Jazz Age Stories

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Dec 1998 · Sold by Penguin

About this ebook

"A generation grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken", was how F. Scott Fitzgerald defined his age. Perhaps nowhere in American fiction is this statement better exemplified than in Fitzgerald's first two volumes of short fiction: Flappers and Philosophers and Tales of the Jazz Age. Penguin's new Jazz Age Stories gathers all of these early pieces in one volume, which together capture the shine and seductive sound of early American jazz, the scandalous affronts to religious pieties, the nights of drunken revelry, and the impending doom of financial, moral, and intellectual dissolution. Spanning the early twentieth-century American landscape -- the Minnesota of his youth, the Princeton college years, the squalor and opulence of New York -- this collection contains unforgettable images of modern America, and eloquently expresses Fitzgerald's theme of the enchantment and disillusionment of materialism. Jazz Age Stories includes "The Ice Palace", "Bernice Bobs Her Hair", and "A Diamond as Big as The Ritz".

About the author

F. Scott Fitzgerald was born in 1896 in St. Paul, Minnesota. He attended Princeton University, where he began writing what would become his first novel, This Side of Paradise. He left Princeton to join the army during World War I, though the war ended shortly after his enlistment. This Side of Paradise, published in 1920, was a critical and financial success and was followed the same year by his first story collection, Flappers and Philosophers, followed by Tales of the Jazz Age in 1922. Fitzgerald went on to publish three more novels—The Beautiful and Damned, The Great Gatsby, and Tender Is the Night—and many more stories. He died in 1940, leaving his last novel, The Love of the Last Tycoon, unfinished.

Patrick O’Donnell is a professor of British and American literature at Michigan State University. He is the author of John Hawkes, Echo Chambers: Figuring Voice in Modern Narrative, and Latent Destinies: Cultural Paranoia in Contemporary U.S. Narrative. Professor O’Donnell has also written the introduction and notes for F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise and Jazz Age Stories.