“Winter Dreams” was originally published in the December 1922 issue of Metropolitan Magazine. It was collected in All the Sad Young Men (1926). It is currently most readily available in The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald: A New Collection (Scribner).

During my early encounters with F. Scott Fitzgerald's work, beginning with a senior thesis that I wrote as a graduation requirement at Princeton in 1948–49, I was haunted by a persistent question. How could the author of what Fitzgerald himself called that “picaresque ramble” of a novel, This Side of Paradise, and that too prolonged and sometimes artless cautionary tale called The Beautiful and Damned, with its often obtrusive “attempt to convey a profound air of erudition” (Zelda Fitzgerald's phrase in her 1922 review of the book)— how could that same author produce, just three years later, a third novel as structurally tight and as splendidly artful as The Great Gatsby? The question became all the more compelling when I learned at another time that Fitzgerald actually wrote the first draft of The Great Gatsby during 1923, the year following the publication of The Beautiful and Damned, a draft rewritten and completed a year later. He was just twenty-seven years old when he began to work on his durable masterpiece.

How could Fitzgerald have learned so much so well in such a short span of time and at such an early age? His college friends, Edmund Wilson and John Peale Bishop, offered some early criticism, but he clearly knew more about the writing of fiction from the start than they did. His undergraduate work on scripts for the Princeton Triangle Club musicals was of dubious lasting value, and according to his own testimony he got no help from those who were paid to teach him the virtues of literature either during or after his days at Princeton. His apprenticeship as a professional writer came while he earned his living under the pressure of writing story after story, each seemingly out of the same mold, for one or another popular magazine.

I found an answer to these questions when I had to begin assigning my students background reading in the undergraduate creative writing program that was first established in Fitzgerald's university some twenty years after he failed to earn his degree there as an English major.