Encompassing the very best of F. Scott Fitzgerald's short fiction, this collection spans his career, from the early stories of the glittering Jazz Age, through the lost hopes of the thirties, to the last, twilight decade of his life. It brings together his most famous stories, including 'The Diamond as Big as the Ritz', a fairy tale of unlimited wealth; the sad and hilarious stories of Hollywood hack Pat Hobby; and 'The Lost Decade', written in Fitzgerald's last years.p>
Student Review by Lucy Bowes, Durham University
Apart from knowing that ‘The Curious Case of Benjamin Button’ had originally been penned by Fitzgerald before being made into a multi million dollar movie, I had heard little about the existence of these short stories. Indeed the short story was something that I had rarely come across since the fairytales I was read as a child.
Yet, far from the fairytales of childhood, these stories are the fairytales of the Jazz Age and the time that followed it; they are darker, filled with intense glamour, but cloaked in a great shadow. It is the stuff of a beautiful yet terrible dream. Even our characters, when looking back on this era of opulence, cannot be quite sure that it happened. We are witness to a form of black magic, but also an underlying reality that communicates universal themes such as the inevitable fading of beauty and the passing of time.
Fitzgerald captures the absurdity of wealth and its irony in stories such as ‘The Diamond as Big as the Ritz’, hope, illusions, frustration and disenchantment haunt these pages. It is ‘all very rich and very sad’. Nonetheless, a wittiness pervades his narrative, and the tales documenting the unfortunate progress of Pat Hobby are incredibly amusing. In ‘Babylon Revisited’, a story of fatherhood, we find a great tenderness that appears to come from the heart of the writer himself. And in the last lines of the collection, amidst the final story ‘The Lost Decade’, there lies the possibility of regeneration.
Though his short stories lack the great sorrowing tragedy that lingers throughout many of his novels, we glimpse brief moments of such intensity, that leave the reader suddenly aching at both the beauty of the language and the emotional force of Fitzgerald’s writing. For although we continually witness enchantment followed by crushing disillusionment, we continue to read on, turning one page and then the next. For those who know and love Fitzgerald as a writer, these stories are further confirmation of his ability to enchant and compel with words and tales, but they also stand as a wonderful collection of stories in their own right; beautiful snippets of an age we all secretly wish we could have been part of.
Student Review by Madeleine Stottor, Nonsuch High School for Girls
Love, money, youth and success: these are the themes which dominate Fitzgerald’s prose. ‘Flappers and Philosophers’ comprises forty-five of his short stories and spans the entirety of his dramatic twenty year career. Although it is novels like ‘The Great Gatsby’ which have ensured his fame, Fitzgerald’s short stories are no less readable, entertaining, tragic or beautiful. They are tales in which “things go glimmering”, where a diamond as large as a mountain jostles for space with an ominous cut glass bowl, the constraints of class dictate relationships and political mayhem in ‘May Day’ competes for attention with religion in ‘Absolution’.
This is an excellent collection for both Fitzgerald acolytes and the uninitiated. As an introduction to the author, this collection works well, displaying the breadth of Fitzgerald’s abilities and imagination and providing a foretaste of lyrical feasts like ‘The Great Gatsby’ with stories like ‘Winter Dreams’. For those who have already read Fitzgerald’s novels, or even previously published collections of short stories, ‘Flappers and Philosophers’ is no less interesting. The strongly autobiographical nature of many, if not all, of the stories provides the reader with a crucial insight into Fitzgerald’s character. Furthermore, this collection demonstrates clearly Fitzgerald’s development as both a writer and a person. In ‘Bernice Bobs Her Hair’, Fitzgerald writes that “everyone was a Who’s Who to everyone else’s past” and these stories have a similar role in revealing their author. Each one is part of a Who’s Who detailing Fitzgerald’s own past, as he draws on his idealism, dissolution and eventual ‘crack-up’ in creating his stories.
And indeed his characters follow these patterns, with none achieving the fulfilment and happiness they desire. The later Pat Hobby sequence of stories is explicit in its bitterness and sense of failure, but even earlier stories like ‘The Cut Glass Bowl’ depict characters who are almost cursed by their success and beauty to ultimate suffering. It seems that, for Fitzgerald, the beautiful are always damned.
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