Master the 40: The Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald

Send us Fan Mail Published in  Esquire in September 1937, "The Long Way Out" could possibly be the best F. Scott Fitzgerald short story nobody has ever paid attention to---not even seasoned scholars. Set in a sanitarium, the plot involves a traumatized woman who every day gets ready for a visit from her husband, who never arrives because, as the hospital staff has decided they won't...

Send us Fan Mail While we're editing our next episode (out before the end of the month!), we're very excited to share this adaptation of Fitzgerald's "The Dance," which first appeared in  Red Book exactly 100 years ago. Although not widely known, "The Dance" is important for two reasons: it's Fitzgerald's most overt attempt at a murder mystery and his m...

Send us Fan Mail Published December 17, 1927 in the  Saturday Evening Post , "A Short Trip Home" is most notable as one of a handful of supernatural short stories F. Scott Fitzgerald published throughout his career. Indeed, the  Post  almost declined the story because they weren't keen on tales of specters, wraiths, or apparitions, but ultimately they couldn't resist his prose....

Send us Fan Mail Published in the  Saturday Evening Post  on March 3, 1928 "Magnetism" tells the story of an "accidental" Hollywood star, George Hannaford, whose life is beguiled by celebrity and the pitfalls of fame. And by pitfalls we mean all the women who have fallen under the sway of his charisma, or what kids today call "rizz." There's George's wife, w...

Send us Fan Mail Published in the 21 July 1934 issue of the  Saturday Evening Post , "No Flowers" is one of Fitzgerald's Great Depression stories that teaches a lesson about the frugality and humility many mainstream American outlets felt were necessary to survive the economic devastation of the decade. At first glance, the story can seem frivolous or even silly compared to the prol...

Send us Fan Mail After 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...

Send us Fan Mail Imagine 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, unfo...

Send us Fan Mail Published 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 d...

Send us Fan Mail Published 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'...

Send us Fan Mail Appearing 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...

Send us Fan Mail Published 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 exorcis...

Send us Fan Mail A 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 return...

Send us Fan Mail In 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 co...

Send us Fan Mail As 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 th...

Send us Fan Mail In 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 sto...

Send us Fan Mail Of 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...

Send us Fan Mail Just 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 P...

Send us Fan Mail We 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 glim...

Send us Fan Mail For 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 righ...

Send us Fan Mail Some 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...

Send us Fan Mail Our 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 Ma...

Send us Fan Mail Our 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 submi...

Send us Fan Mail Hot 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 Holly...

Send us Fan Mail For 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 e...

Send us Fan Mail In 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&...