The Complete Magazine Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1921–1924

As indicated by the volume’s title, the stories contained in The Complete Magazine Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1921–1924 cover the period from 1921 to 1924, which was F. Scott Fitzgerald’s most prolific period of magazine publishing. Readers will find well-known stories such as “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” and “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz”; stories widely acknowledged as significant to Fitzgerald’s career, such as “Absolution,” which was part of an early version of The Great Gatsby; and less frequently taught stories such as “His Russet Witch” and “Gretchen’s Forty Winks.” Fitzgerald’s magazine career, and thus the focus of this volume, included contributions to The Metropolitan (stories and the serialization of The Beautiful and Damned), Hearst’s International, and the Saturday Evening Post, as well as less frequent contributions to other venues. As the volume’s coeditor Jennifer Nolan points out, this period of Fitzgerald’s productivity in magazines coincided with a significant era for popular periodicals, including the transformation of The Smart Set, the financial struggles of Collier’s, the rise of Liberty Magazine, and the founding of The American Mercury.The volume begins with an introduction by Nolan and then provides the stories, which have been transcribed and edited by coeditor Alexandra Mitchell, followed by explanatory notes by Mitchell, and finally three appendices: an Ngram language analysis by Mitchell that demonstrates Fitzgerald’s ear for trends in language; an overview of the magazines’ publication details by Nolan, including the total number of stories Fitzgerald published in each magazine over the course of his career; and a selection of visual contexts from the magazines, organized by Nolan. The explanatory notes offer a helpful resource for those newer to Fitzgerald and the period by focusing on connections between the stories and Fitzgerald’s novels, converting his many financial references into today’s dollars, and explaining references specific to the fashionable 1920s milieu that was his perpetual topic. Similarly valuable for classroom use, the Ngram analysis models how a student might pursue a research project on the recurring slang of youth culture or the jargon of American businessmen, and the appendix of visual contexts suggests a research assignment for students to work with digitized versions of the magazines to find additional images that correspond to key themes in the stories.Scholars and those more familiar with Fitzgerald who are seeking fresh approaches for teaching should be excited about the volume’s new evidence for the narrative of Fitzgerald as a financially insecure and money-obsessed writer. Each story opens with information about the magazine in which it was published, the publication date, and the amount Fitzgerald was paid. Nolan divides his magazine career into three eras “based on which magazine had the most financial power over Fitzgerald’s career” (xiv): Metropolitan, Cosmopolitan/Hearst’s International, and Saturday Evening Post. The magazines’ power over Fitzgerald across these years is indicated by Nolan’s discussion of publishing contracts as well as details from Fitzgerald’s correspondence about his relationship with various magazine editors.In addition to making the savvy choice to include what Fitzgerald was paid for each story, thus foregrounding the matter of the author’s sensitivity to his status as a working writer, the editors have chosen to organize the collection according to the stories’ original publication dates (as opposed to the date of composition or thematic focus). As Nolan writes, this choice “replicate[s], as near as possible, the version of Fitzgerald’s texts American audiences would have read, in the order that the stories would have been available to them” (xxv). This choice, along with the emphasis on payments and contracts, contributes to an edition that is materially grounded, historically rich, and allows the reader to understand how the idea of Fitzgerald and all he came to stand for in American culture would have emerged out of the magazines.Other significant editorial decisions include the choice to keep in place original errors that would have appeared in print, as well as significant editorial paratexts such as headnotes, which also serve to replicate the original readers’ encounter with the stories. What is not, understandably, included in the volume are the original illustrations that accompanied the stories. Nolan’s appendix of magazine images is an attempt to address this loss, but this is also, as mentioned above, a teaching opportunity for those who plan to work with this excellent collection in their classrooms. Indeed, the editors very much frame their book in this way, with Nolan ending her introduction with an invitation: “This volume offers a gateway into the living textual history of Fitzgerald’s work, warts and all, and how he was being framed by the magazines for his largest audiences” (xxxiii).The positioning of the volume, especially through Nolan’s excellent introduction, will be of interest to this journal’s readers for its emphasis on the periodical context of the American 1920s and Fitzgerald’s ambivalence toward his place within it. Nolan notes that his cutting essay “This Is a Magazine,” which describes “the vast and soggy interior of a magazine” (quoted on p. xii), “reveals that this is clearly a world Fitzgerald deeply understands—the satire works, as all effective satire does, because of how well Fitzgerald has captured his subject” (xii).Through this story of Fitzgerald’s shifting contracts and affiliations, the role of magazines in shaping his authorial persona becomes clear. As Nolan indicates, despite their differences, McCall’s, Liberty, and Hearst’s International framed Fitzgerald similarly, establishing his image as “an interpreter of ‘youth’” for American audiences (xxi). In addition to describing the intertwined fates of Fitzgerald and popular magazines of this time, the volume also makes the case for understanding the author and the magazines he wrote for in a broader context of literary judgment during the period. The popular magazines in which he published interacted with other players in a literary ecosystem that included institutions such as Edward O’Brien’s Best American Short Stories anthologies and modernist little magazines such as The Dial, in which Gilbert Seldes reviewed the 1922 anthology and found the Fitzgerald magazine story included therein “the trickiest and cheapest of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s ‘output’” (quoted on p. xvii).Offering a carefully considered account of five crucial years when popular magazines experienced unprecedented transformation and Fitzgerald underwent an intense education in publishing and the literary marketplace, this new edition of his magazine stories is an invaluable resource for teachers, students, and scholars.