Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Bryant Mangum

Critical Essay by Bryant Mangum

SOURCE: Mangum, Bryant. “The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald.” In The Cambridge Companion to F. Scott Fitzgerald, edited by Ruth Prigozy, pp. 57-78. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

In the following essay, Mangum traces the relationship between Fitzgerald's early short stories and his novels, asserting that he used the shorter pieces as a “workshop for subjects, themes, and techniques that he would continue to develop in later stories and novels.”

In an all-too-brief professional career of approximately twenty years, Fitzgerald wrote 178 short stories, most of them for sale to commercial magazines of the 1920s and 1930s. Thirty-nine of these stories were collected in four separate volumes, one accompanying each of the four novels which Scribners published during Fitzgerald's lifetime: Flappers and Philosophers (1920) was the companion volume for This Side of Paradise (1920); Tales of the Jazz Age (1922) for The Beautiful and Damned (1922); All the Sad...
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