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Master the 40: The Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald"The Offshore Pirate"Send us a textAfter a year's sabbatical planning the April 2025 Gatsby Centennial and the Fitzgerald Society's June 2025 accompanying conference, Master the 40 is back with a discussion of Fitzgerald's quintessential flapper story "The Offshore Pirate." Originally published in the May 29, 1920 issue of The Saturday Evening Post, this delightful trick-ending tale tells the story of an importunate young girl, Ardita Farnam, who is kidnapped by a self-described jazz musician-turned-pirate, Curtis Carlyle, who embodies Ardita's notion of romance as a daring spectacle or all-out pageantry. Full of snappy patter and vivid illustration, the story conveys all the sass and...2025-07-1252 min
Master the 40: The Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald"The Love Boat"Send us a textImagine F. Scott Fitzgerald in the afterlife, some thirty-six years after his premature passing, discovering to his dismay that the cheesiest TV producer ever has copped the title to a little-known short story of his and turned it into a landmark of cultural kitsch. That's the premise of this episode, in which we dissect the creepiest story Fitzgerald ever wrote, called, unfortunately "The Love Boat." Yes, we'll soon be making another run of endless Isaac and Gopher jokes as we explore this tale of a man who consoles his mid-life crisis by crashing...2024-06-0559 min
Master the 40: The Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald"What a Handsome Pair!"Send us a textPublished in the August 27, 1932, issue of the Saturday Evening Post, "What a Handsome Pair!" clearly reflects F. Scott Fitzgerald's dour view of marital relationships amid the relapse that took Zelda to the Phipps Clinic in Baltimore. The story of two couples, Stuart and Helen Oldhorne and Teddy and Betty Van Beck, "Pair!" insists that for men to enjoy domestic contentment they must pick wives who will not compete with them in their chosen métier. In other words, not exactly a feminist story! Fitzgerald perhaps exposed a little too much anger here that Z...2024-03-2557 min
Master the 40: The Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald"The Sensible Thing"Send us a textPublished on July 5, 1924 as F. Scott Fitzgerald was writing The Great Gatsby, this Liberty short story has always been seen as a key rehearsal for his magnum opus. In the story of George Rollins (or George O'Kelly in the version that appeared in 1926 in All the Sad Young Men) as he pursues the Tennessee belle Jonquil Cary we have yet another variation on Fitzgerald's quintessential "golden girl" theme. The story's reputation has been somewhat inflated by its compositional proximity to Gatsby. We explore the theme of first love, focusing on the oft-reprinted closing li...2023-12-2749 min
Master the 40: The Stories of F. Scott FitzgeraldThe Ants at PrincetonSend us a textAppearing in the June 1936 issue of Esquire, "The Ants at Princeton" is by any measure a singularly kooky entry in F. Scott Fitzgerald's short-story corpus. A fantasy about a human-sized ant who steps onto the field to save the game between heated rivals Princeton and Harvard (you can probably guess who FSF roots for), the text has always baffled scholars: is it a short story or is it, as Fitzgerald wrote in his ledger, a mere "satire"? And does that even matter? Behind the peculiar and not particularly effective conceit, though, lies a l...2023-09-2750 min
Master the 40: The Stories of F. Scott FitzgeraldHer Last CaseSend us a textPublished in fall 1934 in the Saturday Evening Post, "Her Last Case" is one of F. Scott Fitzgerald's most important stories about the South. Indeed, it challenges consensus opinions about the writer's regard for the region that the Tarleton stories of the 1920s set. Far from a pastoral evocation of antebellum gentility, the story insists the South must exorcise its lingering obsession with the Lost Cause---and it does so through a variety of Gothic strum und drang featuring the literal book that named the South's revisionary insistence that the Civil War was fought to...2023-07-2955 min
Master the 40: The Stories of F. Scott FitzgeraldDiamond Dick and the First Law of WomanSend us a textA contender for one of the strangest Fitzgerald titles ever, "Diamond Dick and the First Law of Woman," published in April 1924, tells the story of a maverick young debutante, Diana Dickey, who returns from the Western front where she served as a canteen girl to spend the next five years wondering what to do with her life. Only when wounded aviator Charlie Abbott returns from a long convalescence in Paris does Diana seem to reenact her decidedly masculine persona of "Diamond Dick," the hero of hundreds of nineteenth-century dime novels, and find her p...2022-12-2650 min
Master the 40: The Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald"Babylon Revisited"Send us a textIn late 1930 as Zelda Fitzgerald remained hospitalized in a sanitarium trying to regain her sanity her husband cranked out a frenzied series of stories to pay for her treatment. Out of this whirlwind of effort came "Babylon Revisited," which appeared originally in the February 21, 1931, issue of the Saturday Evening Post and later anchored the fourth and final story collection of his life, Taps at Reveille (1935). "Babylon" is the mack daddy of all Fitzgerald stories, widely hailed as the best of his short fiction and his most widely anthologized. This episode asks why the stor...2022-11-281h 05
