventiveness and verve only heighten our sense that the world being described is our own modern world. A profound coherence informs This Side of Paradise-a coherence born of its author's uncanny ability to revel in the fragmented surfaces of human life while exploring and comprehending its serene depths.

Scott Fitzgerald's first novel, written when the author was twenty-four, appeared in 1920 and immediately established him as a leading literary figure in the brilliant and dangerous world of 1920s America. The novel tells the story of a spoilt child in search of happiness. Pampered as a child, wealthy, brilliant at school, Amory Blaine looks for the love of others but only finds himself. A short, sharp masterpiece with an intriguing religious undertow, this is also a touchingly autobiographical novel which reflects ominously on Fitzgerald's own future.