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Jazz Age Stories

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Overview

An original collection of Fitzgerald's greatest tales from the "Roaring '20s," Jazz Age Stories includes "Bernice Bobs Her Hair," "The Ice Palace," and "A Diamond as Big as the Ritz."

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Author Information

Bio of F. Scott Fitzgerald

F(rancis) Scott Fitzgerald was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, on September 24, 1896. He was educated at Princeton University and served in the U.S. Army from 1917 to 1919, attaining the rank of second lieutenant. In 1920 Fitzgerald married Zelda Sayre, a young woman of the upper class, and they had a daughter, Frances. Fitzgerald is perhaps best known for his short stories and novels, but his many contributions to American literature also include plays, poetry, music, and letters. He is now highly regarded as an American writer. Ernest Hemingway, who was greatly influenced by Fitzgerald's short stories, wrote that Fitzgerald's talent was "as fine as the dust on a butterfly's wing." Yet during his lifetime Fitzgerald never had a best-selling novel and, toward the end of his life, he worked sporadically as a screenwriter at motion picture studios in Los Angeles. There he contributed to scripts for such popular films as Winter Carnival and Gone with the Wind. Fitzgerald's work is inseparable from the Roaring 20s. Berenice Bobs Her Hair and A Diamond As Big As The Ritz, are two short stories included in his collections, Tales of the Jazz Age and Flappers and Philosophers. His first novel The Beautiful and Damned was flawed but set up Fitzgerald's major themes of the fleeting nature of youthfulness and innocence, unattainable love, and middle-class aspiration for wealth and respectability, derived from his own courtship of Zelda. This Side of Paradise (1920) was Fitzgerald's first unqualified success. The Great Gatsby (1925) is considered by many to be the greatest American novel. Tender Is the Night, a mature look at the excesses of the exuberant 20s, was published in 1934. Much of Fitzgerald's work has been adapted for film, including Babylon Revisited, adapted as The Last Time I Saw Paris by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in 1954. The Last Tycoon, adapted by Paramount in 1976, was a work in progress when Fitzgerald died of a heart attack on December 21, 1940, i n Hollywood, California. Fitzgerald is buried in St. Mary's Cemetery in Rockville, Maryland. 030

Bio of Patrick K. O'Donnell

Patrick O'Donnell is a historian and expert on WWII espionage and special operations. He has spent the past twelve years interviewing over 1,400 of America's elite agents and troops and is the best-selling author of Beyond Valor and Into the Rising Sun (both published through the Free Press/Simon & Schuster). Beyond Valor was the winner of the prestigious William E. Colby Award for Outstanding Military History (over fifty of America's top historians and authors selected the book). He is also the founder of The Drop Zone (www.thedropzone.org), an award-winning web site and the first on-line oral history project for veterans of WWII and the interested public. Mr. O'Donnell was a historical consultant for DreamWorks' award-winning mini-series BAND OF BROTHERS, and for documentaries produced by the BBC, Fox News, and The History Channel. His books and web site are widely acclaimed on national television and radio and in newspapers such as USA TODAY, the WASHINGTON POST, the LOS ANGELES TIMES and the WALL STREET JOURNAL, which said "The Drop Zone presents the remarkable and often terrifying war stories of U.S. Army Airborne and Ranger troops. Browse through a few of these tales and you will probably gain new respect for the older men in the Veterans Day parade." Mr. O'Donnell lives in Fairfax Station, Virginia and is currently working on his fourth book, a historical account of MI6, Britain's Secret Intelligence Service.

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Additional Info

Imprint

Penguin Classic

Filesize

1.30 MB

Number of Pages

464

eBook ISBN

9780786564378

Excerpt from: Jazz Age Stories by F. Scott Fitzgerald

This unlikely story begins on a sea that was a blue dream, as colorful as blue-silk stockings, and beneath a sky as blue as the irises of children's eyes. From the western half of the sky the sun was shying little golden disks at the sea;ýif you gazed intently enough you could see them skip from wave tip to wave tip until they joined a broad collar of golden coin that was collecting half a mile out and would eventually be a dazzling sunset. About half-way between the Florida shore and the golden collar a white steam-yacht, very young and graceful, was riding at anchor and under a blue-and-white awning aft a yellow-haired girl reclined in a wicker settee reading The Revolt of the Angels, by Anatole France.

She was about nineteen, slender and supple, with a spoiled alluring mouth and quick gray eyes full of a radiant curiosity. Her feet, stockingless, and adorned rather than clad in blue-satin slippers which swung nonchalantly from her toes, were perched on the arm of a settee adjoining the one she occupied. And as she read she intermittently regaled herself by a faint application to her tongue of a half-lemon that she held in her hand. The other half, sucked dry, lay on the deck at her feet and rocked very gently to and fro at the almost imperceptible motion of the tide.

The second half-lemon was well-nigh pulpless and the golden collar had grown astonishing in width, when suddenly the drowsy silence which enveloped the yacht was broken by the sound of heavy footsteps and an elderly man topped with orderly gray hair and clad in a white-flannel suit appeared at the head of the companionway. There he paused for a moment until his eyes became accustomed to the sun, and then seeing the girl under the awning he uttered a long even grunt of disapproval.

If he had intended thereby to obtain a rise of any sort he was doomed to disappointment. The girl calmly turned over two pages, turned back one, raised the lemon mechanically to tasting distance, and then very faintly but quite unmistakably yawned.

"Ardita!" said the gray-haired man sternly.

Ardita uttered a small sound indicating nothing.

"Ardita!" he repeated. "Ardita!"

Ardita raised the lemon languidly, allowing three words to slip out before it reached her tongue.

"Oh, shut up."

"Ardita!"

"What?"

"Will you listen to me;ýor will I have to get a servant to hold you while I talk to you?"

The lemon descended slowly and scornfully.