Master the 40: The Stories of F. Scott FitzgeraldThe Four FistsSend us a textAs spring turned to summer in 1920 and This Side of Paradise was making a celebrity of F. Scott Fitzgerald, the periodical published by his very own publisher, Scribner's Magazine, featured an atypical story by him: "The Four Fists," whose premise is---no, seriously---that we would all be better off if in moments of moral impurity we took a knuckle sandwich to the chiclets. Four times in this odd tale the hero, Samuel Meredith, gets punched in the face, and four times he becomes a better person for it. Although it sounds like it might ma...2022-08-1546 min
Master the 40: The Stories of F. Scott FitzgeraldCrazy SundaySend us a textIn late 1931 F. Scott Fitzgerald traveled to Hollywood for a second attempt to crack the lucrative movie market. While there he attended a party at the home of MGM studio chieftain Irving Thalberg and his wife, Norma Shearer, at which he performed a bit of drunken doggerel and embarrassed himself. Never one not to avail himself of autobiographical material, he quickly shaped a story about an emotional triangle between a "hack" screenwriter (Joel Coles) and a charismatic director (Miles Calman) and his actress/Pygmalion figure/wife (Stella). Because it addressed the theme of...2022-06-0358 min
Master the 40: The Stories of F. Scott FitzgeraldThe FiendSend us a textOf all the commercial genres F. Scott Fitzgerald attempted in his stories (romance, moral tales, even fantasy and supernatural fiction), he was probably least adept at crime writing. That may seem odd considering The Great Gatsby's influence on the gangster tales and film noir and given the fact the crime fiction was racing toward its hardboiled peak when the unfortunately titled "The Fiend" appeared in Esquire in January 1935. Rather than a Dashiell Hammett or Raymond Chandler ode to moral corruption, though, Fitzgerald's short tale of a widower's attempt to destroy the incarcerated killer wh...2022-01-1744 min
Master the 40: The Stories of F. Scott FitzgeraldPorcelain and PinkSend us a textJust when you thought your stocking couldn't get any more stuffed this Christmas, we're slipping underneath your holly jolly to drop our second episode of season two. "Porcelain and Pink" appeared in the January 1920 issue of The Smart Set, one month before F. Scott Fitzgerald debuted in the Saturday Evening Post and two before the publication of This Side of Paradise. A charming trifle, "P&P" tells the story of a young flapper, Julie, luxuriating in a blue bathtub who teases a young literary beau by pretending to be her sister (the gentleman's...2021-12-261h 01
Master the 40: The Stories of F. Scott FitzgeraldHe Thinks He's WonderfulSend us a textWe kick off season 2 of Master the 40 with our first foray into the series of "juveniles" Fitzgerald wrote for the Saturday Evening Post between 1928 and 1931. Actually, he wrote two coming-of-age series for the magazine, one about a boy (Basil Duke Lee) and one about a girl (Josephine Perry). The latter tend to be darker and sadder, while the former offer nostalgic glimpses of Fitzgerald's own adolescence in St. Paul in the 1910s. Chronologically, "He Thinks He's Wonderful" is the fourth of eight Basil stories and captures our hero smackdab in the middle of...2021-10-1954 min
Master the 40: The Stories of F. Scott FitzgeraldOne Trip AbroadSend us a textFor our tenth episode we explore a short story we think falls just outside of the Top 10: October 11, 1930's "One Trip Abroad," which totally blows anything else in that issue of the Saturday Evening Post out of the water. Many critics considered it Fitzgerald's second greatest story about expatriation after "Babylon Revisited," which was written right on the heels of this masterful depiction of marital disillusionment and moral drift. The story came at a desperate time: following Zelda's June 1930 entry to Les Rives des Prangins in Switzerland Scott needed to crank out a...2021-06-1359 min
Master the 40: The Stories of F. Scott FitzgeraldJohn Jackson's ArcadySend us a textSome critics have dismissed this story of a man who escapes his worldly woes by fleeing his office to return to his small-town, rundown origins as "pure trash," but we uncover some historical reasons it should be of interest. First, "John Jackson's Arcady" was the last short story Fitzgerald wrote in April 1924 before departing for the Riviera to write The Great Gatsby. As such, it has some intriguing overlap with the novel. Second, although not republished in a collection until 1979, the story enjoyed a curious afterlife as an elocution text for aspiring high-school...2021-04-2249 min
