‘There were couples dancing flat-footed in the corner to a phonograph record made by Rastus Muldoon's Savannah Band; there were couples stalking a slow Chicago with a Memphis sideswoop solemnly around the room’ (TJA, 463). Jim Powell, protagonist of Fitzgerald's 1923 story, ‘Dice, Brassknuckles and Guitar’, named his dance academy after three of the courses offered alongside dance lessons. This quotation exemplifies the need for annotation within scholarly editions of Fitzgerald's works. Who is Rastus Muldoon? And what is the difference between a slow Chicago and a Memphis Sideswoop? These details are important: they establish the socio-cultural milieu in which we find these characters, and as a ‘social realist’, in Matthew Bruccoli's phrase, Fitzgerald was constantly drawn to the popular culture of the 1920s and 1930s in his fiction. He was especially interested in leisure activities: popular music, musical theatre, film, dance and sport references litter his stories. When Fitzgerald refers to the musical The Midnight Sons in ‘The Captured Shadow’ (1928), his contemporary audience would presumably have known that the famous British dancer Vernon Castle is one of the ‘three men in evening clothes and opera hats sauntering jovially along Broadway’ (BJG, 101). For the modern reader, these references need to be teased out for a full appreciation of Fitzgerald's artistry, and to ensure that Fitzgerald's own playfully stated aim of writing ‘for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterwards’ is fulfilled.

James West has written about the difficulties associated with annotating Fitzgerald's works, since Fitzgerald clearly intends for his readers to appreciate his references to song lyrics, dances, films and celebrities, but identification is the tip of the iceberg, and the particular resonance Fitzgerald was reaching for by selecting a reference often lies dormant within the annotations. Although determining Fitzgerald's intentions presents West with an unwelcome (and editorially precarious) task, investigation of these reference points yields new readings. West writes of his difficulties in deciding how much readers needed to know about the references he had identified, but he also had to consider more practical factors such as the number of pages the publisher would print, as well as the anticipated shelf-life of the editions in libraries around the world.