Updating his editor, Maxwell Perkins, about his progress on The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, ‘So in my new novel I’m thrown directly on purely creative work – not trashy imaginings as in my stories but the sustained imagination of a sincere yet radiant world.’ Fitzgerald's classification of his stories as ‘trash’ recurred throughout the course of his twenty-one-year professional career, but the interplay between art and commerce in Fitzgerald's oeuvre is complex. Fitzgerald resented having to pause his novel-writing efforts in order to earn cash from the magazines to which he sold his stories, but he was also proud of the high fees his work commanded, reaching his peak price, $4,000 per story, at the Saturday Evening Post in 1929. Though often written out of financial need, Fitzgerald's short fiction served vital purposes in his career: he built a brand with his early, effervescent flapper stories, and he began to use the medium to develop ideas and to workshop characters that were to appear in his novels, even exporting phrases from stories verbatim. From 1937 until his death in 1940, working in Hollywood, he experimented with the medium, adopting a distinctively terse style of writing and turning to a fragmentary short story form that reflected an intensifying exploration of the themes of alienation and loneliness.

Fitzgerald's reference to ‘trashy imaginings’ apparently shows him dismissing the popular culture that infused these short stories, despite the fact that it is this same vivid interpretation of popular culture which he uses to create his ‘sustained imagination of a sincere and yet radiant world’. In particular, four major leisure pursuits of the interwar period – jazz dance, jazz music, musical theatre and film – impacted upon Fitzgerald's literary aesthetics. In his integration of these media into his short fiction, we can trace a recurring ambivalence towards them: Fitzgerald is torn between embracing these modern leisure pursuits and rejecting them on account of their hedonism. This ambivalent response to modernity can be elucidated through readings of his invocations of dance, music, musical theatre and film as parodic. Often, Fitzgerald presents the enticing glamour and moral vacancy of these pursuits simultaneously.