The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald Read Online Free

in Montgomery in the months preceding the composition of the story, trips he had made to urge her to resume their engagement. The other two stories inspired by his connection to Montgomery are “The Jelly-Bean” and “The Last of the Belles” (
Post,
March 2, 1929). In these stories, known now as the Tarleton Trilogy, Fitzgerald creates a hybrid of the flapper and the Southern belle, another original Fitzgerald creation and one whose philosophy and outlook are a product of both her Southern heritage and of the movement toward social liberation of women in America during the 1920s.
    Of the flapper-belles in the Tarleton Trilogy, Sally Carrol Happer from “The Ice Palace,” with her two sides—“the sleepy old side you love” and the side that “makes me do wild things”—comes closest to embodying the originality and complexity that distinguishes all of Fitzgerald’s flappers, whatever their type. Nancy Lamar in “The Jelly-Bean,” on the other hand, has no apparent loyalty to the chivalric tradition and seems surely headed toward an unhappier end than Sally Carrol: “I’m a wild part of the world, Jelly-bean,” she tells Jim Powell before her wild side leads her to marry her suitor from Savannah during a drunken evening. The growing darkness of mood in the Tarleton stories foreshadows the approaching end of Fitzgerald’s flapper stories. When an interviewer reminded him in 1921 that he had brought the customs of the flapper to the attention of the older generation, Fitzgerald responded that “My new novel will, I hope, be more mature. It will be the story of two young married folk and it will show their gradual disintegration—broadly speaking, how they go to the devil.” 16
    In those dreamy months during the winter of 1919 and spring of 1920 during which Fitzgerald was creating his early flappers and securing his reputation as the flapper’s historian, he was having difficulty making progress toward a novel that would follow
This Side of Paradise.
It is likely that “May Day,” written in March 1920, was originally the beginning of what he thought would become that novel, though he eventually compressed its three episodes and brought them together as a long short story in “May Day,” which he sold to
The Smart Set
for $200. In these episodes he captures the feeling of those days around the May Day riots of 1919 that grew out of a nationwide postwar sentiment against socialists and other dissidents and were fueled by anarchist bombings. The riots took place all over the country, most notably in Boston and New York, and Fitzgerald continued throughout his life to maintain they had “inaugurated the Jazz Age.” 17 The story shows Fitzgerald at a pivotal moment when he began to draw from recent personal experience, to communicate its poignancy and residual pain, and yet to distance himself from it by juxtaposing it against historical events that place individual conflict—Gordon Sterrett’s in the case of “May Day”—in a social context. As it happens, it also shows him in the grips of a brief flirtation with the philosophy of determinism that he could not finally embrace fully because it so depreciated the role of the romantic vision. When Fitzgerald’s experimentation with naturalism reached its dead end in
The Beautiful and Damned
he began shaping the aesthetic and philosophical underpinnings of what would become his most powerful affirmation of the romantic vision in
The Great Gatsby,
and he did so in stages evident in three stories featured in this collection: “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz,” “Winter Dreams,” and “Absolution.”
    In
The Great Gatsby,
Fitzgerald enshrines Gatsby’s “gift for romantic readiness,” which causes him, in spite of his tragic death, to turn out “all right in the end,” 18 according to Nick—an assertion that Nick can make because Gatsby never wavered in the pursuit of his dream that originated in a mind that romped “like the mind of God.”