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I'd Die For You: And Other Lost Stories - Softcover

Fitzgerald, F. Scott

 
9781501144356: I'd Die For You: And Other Lost Stories
Softcover
ISBN 10: 1501144359 ISBN 13: 9781501144356
Verlag: Scribner, 2018

Inhaltsangabe

A collection of the last remaining unpublished and uncollected short stories by F. Scott Fitzgerald, the iconic American writer of The Great Gatsby who is more widely read today than ever. “A treasure trove of tales too dark for the magazines of the 1930s. Lucky us” (Newsday). “His best readers will find much to enjoy” (The New York Times Book Review).

I’d Die For You, edited by Anne Margaret Daniel, is a collection of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s stories never widely shared. Some were submitted individually to major magazines during the 1930s and accepted for publication during Fitzgerald’s lifetime, but never printed. Some were written as movie scenarios and sent to studios or producers, but not filmed. Others are stories that could not be sold because their subject matter or style departed from what editors expected of Fitzgerald.

Some of the eighteen stories were physically lost, coming to light only in the past few years. All were lost, in one sense or another: lost in the painful shuffle of the difficulties of Fitzgerald’s life in the middle 1930s; lost to readers because contemporary editors did not understand or accept what he was trying to write; lost because archives are like that. Readers will experience here Fitzgerald writing about controversial topics, depicting young men and women who actually spoke and thought more as young men and women did, without censorship. Rather than permit changes and sanitizing by his contemporary editors, Fitzgerald preferred to let his work remain unpublished, even at a time when he was in great need of money and review attention.

Written in his characteristically beautiful, sharp, and surprising language, exploring themes both familiar and fresh, these stories provide new insight into the bold and uncompromising arc of Fitzgerald’s career. I’d Die For You is a revealing, intimate look at Fitzgerald’s creative process that shows him to be a writer working at the fore of modern literature—in all its developing complexities.

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Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

F. Scott Fitzgerald was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1896. He attended Princeton University, joined the United States Army during World War I, and published his first novel, This Side of Paradise, in 1920. That same year he married Zelda Sayre and for the next decade the couple lived in New York, Paris, and on the Riviera. Fitzgerald’s novels include The Beautiful and Damned, The Great Gatsby, and Tender Is the Night. He died at the age of forty-four while working on The Last Tycoon. Fitzgerald’s fiction has secured his reputation as one of the most important American writers of the twentieth century.

Anne Margaret Daniel teaches literature at the New School University in New York City. She has published widely on Fitzgerald and on Modernism since 1996. Anne Margaret lives in Manhattan and upstate New York.

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I’d Die for You Introduction
. . . it isn’t particularly likely that I’ll write a great many more stories about young love. I was tagged with that by my first writings up to 1925. Since then I have written stories about young love. They have been done with increasing difficulty and increasing insincerity. I would either be a miracle man or a hack if I could go on turning out an identical product for three decades.

I know that is what’s expected of me, but in that direction the well is pretty dry and I think I am much wiser in not trying to strain for it but rather to open up a new well, a new vein. . . . Nevertheless, an overwhelming number of editors continue to associate me with an absorbing interest in young girls—an interest that at my age would probably land me behind bars.

—F. Scott Fitzgerald to Kenneth Littauer, editor of Collier’s magazine, 1939

After his sensational start as a professional writer in 1919, F. Scott Fitzgerald was increasingly stereotyped as a writer of what he himself had dubbed “the Jazz Age.” Readers, and editors, anticipated from him standard romances, poor boys wooing rich girls, parties and glamour and glib flappers. When he tried something different, in a darker and deeper historical decade, and as a mature man who had lived through much pain, Fitzgerald found it very difficult to break out of this early stereotype. The young writer surrounded by campus life at Princeton (This Side of Paradise) becoming part of a new, golden couple (The Beautiful and Damned) and then the creator and chronicler of the Jazz Age (the story collections of the 1920s, and The Great Gatsby) gives way straight to The Crack-Up in most literary biographies and readers’ conceptions of Fitzgerald. He wanted, as he put it, to “open up a new well, a new vein.” Unfortunately, only a very few appreciated what he was trying to do.

These stories are about divorce and despair; working days and lonesome nights; smart teenagers unable to attend college or find a job during the Great Depression; American history, with its wars, its horrors, and its promises; sex, with marriage thereafter—or not; and the wild, bright vitality and grinding poverty of New York City, a place Fitzgerald truly loved and understood in all its possibilities, shallowness, and ugliness. They show him not as a “sad young man” growing old, and trapped in the golden days of his own recent past, but at the fore of Modern literature, in all its experimentalism and developing complexities.

