When the rain was over the sky became yellow in the west and the air was cool. Close to the street, which was of red dirt and lined with cheap bungalows dating from 1910, a little boy was riding a big bicycle along the sidewalk. His plan afforded a monotonous fascination. He rode each time for about a hundred yards, dismounted, turned the bicycle around so that it adjoined a stone step and getting on again, not without toil or heat, retraced his course. At one end this was bounded by a colored girl of fourteen holding an anemic baby, and at the other by a scarred, ill-nourished kitten, squatting dismally on the curb. These four were the only souls in sight.

The little boy had accomplished an indefinite number of trips oblivious alike to the melancholy advances of the kitten at one end and to the admiring vacuousness of the colored girl at the other when he swerved dangerously to avoid a man who had turned the corner into the street and recovered his balance only after a moment of exaggerated panic.

But if the incident was a matter of gravity to the boy, it attracted scarcely an instant's notice from the newcomer, who turned suddenly from the sidewalk and stared with obvious and peculiar interest at the house before which he was standing. It was the oldest house in the street, built with clapboards and a shingled roof. It was a house—in the barest sense of the word: the sort of house that a child would draw on a blackboard. It was of a period, but of no design, and its exterior had obviously been made only as a decent cloak for what was within. It antedated the stucco bungalows by about thirty years and except for the bungalows, which were reproducing their species with prodigious avidity as though by some monstrous affiliation with the guinea-pig, it was the most common type of house in the country. For thirty years such dwellings had satisfied the canons of the middle class; they had satisfied its financial canons by being cheap, they had satisfied its aesthetic canons by being hideous.

Merlin Grainger was employed by the Moonlight Quill Bookshop, which you may have visited, just around the corner from the Ritz-Carlton on Forty-seventh Street. The Moonlight Quill is a very romantic little store, considered radical and admitted dark. It is spotted interiorly with red and orange posters of breathless exotic intent, and lit no less by the shiny reflecting bindings of special editions than by the great squat lamp of crimson satin that, lighted through all the day, swings overhead. It is truly a mellow bookshop. The words “Moonlight Quill” are worked over the door in a sort of turpentine embroidery. The windows seem always full of something that has passed the literary censors with little to spare; things with covers of deep orange bearing the titles on little white paper squares. And above all there is the smell of musk, which the clever Mr. Moonlight Quill has ordered to be sprinkled about—the smell half of a curiosity shop located in Dickens’ London and half of a coffee house on the shores of the Bosphorus.

From nine until five-thirty Merlin Grainger asked old ladies in black and young men with dark circles under their eyes if they “had seen that,” if they “cared for this fellow,” if they were interested in first editions. Did they buy novels with cowboys on the cover or books which gave Shakespeare's newest sonnets as dictated psychicly to Miss Sutton of South Dakota, he sniffed. As a matter of fact, his own taste ran to these latter, but as an employee at the Moonlight Quill he assumed for the working day the attitude of a disillusioned connoisseur.

After he had crawled over the window display to pull down the front shade at five-thirty every afternoon and said good-bye to Mr. Moonlight Quill and the lady clerk, Miss McCracken, and the lady stenographer, Miss Masters, he went home to the girl, Caroline. He did not eat supper with Caroline. It is very doubtful if Caroline would have considered eating off his bureau with the collar buttons dangerously near the cottage cheese and the ends of his necktie just missing his glass of milk—he had never asked her to eat with him. He ate alone.

When you come into Cyrus Girard's office suite on the thirty-second floor you think at first that there has been a mistake, that the elevator instead of bringing you upstairs has brought you uptown, and that you are walking into an apartment on Fifth Avenue where you have no business at all. What you take to be the sound of a stock ticker1 is only a businesslike canary swinging in a silver cage overhead, and while the languid debutante at the mahogany table gets ready to ask you your name you can feast your eyes on etchings, tapestries, carved panels and fresh flowers.

Cyrus Girard does not, however, run an interior-decorating establishment, though he has, on occasion, run almost everything else. The lounging aspect of his ante-room is merely an elaborate camouflage for the wild clamor of affairs that goes on ceaselessly within. It is merely the padded glove over the mailed fist, the smile on the face of the prize fighter.

