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

which suggests that the dreams of Jazz Age youth—dreams of riches, power, and eternal life—are perfectly consonant with the ambitions of the failed American Dream. As this reading of “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz” suggests, Fitzgerald’s larger subject in his stories of the Jazz Age is America viewed as a young nation of uncertain destiny that had claimed its place on the world stage in the Great War and is now poised to realize those dreams of prosperity, expansion, and release from the constraints of time and space that have been part of the American imaginary since its founding. The history of the United States in the twentieth century, as Fitzgerald accurately predicts in these narratives of mundane lives and allegorical circumstance, is one in which the insubstantiality of the dream itself and the disastrous consequences of its pursuit have been made manifest.
    There is no doubt that the stories collected in Flappers and Philosophers and Tales of the Jazz Age are of uneven quality and reflect the status of a writer who is working through his own youthful apprenticeship. “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz,” “May Day,” and “The Ice Palace,” for example, are truly excellent stories told with skill and artistic certainty that offer substantial explorations of identity, place, and history; on the other hand, “The Offshore Pirate,” “Tarquin of Cheapside,” or “Jemina” are early, stiff efforts that offer only a sense of Fitzgerald’s promise as a writer. But in all of these stories, from the successful to the failed, we can recognize Fitzgerald as a modern, even experimental writer—perhaps himself engaging in some youthful “chemical madness”—trying out techniques and strategies, plot lines, structures, character types, patterns of trope and imagery, and styles of dialogue that would cohere as he developed his craft into the recognizable signature of The Great Gatsby , or of “Winter Dreams,” and “Babylon Revisited.”
    The short story form offered not only financial recompense for an author who, in some sense, was obsessed with money, it offered Fitzgerald a medium in which he could place artistry and authorship on trial. It is important to discern Fitzgerald’s nerve as a writer in these stories—some good, some bad, all of great interest as the early work of a major American author—particularly in his willingness to combine imitation with exploration in his portraits of the age that his stories he articulated and identified. The predictions of some reviewers of his short-story collections that Fitzgerald might become just another literary hack are contravened by literary history, but their predictions are also disproven by the stories themselves, which reveal—if, at times, in epiphanic flashes, in a surprising phrase or fragment of dialogue—Fitzgerald’s unique ability to convey philosophy through style, to manufacture a world dependent upon a word. They remain valuable renditions of an age that has ended, yet one which reappears in each passing generation as it defines youth and its vanishing on its own terms.

SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
    Bruccoli, Matthew J., and Jackson R. Bryer, eds. F. Scott Fitzgerald in His Own Time: A Miscellany. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1971.
    Bruccoli, Matthew J. Scott and Ernest: The Authority of Failure and the Authority of Success. New York: Random House, 1978.
    â€”——. Some Sort of Epic Grandeur: The Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981.
    Bryer, Jackson R. The Critical Reputation of F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Bibliographical Study. Rev. Ed. Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1984.
    â€”——, ed. F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Critical Reception. New York: B. Franklin, 1978.
    â€”——, ed. New Essays on Fitzgerald’s Neglected Stories. Columbia: University of Missouri Press,