The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Other Jazz Age Stories Read Online Free

“a most important volume of short stories because it collects tales which, perhaps more than any published lately, are weather vanes of the popular magazine fiction of the next few years”; moreover, she suggested that the stories are cultural weather vanes through which Fitzgerald “has crystallized his generation.” Using broad strokes, the critic for The New York Times Book Review and Magazine wrote, “Not the most superficial reader can fail to recognize Mr. Fitzgerald’s talent and genius. So far as seriousness is concerned, no one appreciates the value of the Russian School [referring to the “realistic” stories of Chekov and Turgenev] better than he himself. The ingenuity which marks his works he may consider a necessity in American fiction today. . . . Mr. Fitzgerald is working out an idiom, and it is an idiom at once universal, American and individual.”
    The mixed and, in many instances, polarized reviews generated by Flappers and Philosophers typifies the reception of Fitzgerald’s novels and stories from this point onward. While it is not unusual for an author of Fitzgerald’s popularity and significance to garner such a range of responses, what is remarkable is the intensity of the disputes over Fitzgerald’s status either as a literary lightweight, catering to popular tastes, or an always emerging major American writer who portrays with combined accuracy and lyricism the desires and cultural assumptions—the ideology—of the Jazz Age generation.
    By the time of the appearance of The Beautiful and Damned in March 1922, Fitzgerald was rapidly becoming a known quantity, and the prodigious sensationalism that surrounded the publication of This Side of Paradise was beginning to wear thin. Fitzgerald’s second novel, which one reviewer described as “two in swift descent on life’s toboggan,” another as “the flapper’s tragedy,” and a third as a book that “ought to be called ‘The Boozeful and Damned,’ by Scotch Fitzgerald,” earned neither the critical applause nor the money that Fitzgerald—at this point living the life of dissipation he ascribed to his protagonists—had hoped for.
    Tales of the Jazz Age , appearing in September of that year, while it generally fared better with the reviewers than did Flappers and Philosophers , was still met with enough critical and financial ambivalence to bring disappointment and concern to Fitzgerald and his publisher. Writing in the Baltimore News , Robert Garland called the collection “both silly and profound,” and claimed that “the enfant terrible of modern American literature has gone on a ragtime holiday. In these ‘Tales of the Jazz Age’ Scott Fitzgerald is once more the precocious and more than a little acrid youngster of Princetonian days, profoundly foolish, ironically wise.” More astringently, the critic for The New Republic wrote that Fitzgerald is “amusing, flippant, glib, sophisticated according to Princeton undergraduate standards. . . . His characters never complete into substance; he sometimes succumbs to salesmanship; he has a fair range; he is better in fantasies; there are split-seconds of beauty expressed. But that emphatically is all.” In a similar vein, the poet Stephen Vincent Bénet, who would go on to win a Pulitzer Prize in 1929, wrote in the New York Evening Post Literary Review that Tales of the Jazz Age “is competent enough, but it doesn’t mean anything. It shows neither that Mr. Fitzgerald is a flash in the pan nor that he is a constellation. It shows nothing. There is no reason why it should. Mr. Fitzgerald, to compare him with any good football coach, very sensibly doesn’t believe in showing all of his stuff in preliminary or intermediate games.” But if Bénet felt that Fitzgerald was calculatingly holding “genius” in reserve, others suggested that he was wasting