No one was more intensely aware of this than the three young men who were waiting there one April morning to see Mr. Girard. Whenever the door marked Private trembled with the pressure of enormous affairs they started nervously in unconscious union. All three of them were on the hopeful side of thirty, each of them had just got off the train, and they had never seen one another before. They had been waiting side by side on a Circassian leather lounge for the best part of an hour.

Once the young man with the pitch-black eyes and hair had pulled out a package of cigarettes and offered it hesitantly to the two others. But the two others had refused in such a politely alarmed way that the dark young man, after a quick look around, had returned the package unsampled to his pocket. Following this disrespectful incident a long silence had fallen, broken only by the clatter of the canary as it ticked off the bond market in bird land.

When the Louis XIII clock stood at noon the door marked Private swung open in a tense, embarrassed way, and a frantic secretary demanded that the three callers step inside. They stood up as one man.

“Do you mean—all together?” asked the tallest one in some embarrassment.

“All together.”

The Majestic came gliding into New York harbor on an April morning. She sniffed at the tug-boats and turtle-gaited ferries, winked at a gaudy young yacht and ordered a cattle-boat out of her way with a snarling whistle of steam. Then she parked at her private dock with all the fuss of a stout lady sitting down, and announced complacently that she had just come from Cherbourg and Southampton with a cargo of the very best people in the world.

The very best people in the world stood on the deck and waved idiotically to their poor relations who were waiting on the dock for gloves from Paris. Before long a great toboggan had connected the Majestic with the North American continent and the ship began to disgorge these very best people in the world—who turned out to be movie queens, missionaries, retired jewellers, British authors, musical comedy twins, the Duchess Mazzini (nee Goldberg) and, needless to add, Lord and Lady Thingumbob, of Thingumbob Manor.

The photographers worked wildly as the stream of passengers flowed on to the dock. There was a burst of cheering at the appearance of a pair of stretchers laden with two middle-westerners who had drunk themselves delirious on the last night out.

The deck gradually emptied but when the last Poiret Madonna had reached shore the photographers still remained at their posts. And the officer in charge of debarkation still stood at the foot of the gangway, glancing first at his watch and then at the deck as if some important part of the cargo was still on board. At last from the watchers on the pier there arose a long-drawn “Ah-h-h!” as a final entourage began to stream down from deck B.

First came two French maids, one carrying a pair of minute dogs and the other bearing an enormous green parrot in an enormous red cage. After these marched a squad of porters, blind and invisible under innumerable bunches and bouquets of fresh flowers. Another maid followed, leading a sad-eyed orphan child of a French flavor and close upon its heels walked the second officer pulling along three neurasthenic wolfhounds much to their reluctance and his own.

A pause.

Running footsteps—light, soft-soled shoes made of curious leathery cloth brought from Ceylon setting the pace; thick flowing boots, two pairs, dark blue and gilt, reflecting the moonlight in blunt gleams and splotches, following a stone's throw behind.

Soft Shoes flashes through a patch of moonlight, then darts into a blind labyrinth of alleys and becomes only an intermittent scuffle ahead somewhere in the enfolding darkness. In go Flowing Boots with short swords lurching and long plumes awry, finding a breath to curse God and the black lanes of London.

Soft Shoes leaps a shadowy gate and crackles through a hedgerow. Flowing Boots leap the gate and crackles through the hedgerow— and there, startlingly, is the watch ahead—two murderous pikemen of ferocious cast of mouth acquired in Holland and the Spanish marches.

But there is no cry for help. The pursued does not fall panting at the feet of the watch, clutching a purse; neither do the pursuers raise a hue and cry. Soft Shoes goes by in a rush of air. The watch curse and hesitate, glance after the fugitive and then spread their pikes grimly across the road and wait for Flowing Boots. Darkness, like a great hand, cuts off the even flow of the moon.

The hand moves off the moon whose pale caress finds again the eaves and lintels, and the watch, wounded and tumbled in the dust. Up the street one of Flowery Boots leaves a black trail of spots until he binds himself clumsily as he runs, with fine lace caught from his throat.

It was no affair for the watch: Satan was out tonight and Satan seemed to be he who appeared dimly in front, heel over gate, knee over fence. Moreover the adversary was obviously traveling near home or at least in that section of London consecrated to his coarser whims, for the street narrowed like a road in a picture and the houses bent over further and further, cooping in natural ambushes suitable for murder and its histrionic sister, sudden death.

