Fitzgerald was a major novelist, but at least a dozen of his stories rank among the very best short fiction written in the twentieth century. Fitzgerald 's whole life was bound up with his short stories; indeed, the story of his life cannot be told without them. Only through an acquaintance with his career as a short-fiction writer can the complex man who now occupies a major position in the literary and mythic life of the nation be understood.
Perhaps no other American writer has felt himself as inextricably tied to the history of his country as F. Scott Fitzgerald . Born in 1896, at the end of an era of unprecedented national growth, he lived to see the traditions that had guided his parents' generation and his own childhood cast aside; indeed, he was said by his contemporaries to have precipitated the upheaval in manners and morals that accompanied the end of World War I. Never as "lost" as the members of his generation described in Paris by Gertrude Stein, Fitzgerald nevertheless experienced and even personified the "boom" of the 1920s and the "bust" of the 1930s.
