F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Short Fiction: From Ragtime to Swing Time

A revisionist reading of Fitzgerald’s short stories through the lens of popular culture from the 1910s to the 1930s

F. Scott Fitzgerald is remembered primarily as a novelist, but he wrote nearly two hundred short stories for popular magazines such as the widely-read Saturday Evening Post. These are vividly infused with the new popular culture of the early twentieth century, from jazz to motion pictures. By exploring Fitzgerald’s fascination with the intertwined spheres of dance, music, theatre and film, this book demonstrates how Fitzgerald innovatively imported practices from other popular cultural media into his short stories, showing how jazz age culture served as more than mere period detail in his work.

Key Features

Interdisciplinary formal and thematic analysis of popular cultural references in Fitzgerald’s short fiction Offers fresh readings of longstanding concepts in Fitzgerald studies, such as his ‘double vision’ Contributes to the growing field of popular cultural studies of modernist authors