Down long and sinuous lanes twisted the hunted and the harriers, always in and out of the moon in a perpetual queen's move over a checker-board of glints and patches. Ahead, the quarry, minus his leather jerkin now and half blinded by drips of sweat, had taken to scanning his ground desperately on both sides.

The chart below foregrounds the role of American magazines in the publication of the stories included in this volume. As such, it lists the magazine in which and date on which each story was published during this era in Fitzgerald's career, as well as how much each magazine paid for the story. While not a subject of this volume, the serialization of The Beautiful and Damned is also included because its exclusion gives a misleading picture of Fitzgerald's presence in the American periodical market during this period.

The final column indicates how many times Fitzgerald had published in each magazine at the time each story appeared, as well as the total number of stories Fitzgerald published during his lifetime in each of the magazines, which provides insight into what role each magazine played at various points in his career. Because the focus of this volume is on the impact of the magazine market during Fitzgerald's life, posthumous publications have not been included in this tabulation. Non-fiction works, plays, book excerpts, and reprints have also been excluded (though they are referenced in the notes below, where relevant).

Most of the information in this chart is included in Appendix A of Bryant Mangum's A Fortune Yet, and it has also been checked against Fitzgerald's Ledger. Information for the final column was calculated from both sources. The notes below provide further information about each magazine.

What a wife learned who tried to improve her husband

Take the expression “cold-blooded” for instance—little shining pieces of ice circulating in the arteries, passing the heart every half hour and giving it a chill, flying through the brain like an express train through a prairie village and making warm decisions into cool ones. An unpleasant thought!

But there was nothing cold-blooded about young Coatesworth. He liked people—and that's much rarer than it sounds. Some are impelled to seek company by an inexhaustible curiosity, some are driven to it by sheer boredom with themselves and others congregate for no more reason than that the pithecanthropus erectus huddled in groups a hundred thousand years ago. But young Coatesworth liked people. He had an almost blind eye for their imperfections, he knew how to keep his mouth shut and his blood was warm. He is what is often known among men as a “hell of a nice fellow.” This was no casual compliment. As niceness goes in this somewhat unpleasant world, he was.

So in college he had been enormously popular—vice-president of his class and manager of some athletic team. Afterwards, in the army, his company were wildly sentimental about him, and when the war was over had a way of writing him from Kokomo, Indiana or Muscatine, Iowa, about their successes and their failures and the births of their male children. Coatesworth always answered their letters even when he was very busy—because he himself was somewhat sentimental. Besides, he was nice.

When he was twenty-seven he fell in love with Jaqueline James, who likewise lived in Indianapolis, and married her. She married him, of course, because he was such a nice fellow. Why he married her is a little harder to guess, because of all the young girls in the city she seemed the most completely selfish and the most exquisitely spoiled. People went around talking about the attraction of opposites for each other—and meant nothing complimentary to Jaqueline James.

After the Coatesworths had been married a year they came to themselves and began to look each other over with discerning eyes. There was a great deal of affection between them and neither found anything particularly alarming in the other, for a selfish person and an unselfish person usually get on together very well indeed.

From the very beginning of his career, critics and audiences alike were notably impressed by the authenticity of F. Scott Fitzgerald's work. A review of his first novel, This Side of Paradise, which appeared on 1 April 1920 in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, noted that “Mr. Fitzgerald has all the small talk of undergraduates and the ‘flapper’ at his fingers’ ends,” and as Jackson Bryer has noted, reviews of the novel in college newspapers at the time “all provided ample evidence that Fitzgerald was reaching his own generation by depicting it accurately.” In the words of Matthew J. Bruccoli, “acutely sensitive to the moods and values of his time, [Fitzgerald] was a master of selective detail.”

Thanks to modern technology, we can now quantify just how accurately Fitzgerald depicted his generation. Google Ngram provides a searchable corpus of texts – magazines, books, and journal articles – from 1500 to the present day. The search results show how the concentration of a given word or phrase change over time within the corpus. Figure A.1 gives an example, showing the emergence and decline of the word “flapper” in American English throughout Fitzgerald's lifetime; its concentration in printed texts reached a peak in 1923 before beginning a virtually unchecked decline from the mid-1920s.

