Tales of the Jazz Age is a 1922 collection of 11 short stories by American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald. Divided into three separate parts, it includes one of his better-known short stories, "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button". All of the stories had first appeared, independently, in either Metropolitan Magazine, The Saturday Evening Post, Smart Set, Collier's, the Chicago Sunday Tribune, or Vanity Fair.
Due to its adult theme, Fitzgerald did not consider the short story "May Day" to be suitable for the family-oriented readership favored by the Saturday Evening Post. He offered this "masterpiece" to H. L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan, editors at The Smart Set, where it appeared in the July 1920 issue. Fitzgerald termed the story "this somewhat unpleasant tale".: In "A Table of Contents: My Last Flappers"
Contents Fitzgerald provided his own annotated table of contents for the collection, providing commentary on each story. The works are presented in three categories: My Last Flappers, Fantasies, and Unclassified Masterpieces. The original periodical publication and date are indicated below.
My Last Flappers "The Jelly-Bean" (Metropolitan Magazine, October 1920) "The Camel's Back" (Saturday Evening Post, April 24, 1920) "May Day" (The Smart Set, July 1920) "Porcelain and Pink" (The Smart Set, January 1920): As "Porcelain in Pink" (A One Act Play)
Fantasies "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz" (The Smart Set, June 1922) "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" (Collier's, May 27, 1922) "Tarquin of Cheapside" (The Smart Set, February 1921) "O Russet Witch!" (Metropolitan Magazine, February 1921): Published in Metro under the title "His Russet Witch."
Unclassified Masterpieces "The Lees of Happiness" (Chicago Sunday Tribune, December 12, 1920) "Mr. Icky" (The Smart Set, March 1920): Published in the CST as "Mr. Icky: The Quintessence of Quaintness in One Act" "Jemina" (Vanity Fair, January 1921): Published in Vanity Fair under the title "Jemina, the Mountain Girl (One of Those Family Feud Stories of the Blue Ridge Mountains with Apologies to Stephen Leacock)"
Reception
Critic Hildegarde Hawthorne in The New York Times, October 29, 1922, commented on Fitzgerald's contemporary identification as a writer for slick magazines, in particular The Saturday Evening Post. Hawthorne wrote that stories "give too much of the effect of samples... The book is more like a magazine than a collection of stories by one man, arranged by an editor to suit all tastes and meant to be thrown away after reading."
Hawthorne closes with an upbeat assessment of Fitzgerald's potential as a fiction writer: "These stories are announced as beginning in the writer's second manner. They certainly show a development in his art, a new turn... this 'second manner' is surely the outcropping of a rich vein that may hold much wealth."
Critical appraisal
According to biographer Kenneth Eble, Fitzgerald characterized some of the short fiction as "cheap and without the spontaneity of my first work." Eble adds that "Tales of the Jazz Age suffers badly from the inclusion of some early writing which might better have remained in The Nassau Literary Review, where it first appeared.": "He did not have enough strong stories for Tales of the Jazz Age..."
Several stories in Tales of the Jazz Age are notable for their "authorial self-consciousness" registered through Fitzgerald's editorial remarks directed towards the reader. Literary Critic John Kuehl writes:
Kuehl argues that this "egotistical foregrounding" tends to squander Fitzgerald's literary talents in favor of an intrusive approach that fails to adequately dramatize his narrative.
Theme Fitzgerald's earliest professional stories largely concerned inherited wealth and the "indolent rich." These preoccupations transitioned, however, toward narratives involving a broader spectrum of social classes, including "businessmen, writers, performers, priests and white-collar workers." Critic John Kuehl reports that this emerging focus on essentially democratic concerns "reaches its apotheosis in 'May Day,' where various socioeconomic classes meet."
References Citations
Sources
External links
Tales of the Jazz Age at Project Gutenberg Tales of the Jazz Age at Internet Archive