Flappers and Philosophers

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Flappers and Philosophers
The cover of the 1920 first edition
AuthorF. Scott Fitzgerald
Cover artistW. E. Hill
CountryUnited States
LanguageEnglish
GenreShort stories
Media typePrint (hardcover & paperback)

Flappers and Philosophers is a collection of eight works of short fiction by

Saturday Evening Post, Scribner's Magazine, or The Smart Set.[1][2]

The volume includes “The Ice Palace,” regarded as one of Fitzgerald’s finest short works.[3]

Stories

The original periodical publication and date are indicated.[4][5]

Background

The stories published in Nassau Literary Review while Fitzgerald was attending Princeton University, as well as those that comprise Flappers and Philosophers, may be placed among his “apprenticeship fiction.”[7][8]

In November 1919, Fitzgerald engaged

Saturday Evening Post, one of several “high-paying mass-circulation slick-paper magazines.” Fitzgerald was paid $400 for each story.[9][10] Fitzgerald’s short fiction became identified with the Post in the following years, to whom he would sell sixty-five of his stories—“40 percent of his output.”[11]

Literary critic and biographer Matthew J. Bruccoli notes that “during his lifetime, Fitzgerald was far better known and more widely read as a short story writer than as a novelist.”[12]

Reception

The New York Times in its September 26, 1920 edition evaluated the collection in light of Fitzgerald’s recently published first novel This Side of Paradise (1920): ”[H]is eight short stories range the gamut of style and mood with a brilliance, a jeu perle [“pearly tone”], so to speak, which is not to be found in the novel.” The reviewer compares the works favorably to the “ Russian school” and to the American author O. Henry, and closes by commending “Mr. Fitzgerald's talent and genius.”[13]

Theme

Literary critic and biographer John Kuehl reports that the book reflects the social types identified in the collection’s title:

Diverse characters and classes manifest themselves, yet Fitzgerald’s fundamentally bourgeois world features the ubiquitous homme manqué and the femme fatale, for courtship and marriage comprise the all-important sexual element.[14]

Footnotes

  1. ^ Bryer, 2000 p. 1069
  2. ^ Elbe, 1963 p. 54: The collection was published on September 10, 1920
  3. ^ Eble, 1963 p. 56: “...as good a story as Fitzgerald ever wrote…clearly his best” of the stories in the collection.
  4. ^ Kuehl, 1991 p. 184: Selected Bibliography
  5. ^ Bryer, 2000 p. 1069: Notes on the Texts.
  6. ^ Bruccoli, 1998 p. 89: Bruccoli reports the date as May 29, 1920 in epigraph.
  7. ^ Kuehl, 1991 p. 25: The stories, written between 1915 and 1921 “...like the author’s prep-school efforts, may be said to comprise his apprenticeship fiction.”
  8. ^ Bryer, 2000 p. 1059-1060: Chronology
  9. ^ Bruccoli, 1998 p. 15
  10. ^ Bryer, 2000 p. 1061: Chronology: Fitzgerald paid “$400 for each of them.”
  11. ^ Bruccoli, 1998 p. 15
  12. ^ Bruccoli, 1998 p. 15
  13. ^ "Flappers". The New York Times. September 26, 1920.
  14. ^ Kuehl, 1991 p. 32 And p. 26: “...a book focused on its two title-figure types…”

Sources

External links
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