Using this technique gives us an indication of how widely used a word or phrase was over a period of time. However, Ngram is not perfect. Most obviously, it tracks only the written and not the spoken word – the “small talk” – that Fitzgerald recorded. Further, the texts in the corpus are digitized using Optical Character Recognition (OCR), a technique that produces consistent and predictable errors – e.g., the word “close” is likely to be rendered as “dose” and “morn” as “mom.” The consistency of OCR errors means that Ngram is more useful as a tool showing relative numbers and changes over time than absolute numbers. More seriously, it is impossible to separate homonyms. An analysis of the phrase “good egg” will include both the colloquial use seen in the stories in this volume and advice to poultry farmers. Finally, the texts in the Ngram corpus are overwhelmingly from Anglo-American sources, which limits its utility for scholars of literature in languages other than English.

Notwithstanding these limitations, Ngram gives us a new perspective on both Fitzgerald and his time.

Some of the caddies were poor as sin and lived in one-room houses with a neurasthenic cow in the front yard, but Dexter Green's father owned the second best grocery store in Dillard—the best one was “The Hub,” patronized by the wealthy people from Lake Erminie— and Dexter caddied only for pocket-money.

In the fall when the days became crisp and grey and the long Minnesota winter shut down like the white lid of a box, Dexter's skis moved over the snow that hid the fairways of the golf course. At these times the country gave him a feeling of profound melancholy—it offended him that the links should lie in enforced gallowness, haunted by ragged sparrows for the long season. It was dreary, too, that on the tees where the gay colors fluttered in summer there were now only the desolate sand-boxes knee-deep in crusted ice. When he crossed the hills the wind blew cold as misery, and if the sun was out he tramped with his eyes squinted up against the hard dimensionless glare.

In April the winter ceased abruptly. The snow ran down into Lake Erminie scarcely tarrying for the early golfers to brave the season with red and black balls. Without elation, without an interval of moist glory the cold was gone.

Dexter knew that there was something dismal about this northern spring, just as he knew there was something gorgeous about the fall. Fall made him clench his hands and tremble and repeat idiotic sentences to himself and make brisk abrupt gestures of command to imaginary audiences and armies. October filled him with hope which November raised to a sort of ecstatic triumph, and in this wood the fleeting brilliant impressions of the summer at Lake Erminie were ready grist to his will. He became a golf champion and defeated Mr. T. A. Hedrick in a marvelous match played over a hundred times in the fairways of his imagination, a match each detail of which he changed about untiringly—sometimes winning with almost laughable ease, sometimes coming up magnificently from behind. Again, stepping from a Pierce-Arrow automobile, like Mr. Mortimer Jones, he strolled frigidly into the lounge of the Erminie Golf Club—or perhaps, surrounded by an admiring crowd, he gave an exhibition of fancy diving from the springboard of the Erminie Club raft… . Among those most impressed was Mr. Mortimer Jones.

When Diana Dickey came back from France in the spring of 1919, her parents considered that she had atoned for her nefarious past. She had served a year in the Red Cross and she was presumably engaged to a young American ace of position and charm. They could ask no more; of Diana's former sins only her nickname survived——

Diamond Dick!—she had selected it herself, of all the names in the world, when she was a thin, black-eyed child of ten.

“Diamond Dick,” she would insist, “that's my name. Anybody that won't call me that's a double darn fool.”

“But that's not a nice name for a little lady,” objected her governess. “If you want to have a boy's name why don't you call yourself George Washington?”

“Be-cause my name's Diamond Dick,” explained Diana patiently. “Can't you understand? I got to be named that be-cause if I don't I’ll have a fit and upset the family, see?”

She ended by having the fit—a fine frenzy that brought a disgusted nerve specialist out from New York—and the nickname too. And once in possession she set about modeling her facial expression on that of a butcher boy who delivered meats at Greenwich4 back doors. She stuck out her lower jaw and parted her lips on one side, exposing sections of her first teeth—and from this alarming aperture there issued the harsh voice of one far gone in crime.

“Miss Caruthers,” she would sneer crisply, “what's the idea of no jam? Do you wanta whack the side of the head?”

“Diana! I’m going to call your mother this minute!”

“Look at here!” threatened Diana darkly, “If you call her you’re liable to get a bullet the side of the head.”

Miss Caruthers raised her hand uneasily to her bangs. She was somewhat awed.

