Throughout his career F. Scott Fitzgerald excelled at the short form, the short story. Indeed when his masterpiece, The Great Gatsby, failed to garner the audience, sales or interest, his earlier novels had achieved with their almost effortless ascent up the best seller list, Fitzgerald was thrown back on his talents as a short story writer and the significant market for such writing in the weekly magazines that were a staple of life in America in the 1920’s. As Fitzgerald said, he labored over his novels, but the short stories came whole and complete and only required a kind of automatic transcription with one or, at the most, two revisions. The Saturday Evening Post paid mightily for Fitzgerald’s output, and this income kept him and Zelda solvent on their high profile march through the Roaring 20’s. Flappers and Philosophers is Fitzgerald’s first collection of short stories, written during the years before and concurrent with his first novel, This Side of Paradise, and the stories deal with many of the same themes of that bright era, complete with its darker shadows born of that generation’s overt, even rebellious pursuit of pleasure, not without the bad seeds of greed and the hyper-consciousness of one’s social status in a stratified post-war America. (Summary by Michael Hogan)

Play sample:

Download a PDF datasheet