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COPYRIGHT INFO
The F. Scott Fitzgerald Megapack is copyright © 2014 by Wildside Press, LLC. All rights reserved.
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Many of the stories assembled in The F. Scott Fitzgerald Megapack are well known; we include the complete contents of his short story collections Flappers and Philosophers and Tales of the Jazz Age, plus his novels This Side of Paradise (1920) and The Beautiful and Damned (1922). [Due to copyright issues, his three later novels and stories are not included here.]
We are also including a number of less well known works:
“Myra Meets His Family” first appeared in The Saturday Evening Post, March 20, 1920.
“Winter Dreams” first appeared in Metropolitan Magazine, December 1922.
“Two for a Cent” first appeared in Metropolitan Magazine, April 1922.
“The Popular Girl” first appeared as a two-part serial in The Saturday Evening Post, Feb. 11, 1922 to Feb. 18, 1922.
We are also including a number of very early works, written when Fitzgerald was in school, including four stories (the first published when he was 13) plus a selection of stories and poems from college magazines.
The following originally appeared in The St. Paul Academy Now and Then: “The Mystery of the Raymond Mortgage” (October 1909), “Reade, Substitute Right Half” (February, 1910), “A Debt of Honor” (March 1910), and “The Room with the Green Blinds” (June 1911).
The following originally appeared in Newman News: “A Luckless Santa Claus” (Christmas 1912), “Pain and the Scientist” (1913), “The Trail of the Duke” (June 1913).
The following originally appeared in The Nassau Litera\ry Magazine: “The Usual Thing” (December 1916) “Princeton—The Last Day” (May 1917), “Sentiment—And the Use of Rouge” (June 1917), “The Pierian Springs and the Last Straw” (October 1917), and “Marching Streets” (February 1919).
The following originally appeared in The Princeton Tiger: “Little Minnie McCloskey” (December 1, 1916), “The Old Frontiersman” (December 18, 1916), “The Diary of a Sophomore” (March 17, 1917), “The Prince of Pests” (April 28, 1917), “Staying Up All Night” (November 10, 1917), “Cedric the Stoker” (November 10, 1917).
Two rare essays from The Bookman are also included: “The Baltimore Anti-Christ” (a review of Prejudices, Second Series, by H.L. Mencken) originally appeared in March 1921. “Poor Old Marriage” (a review of Brass, by Charles G. Norris) originally appeared in November 1921.
A NOTE FROM THE PUBLISHER
Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald (September 24, 1896 – December 21, 1940) was an American author of novels and short stories, whose works are the paradigmatic writings of the Jazz Age, a term he coined. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century. Fitzgerald is considered a member of the “Lost Generation” of the 1920s. He finished four novels: This Side of Paradise, The Beautiful and Damned, The Great Gatsby (his most famous), and Tender Is the Night. A fifth, unfinished novel, The Love of the Last Tycoon, was published posthumously. Fitzgerald also wrote many short stories that treat themes of youth and promise along with age and despair.
Fitzgerald’s work has been adapted into films many times. His short story, “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”, was the basis for a 2008 film. Tender is the Night was filmed in 1962, and made into a television miniseries in 1985. The Beautiful and Damned was filmed in 1922 and 2010. The Great Gatsby has been the basis for numerous films of the same name, spanning nearly 90 years; 1926, 1949, 1974, 2000, and 2013 adaptations. In addition, Fitzgerald’s own life from 1937 to 1940 was dramatized in 1958 in Beloved Infidel.
Fitzgerald had been an alcoholic since his college days, and became notorious during the 1920s for his extraordinarily heavy drinking, leaving him in poor health by the late 1930s. According to Zelda’s biographer, Nancy Milford, Fitzgerald claimed that he had contracted tuberculosis, but Milford dismisses it as a pretext to cover his drinking problems. However, Fitzgerald scholar Matthew J. Bruccoli contends that Fitzgerald did in fact have recurring tuberculosis, and Nancy Milford reports that Fitzgerald biographer Arthur Mizener said that Fitzgerald suffered a mild attack of tuberculosis in 1919, and in 1929 he had “what proved to be a tubercular hemorrhage.” It has been said that the hemorrhage was caused by bleeding from esophageal varices.
Fitzgerald suffered two heart attacks in the late 1930s. After the first, he was ordered by his doctor to avoid strenuous exertion. He moved in with Sheilah Graham, who lived in Hollywood on North Hayworth Avenue, one block east of Fitzgerald’s apartment on North Laurel Avenue. Fitzgerald had two flights of stairs to climb to his apartment; Graham’s was on the ground floor. On the night of December 20, 1940, Fitzgerald and Sheilah Graham attended the premiere of This Thing Called Love starring Rosalind Russell and Melvyn Douglas. As the two were leaving the Pantages Theater, Fitzgerald experienced a dizzy spell and had trouble leaving the theater; upset, he said to Graham, “They think I am drunk, don’t they?”
The following day, as Fitzgerald ate a candy bar and made notes in his newly arrived Princeton Alumni Weekly, Graham saw him jump from his armchair, grab the mantelpiece, gasp, and fall to the floor. She ran to the manager of the building, Harry Culver, founder of Culver City. Upon entering the apartment to assist Fitzgerald, he stated, “I’m afraid he’s dead.” Fitzgerald had died of a heart attack.
Among the attendants at a visitation held at a funeral home was Dorothy Parker, who reportedly cried and murmured “the poor son-of-a-bitch,” a line from Jay Gatsby’s funeral in Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. His body was transported to Maryland, where his funeral was attended by twenty or thirty people in Bethesda; among the attendants were his only child, Frances “Scottie” Fitzgerald Lanahan Smith (then age 19), and his editor, Maxwell Perkins. Fitzgerald was originally buried in Rockville Union Cemetery. Zelda died in 1948, in a fire at the Highland Mental Hospital in Asheville, North Carolina. Scottie Smith worked to overturn the Archdiocese of Baltimore’s ruling that Fitzgerald died a non-practicing Catholic, so that he could be buried at the Roman Catholic Saint Mary’s Cemetery where his father’s family was interred; this involved “re-Catholicizing” Fitzgerald after his death. Both of the Fitzgeralds’ remains were moved to the family plot in Saint Mary’s Cemetery, in Rockville, Maryland, in 1975.
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Fitzgerald died at age 44, before he could complete The Love of the Last Tycoon. His manuscript, which included extensive notes for the unwritten part of the novel’s story, was edited by his friend, the literary critic Edmund Wilson, and published in 1941 as The Last Tycoon. In 1994 the book was reissued under the original title, which is now agreed to have been Fitzgerald’s preferred title.
ABOUT THE MEGAPACKS
Over the last few years, our “Megapack” series of ebook anthologies and author collections has grown to be among our most popular endeavors. (Maybe it helps that we sometimes offer them as premiums to our mailing list!) One question we keep getting asked is, “Who’s the editor?”
The Megapacks (except where specifically credited) are a group effort. Everyone at Wildside works on them. This includes John Betancourt (me), Carla Coupe, Steve Coupe, Bonner Menking, Colin Azariah-Kribbs, A.E. Warren, and many of Wildside’s authors…who often suggest stories to include (and not just their own!)
A NOTE FOR KINDLE READERS
The Kindle versions of our Megapacks