“Very well,” she said uncertainly, “if you want to act like a little ragamuffin——”

Diana did want to. The evolutions which she practiced daily on the sidewalk and which were thought by the neighbors to be some new form of hop-scotch were in reality the preliminary work on an Apache slouch.

There was once a priest with cold, watery eyes, who, in the still of the night, wept cold tears. He wept because the afternoons were warm and long and he was unable to attain a complete mystical union with our Lord. Sometimes, near four o’clock, there was a rustle of Swede girls along the path by his window and in their shrill laughter he found a terrible dissonance that made him pray aloud for the twilight to come. At twilight the laughter and the voices were quieter but several times he had walked past Romberg's Drug Store when it was dusk and the yellow lights shone inside and the nickel taps of the soda fountain were gleaming, and he had found the scent of cheap toilet soap desperately sweet upon the air. He passed that way when he returned from hearing confessions on Saturday nights and he grew careful to walk on the other side of the street so that the smell of the soap would float upward somewhere between its counter and his nostrils as it drifted, rather like incense, toward the Summer moon.

But there was no escape from the hot madness of four o’clock. From his window as far as he could see, the Dakota wheat thronged the valley of the Red River. The wheat was terrible to look upon and the carpet pattern to which in agony he bent his eyes sent his thought brooding through grotesque labyrinths, open always to the unavoidable sun.

One afternoon when he had reached the point where the mind runs down like an old clock, his housekeeper brought into his study a beautiful, intense little boy of eleven named Rudolph Miller. The little boy sat down in a patch of sunshine and the priest, at his walnut desk, pretended to be very busy. This was to conceal his relief that someone had come into his haunted room.

Presently he turned around and found himself staring into two enormous and staccato eyes, lit with gleaming points of cobalt light. For a moment their expression startled him—then he saw that his visitor was in a state of abject fear.

“Your mouth is trembling,” said Father Schwartz, in a haggard voice.

The little boy covered his quivering mouth with his hand.

“Are you in trouble?” asked Father Schwartz, sharply. “Take your hand away from your mouth and tell me what's the matter.”

At the Great American Lunch Hour young George Rollins straightened his desk with an assumed air of interest. No one in the office must know that he was in a hurry, for success is a matter of atmosphere, and it is not well to advertise the fact that your mind is separated from your work by a distance of seven hundred miles. Offices are unreasonable.

But, once out of the building, he set his teeth and began to run, glancing now and then at the gay noon of early spring, which filled Times Square and loitered less than twenty feet, it seemed, over the heads of the crowd. The crowd all looked slightly upward and took deep March breaths and the sun dazzled their eyes so that scarcely anyone saw anyone else but only his own reflection on the sky.

George Rollins, whose mind was over seven hundred miles away, thought that the whole outdoors was horrible. He rushed into the subway and for ninety-five blocks bent a frenzied glance on a carcard which showed vividly how he had only one chance in five of keeping his teeth for ten years. At 137th Street he broke off his study of commercial art, left the subway and began to run again, a tireless, anxious run that brought him this time to his home—one room in a high, horrible apartment house in the middle of nowhere.

There it was on the bureau, the letter—in sacred ink, on blessed paper—all over the city people, if they listened, could hear the beating of George Rollins’ heart. He read the commas, the blots, and the thumbsmudges—then he threw himself hopelessly upon his bed.

He was in a mess, one of those deplorable messes which are ordinary incidents in the life of the poor—which follow poverty like birds of prey. The poor go under or go up or go wrong or even go on, somehow, in a way the poor have—but George Rollins was so new to poverty that he thought his case was the only one in the world.

When Fifi visited her Long Island aunts the first time she was only ten years old, but after she went back to New York the man who worked around the place said that the sand dunes would never be the same again. She had spoiled them. When she left, everything on Montauk Point seemed sad and futile and broken and old. Even the gulls wheeled about less enthusiastically, as if they missed the brown, hardy little girl with big eyes who played barefoot in the sand.

The years bleached out Fifi's tan and turned her a pale-pink color, but she still managed to spoil many places and plans for many hopeful men. So when at last it was announced in the best newspapers that she had concentrated on a gentleman named Van Tyne everyone was rather glad that all the sadness and longing that followed in her wake should become the responsibility of one self-sacrificing individual; not better for the individual, but for Fifi's little world very much better indeed.

