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

all time.”
    In the trailing light of these early stories and of
The Great Gatsby
soon to come, Fitzgerald would spend years, in his words, “seeking the eternal Carnival by the Sea.” By 1931—far too soon, he believed, to write about the Jazz Age with perspective—he was looking back on it nostalgically and from a distant third-person point of view that he hoped would provide objectivity: “It bore him up,” he remembers in “Echoes of the Jazz Age”; it “flattered him and gave him more money than he had dreamed of, simply for telling people that he felt as they did, that something had to be done with all the nervous energy stored up and unexpended in the War.” 27 In just a half dozen years more, when the wistful past had become barely a memory to him and the fulfilled future was now itself the wistful past, he would require twilight on the French Riviera to recover the time that had seemed “so rosy and romantic to those that were young then.” 28
    NOTES
    F. Scott Fitzgerald, “Early Success,”
The Crack-Up,
ed. Edmund Wilson (New York: New Directions, 1945), p. 90.
    “Early Success,” p. 90.
    “Early Success,” p. 86.
    “Echoes of the Jazz Age,”
The Crack-Up,
p. 14.
    “Early Success,” p. 86.
    “Early Success,” p. 86.
    Matthew J. Bruccoli and Margaret M. Duggan, ed.
Correspondence of F. Scott
Fitzgerald
(New York: Random House, 1980), p. 51.
    F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Ledger
(Washington: Bruccoli Clark/NCR, 1972), p. 173.
    “Early Success,” p. 86.
    The Great Gatsby
(New York: Scribners, 1925), p. 134.
    “Early Success,” p. 89.
    This Side of Paradise
(New York: Scribners, 1920), p. 304.
    “Echoes of the Jazz Age,” p. 21.
    “Early Success,” pp. 87–8.
    The Romantic Egoists: A Pictorial Autobiography from the Scrapbooks and Albums
of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald,
ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli, Scottie Fitzgerald Smith, and Joan P. Kerr (New York: Scribners, 1974), p. 97.
    Romantic Egoists,
p. 79.
    Tales of the Jazz Age
(New York: Scribners, 1922), p. viii.
    The Great Gatsby,
pp. 2–3.
    The Great Gatsby,
p. 134.
    The Great Gatsby,
p. 3.
    “Pasting It Together,”
The Crack-Up,
p. 77.
    Dear Scott/Dear Max: The Fitzgerald-Perkins Correspondence,
ed. John Kuehl and Jackson R. Bryer (New York: Scribners, 1971), p. 112.
    The Letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald,
ed. Andrew Turnbull (New York: Scribners, 1963), p. 509.
    The Great Gatsby,
p. 202.
    Bruccoli and Duggan,
Correspondence of F. Scott Fitzgerald,
p. 212.
    “Early Success,” p. 87.
    “Echoes of the Jazz Age,” p. 13.
    “Echoes of the Jazz Age,” p. 22.

BENEDICTION
    The Baltimore Station was hot and crowded, so Lois was forced to stand by the telegraph desk for interminable, sticky seconds while a clerk with big front teeth counted and recounted a large lady’s day message, to determine whether it contained the innocuous forty-nine words or the fatal fifty-one.
    Lois, waiting, decided she wasn’t quite sure of the address, so she took the letter out of her bag and ran over it again.
    “Darling”:
it began—
“I understand and I’m happier than life ever meant me to be. If I could give you the things you’ve always been in tune with—but I can’t, Lois; we can’t marry and we can’t lose each other and let all this glorious love end in nothing.
    “Until your letter came, dear, I’d been sitting here in the half dark thinking and thinking where I could go and ever forget you; abroad, perhaps, to drift through Italy or Spain and dream away the pain of having lost you where the crumbling ruins of older, mellower civilizations would mirror only the desolation of my heart—and then your letter came.
    “Sweetest, bravest girl, if you’ll wire me I’ll meet you in Wilmington—till then I’ll be here just waiting and hoping for every long dream of you to come true.
    “HOWARD.”
    She had read the letter so many times that she knew it word by word, yet it still startled her. In it she found many faint reflections of the man who