Tales of the Jazz Age, F. Scott Fitzgerald's second collection of short stories, was published in September 1922, six months after his second novel, The Beautiful and Damned came out. Fitzgerald's editor Maxwell Perkins was critical of Fitzgerald's chosen title for the collection, explaining in a May 1922 letter to Fitzgerald that Scribner's book salesmen ‘feel that there is an intense reaction against all jazz and that the word whatever implication it actually has, will itself injure the book’. Fitzgerald replied, defending his choice of title, and assuring Perkins that the book

Almost a decade later, Fitzgerald himself would go on to explain, in Scribner's Magazine, that ‘The word jazz in its progress towards respectability has meant first sex, then dancing, then music’ (MLC, 132). What Fitzgerald's brief survey seeks to demonstrate is the variety of meaning denoted by the word ‘jazz’, and thus there are difficulties in associating the mantel ‘chronicler of the Jazz Age’ solely with the musical definition of ‘jazz’. That being said, musical jazz forms an important part of Fitzgerald's literary enterprise, as critics such as Ruth Prigozy, T. Austin Graham and Anthony Berret have shown in their respective studies. Allegedly originating from the word ‘jass’, one theory posits that the orthographic change was prompted by the ‘Original Dixieland Jass Band’, who had their posters defaced in 1916 (vandals obfuscated the ‘J’). Legend has it that the bandleader Nick LaRocca decided to change the spelling. There are countless theories on where the word ‘jass’ itself came from but most agree that the word probably originated in African American slang. The first appearance in print was in San Francisco, as Krin Gabbard has identified: ‘In 1913, Ernest J. Hopkins offered this definition [in a San Francisco newspaper]: “something like life, vigor, energy, effervescence of spirit, joy, pep, magnetism, verve, virility, ebulliency, courage, happiness – oh, what's the use? – JAZZ”’.