The engagement was not announced on the sporting page, nor even in the help-wanted column, because Fifi's family belonged to the Society for the Preservation of Large Fortunes; and Mr. Van Tyne was descended from the man who accidentally founded that society, back before the Civil War. It appeared on the page of great names and was illustrated by a picture of a cross-eyed young lady holding the hand of a savage gentleman with four rows of teeth. That was how their pictures came out, anyhow, and the public was pleased to know that they were ugly monsters for all their money, and everyone was satisfied all around. The society editor set up a column telling how Mrs. Van Tyne started off in the Aquitania wearing a blue traveling dress of starched felt with a round square hat to match; and so far as human events can be prophesied, Fifi was as good as married; or, as not a few young men considered, as bad as married.

“An exceptionally brilliant match,” remarked Aunt Cal on the eve of the wedding, as she sat in her house on Montauk Point and clipped the notice for the cousins in Scotland, and then she added abstractedly, “All is forgiven.”

“Why, Cal!” cried Aunt Josephine. “What do you mean when you say all is forgiven? Fifi has never injured you in any way.”

The first letter, crumpled into an emotional ball, lay at his elbow, and it did not matter faintly now what this second letter contained. For a long time after he had stripped off the envelope, he still gazed up at the oil painting of slain grouse over the sideboard, just as though he had not faced it every morning at breakfast for the past twelve years. Finally he lowered his eyes and began to read:

“What have I got out of life?” repeated John Jackson aloud, raising up his head.

He wanted no more breakfast, so he picked up both letters and went out on his wide front porch to smoke a cigar and lie about for a lazy half hour before he went downtown. He had done this each morning for ten years—ever since his wife ran off one windy night and gave him back the custody of his leisure hours. He loved to rest on this porch in the fresh warm mornings and through a porthole in the green vines watch the automobiles pass along the street, the widest, shadiest, pleasantest street in town.

“What have I got out of life?” he said again, sitting down on a creeping wicker chair; and then, after a long pause, he whispered,

“Nothing.”

The word frightened him. In all his forty-five years he had never said such a thing before. His greatest tragedies had not embittered him, only made him sad. But here beside the warm friendly rain that tumbled from his eaves onto the familiar lawn, he knew at last that life had stripped him clean of all happiness and all illusion.

He knew this because of the crumpled ball which closed out his hope in his only son.

The sidewalks were scratched with brittle leaves and the wind blew the wet laundry stiff on the line. Snow before night, sure. Autumn was over. This, of course, raised the coal question and the Christmas question; but Roger Halsey, standing on his own front porch, announced to the dead suburban sky that he hadn't time for worrying about the weather. Then he let himself hurriedly into the house and left the subject out in the cold twilight.

The hall was dark, but from above he heard the voices of his wife and the nursemaid and the baby in one of their interminable conversations, which consisted chiefly of “Don’t!” and “Look out, Maxy!” and “Oh, there he goes!” punctuated by wild threats and vague bumpings and the recurrent sound of small, venturing feet.

Roger turned on the hall light and walked into the living room and turned on the red silk lamp. He put his bulging portfolio on the table, and sitting down rested his intense young face in his hand for a few minutes, shading his eyes carefully from the light. Then he lit a cigarette, squashed it out, and going to the foot of the stairs called for his wife.

“Gretchen!”

“Hello, dear.” Her voice was full of laughter. “Come see baby.” He swore softly.

“I can't see baby now,” he said aloud. “How long ‘fore you’ll be down?”

There was a mysterious pause and then a succession of Don’ts and Look out, Maxys, evidently meant to avert some threatened catastrophe.

“How long ‘fore you’ll be down?” repeated Roger, slightly irritated.

“Oh, I’ll be right down.”

“How soon?” he shouted.

He had trouble every day at this hour in adapting his voice from the urgent key of the city to the proper casualness for a model home. But tonight he was deliberately impatient. It almost disappointed him when Gretchen came running down the stairs, three at a time, crying “What is it?” in a rather surprised voice.

They kissed—lingered over it some moments. They had been married three years, and they were much more in love than that implies. It was seldom that they hated each other with that violent hate of which only young couples are capable, for Roger was still actively sensitive to her beauty.

“Come in here,” he said abruptly. “I want to talk to you.”