Although for the general reader F. Scott Fitzgerald 's fame rests primarily on one novel, The Great Gatsby (1925), his creative life, from youth to early death, found full expression in some 160 short stories. These works not only provided the income that sustained Fitzgerald when writing his novels, but they also enhanced the legend that grew up around Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald after his first novel, This Side of Paradise (1920), appeared at the beginning of the Jazz Age. For ten years thereafter the pages of the Saturday Evening Post, Redbook, Woman's Home Companion , and other mass-circulation magazines were filled with romantic tales of young lovers, of dreamers and doers, of madcap heroines and sad young men, many of whom seemed to reflect aspects of the lives of their creator and his wife.

Fitzgerald is one of the most widely recognized names in American literature, yet the legend he so...