***

F. Scott Fitzgerald, graying and chunking up, is reputedly one of the most difficult authors from whom editors may wangle stories these days. He is the literary symbol of an era—the era of the new generation—and editors continue to want stories of flask gin and courteous collegiates preceding ladies through windshields on midnight joy rides. The public has acquired this Fitzgerald taste, too. But Fitzgerald has taken an elderly and naturally serious turn. Mellowed is the term. He wants to write mellowly, too. And if they won’t let him he won’t write at all. So there.

—O. O. McIntyre, “New York Day by Day” column, 1936

Contemporary editors of popular, mass-market magazines at the time were not philistines, of course. However, there were good reasons for them to shy away from what Fitzgerald was writing by the mid-1930s; some of the stories are dark and stark. Only one editor fully saw the merits of what Fitzgerald was trying to do and published him consistently—Arnold Gingrich, of Esquire, a novelist himself. Fitzgerald sold the brilliant Pat Hobby stories to Esquire for $200 or $250 apiece in the two years before his death. (This was a low price to Fitzgerald, but not for a writer during the Depression; and not if you consider its relative worth, when according to the 1940 U.S. Census the average annual income was just over $1,000.) Gingrich encouraged Fitzgerald to turn his fine chronicles of a failed, drunken, Irish-American screenwriter into a novel. But even Gingrich wouldn’t go for some stories; Fitzgerald wrote about young men worrying over venereal disease and having gotten sixteen-year-olds pregnant, and Esquire said no thanks.

Most of these stories are from the days when America, and the world, was in the Great Depression. Fitzgerald’s fortunes, so high just a few years before, had fallen with the country’s. He was often sick, often broke, and anxiously shuttling between the Baltimore area—where he and Zelda had settled with their daughter, Scottie—and a string of health resorts in the North Carolina mountains. After a breakdown in Europe in 1930, Zelda was hospitalized in February 1932 at the Phipps Psychiatric Clinic of Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. For the rest of Fitzgerald’s life, and hers, Zelda would be in and out of costly private clinics and hospitals; the pressure Scott put on himself to earn enough money to pay for these was immense. From early 1935, Fitzgerald’s own health was a concern to him, too, and despite his fear of a recurrence of the tuberculosis with which he’d been diagnosed as a young man, he complicated matters by smoking and drinking to excess.

However, the first story in this collection, “The I.O.U.,” comes from Fitzgerald’s earliest days as a writer; and the last complete ones, “The Women in the House” and “Salute to Lucy and Elsie,” from a stint in Hollywood in 1939 when he had quit drinking and was eagerly working on a new novel, published after his death as The Last Tycoon. There is writing from every stage of his well-chronicled career—the youth reveling in bright days and nights of success and celebrity; the husband and father at thirty suddenly plunged into a world of doctors and hospitals because of his wife’s illness; a struggling man in poor health himself, looking for that new vein to open up for his own writing; and, above all, a professional writer who never failed to take inspiration and energy from the American landscape and personalities around him. That hunger never ended for F. Scott Fitzgerald, and these stories show it.

***

Is there any money in collections of short stories?

—Fitzgerald to his agent, Harold Ober, 1920

Short stories were, from the first, Fitzgerald’s bread and butter. When Princeton’s president, John Grier Hibben, wrote him to complain of, among other things, the characterization of a shallow university and its students in his story “The Four Fists” (1920), Fitzgerald replied, “I wrote it in desperation one evening because I had a three inch pile of rejection slips and it was financially necessary for me to give the magazines what they wanted.”

To give the magazines what they wanted: that was Fitzgerald’s brief as a young writer, and he continued in this very lucrative mode through the 1920s. He sold his work for money and was acutely aware of that fact and of how much he could make, quickly, with short stories, as opposed to waiting until he had enough of a novel complete to consider serialization. He and his family lived well, but after the immense success of his first two novels, The Great Gatsby (1925) did not sell well, and he needed money. Fitzgerald’s discouragement over Gatsby’s lukewarm reception helped to keep him writing short stories for the Saturday Evening Post and spurred him to turn to work on screenplays in Hollywood as the Jazz Age ended. Fitzgerald was walking the tightrope between art and commerce, and did it as well as any writer of his generation.

He was also quite aware of what was his best writing and what was, as he termed it, hack work. Fitzgerald never lied to...

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Verlag
Scribner
Erscheinungsdatum
2018
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1501144359
ISBN 13 
9781501144356
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
384
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Simon and Schuster Netherlands BV, GPSR Europäische Union
info@simonandschuster.nl

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Utrecht
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