The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald

First published in 1989, The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald brings together forty-three of the author's finest stories, tracing the brilliance and melancholy of American life from the exuberant 1920s to the disillusionment of the Depression. Selected and edited by Fitzgerald scholar Matthew J. Bruccoli, the collection moves through a world of fashionable debutantes, ambitious young men, extravagant fortunes, and romances shadowed by disappointment. Among its most celebrated works are Bernice Bobs Her Hair, a sharp comedy of social ambition; The Diamond as Big as the Ritz, a fantastical satire of unimaginable wealth; and Winter Dreams, a poignant exploration of longing and the passing of youth. Together, these stories reveal the wit, tenderness, and penetrating social observation of a writer who understood both the enchantment of the American dream and the sorrow concealed beneath its promises.

Spanning much of Fitzgerald's literary career, the collection offers an unusually intimate portrait of an author whose short fiction was central to both his artistic development and his popular success. His characters pursue love, beauty, status, and happiness against the shifting landscapes of an America transformed by prosperity, changing social conventions, and economic collapse. While his novels, particularly The Great Gatsby and Tender Is the Night, secured his place in the literary canon, these shorter works demonstrate the remarkable range of his imagination, from playful romantic comedy to devastating studies of regret and human frailty. Accompanied by Bruccoli's illuminating editorial commentary, The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald presents the many faces of a writer whose greatest subject remained the fragile distance between what life promises and what it finally allows.

From the book

“The dream was gone. Something had been taken from him.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald, Winter Dreams, collected in The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald

On The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald

“One pleasure of rereading Fitzgerald’s stories now is to rediscover just how good some of them in fact are, and how brilliant a handful.”

— Jay McInerney, The New York Review of Books, 1991