Master the 40: The Stories of F. Scott FitzgeraldThe Lost DecadeSend us a textOur eighth episode focuses on the shortest short story Fitzgerald ever published, "The Lost Decade," which clocks in at only 1,100 words, making it Depression-era kin to today's flash fiction. Appearing in Esquire in December 1939 (exactly one year before the author's death), "Decade" is a haunting masterpiece of intimation and mood: eminence grise Matthew J. Bruccoli summed it up perfectly when he called it "elliptical." Told from the perspective of a New York City newspaper "call boy," Orrison Brown, the story focuses on an architect, Louis Trimble, who wanders the metropolis seeking to reestablish...2021-03-2655 min
Master the 40: The Stories of F. Scott FitzgeraldAt Your AgeSend us a textOur first episode of 2021 examines a story that has been completely ignored both by fans and scholars: August 17, 1929's "At Your Age." The lack of interest is curious for a couple of reasons. For starters, this tale of a fifty-year-old bachelor, Tom Squires, confronting age-inappropriate behavior as he chases after a debutante thirty years his junior was the submission that earned Fitzgerald his peak price of $4,000 per story from The Saturday Evening Post. His agent, Harold Ober, even called it the best story FSF had ever written. That's not true, of course, but w...2021-02-1952 min
Master the 40: The Stories of F. Scott FitzgeraldPat Hobby and Orson WellesSend us a textHot on the heels of David Fincher's Mank, a hotly disputed retelling of the origins of Citizen Kane, we explore F. Scott Fitzgerald's own take on the rise of Orson Welles. In the final year of his life, without income from Hollywood studios or loans from his longtime agent, Harold Ober, Fitzgerald supported himself by cranking out seventeen short stories about the Hollywood hack Pat Hobby, which he sold to Arnold Gingrich's Esquire for $250 each. (Five of the stories appeared posthumously). The most historically interesting of the series is May 1940's "Pat Hobby a...2020-12-0756 min
Master the 40: The Stories of F. Scott FitzgeraldThe Rich Boy: Special Nov 15 Bonus EpisodeSend us a textFor reasons you have to tune in to discover, November 15 is an important day for at least three Fitzgerald diehards. So to celebrate we're offering a special bonus episode featuring our first ever special guest: James L. W. West III, the mastermind behind the Cambridge Edition of the Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald. From 1995 to 2019, Jim singlehandedly produced sixteen of the eighteen volumes that establish FSF's standard texts employing those alchemical arts known as textual editing. For our conversation, we dissect another of Fitzgerald's all-time greatest short stories, "The Rich Boy," which appeared...2020-11-1557 min
Master the 40: The Stories of F. Scott FitzgeraldGretchen's Forty WinksSend us a textIn this episode we nibble on a Fitzgerald comedy so light it could be meringue. Granted, the storyline of a harried husband who slips his wife a Mickey Finn of a sleeping potion so he can finish an important advertising campaign is probably today more of a wake-up call than the high-concept rib-tickler audiences in 1924 read it as. We explore how "Gretchen's Forty Winks" fit into the March 15 issue of the Saturday Evening Post where it appeared alongside forgotten fiction with titles like "Bumbums in Boxes." Such fluffy disposable short stories, we suggest...2020-11-0153 min
Master the 40: The Stories of F. Scott FitzgeraldMay DaySend us a textMost fans agree that "May Day" is among Fitzgerald's all-time greatest stories: certainly Top 10, arguably Top 5, quite possibly No. 2 behind only "Babylon Revisited." Some might even argue that this ambitious "novelette," first published in The Smart Set in July 1920 when its author was all of twenty-three, tops that most-anthologized, most-ubiquitous of Fitzgerald's short fictions. Based on real-life riots that erupted in New York City on May 1, 1919, this panoramic political tale pits four separate duos in intersections of restless violence and spoiled privilege: the dissatisfied debutante Edith Bradin and her brother Henry, the editor...2020-10-051h 08
Master the 40: The Stories of F. Scott FitzgeraldI Got ShoesSend us a textOur second episode looks at one of the most obscure of Fitzgerald's 178 stories, "I Got Shoes." Published in 1933, this eighth-to-last of the author's 60+ contributions to The Saturday Evening Post tells the story of a proud actress, Nell Margery, who schools both her adventurer boyfriend and a daffy gossip columnist on the meaning of professionalism. Critically ignored, the tale appeared on the heels of a vicious marital therapy session in which Fitzgerald vainly excoriated his wife, Zelda, over her efforts at writing, including her play, Scandalabra, which Baltimore's Junior Vagabond Players were soon to...2020-08-291h 10
Master the 40: The Stories of F. Scott FitzgeraldThe Lees of HappinessSend us a textAs F. Scott Fitzgerald's debut novel, This Side of Paradise, becomes a Jazz Age rage in 1920, the Chicago Tribune invites the twenty-three-year-old writer to contribute an original short story to its Blue Ribbon Fiction Sunday section. The result is "The Lees of Happiness," published that December on the heels of his first story collection, Flappers and Philosophers. Although Fitzgerald collected "Lees" in his second story collection, Tales of the Jazz Age (1922), it remains widely overlooked. Our debut episode delves into the main themes and character types in this tale of romantic devotion and sa...2020-08-011h 07