In preparing this collection, I have used all of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novels (This Side of Paradise, The Beautiful and Damned, The Great Gatsby, Tender Is the Night, and The Love of the Last Tycoon) and also his collections of short stories, from those published during his lifetime (Flappers and Philosophers, Tales of the Jazz Age, All the Sad Young Men, and Taps at Reveille) to those, including stories written with Zelda Fitzgerald, published since 1940. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s St. Paul Plays, 1911–1914 (ed. Alan Margolies), the scripts of his shows for the Princeton Triangle Club, and his play The Vegetable were valuable for responding to Fitzgerald’s screenplays and scenarios included here. Poems 1911–1940 (ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli) shows his touch for light verse. The Notebooks of F. Scott Fitzgerald and The Crack-Up are essential reading for anyone writing on Fitzgerald. The magisterial Cambridge Edition of the Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald, currently in thirteen volumes, edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli (volumes 1 and 2) and James L. W. West III (volumes 3–13) is invaluable to scholars, and lovers, of Fitzgerald’s writing. It has been a chief resource for this book. My explanatory notes are modeled upon those in the Cambridge Fitzgerald.
Seven principal volumes contain all of Fitzgerald’s letters published to date: The Letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald (ed. Andrew Turnbull); Correspondence of F. Scott Fitzgerald (eds. Bruccoli and Margaret W. Duggan); Letters to His Daughter (ed. Turnbull); Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda (eds. Jackson R. Bryer and Cathy W. Barks); Dear Scott/Dear Max: The F. Scott Fitzgerald–Maxwell Perkins Correspondence (eds. John Kuehl and Bryer); As Ever, Scott Fitz—: Letters Between F. Scott Fitzgerald and His Literary Agent, Harold Ober, 1919–1940 (ed. Bruccoli); and A Life in Letters (ed. Bruccoli). Much correspondence from, and most correspondence to, Fitzgerald remains unpublished, however.
My work on this volume draws primarily from the Fitzgerald Papers in the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections at Princeton University: the F. Scott Fitzgerald Papers, including the Additional Papers; the Zelda Fitzgerald Papers; and the John Biggs Jr. Collection of F. Scott Fitzgerald Estate Papers. Fitzgerald remains his own best resource for anyone writing about him, his publications, and his life. He saved everything from scribbled notes on drink coasters and restaurant menus to manuscript drafts to final tearsheets (on which he often wrote further revisions and notes). He kept files of interesting newspaper clippings, illustrations he liked, lists of books he was reading, and very much more. His scrapbooks, now available online, are at once a pleasure and a crucial resource. The Daily Princetonian and the Princeton Alumni Weekly provide the principal information on Fitzgerald’s time on campus, from 1913 to 1917. “The I.O.U.” (in manuscript and typescript) is at Yale’s Beinecke Library. The typescripts of “Thumbs Up” and “Dentist Appointment,” and the only known version of “The Couple” (part typescript and part manuscript), and the Ledger of his life and publications (now available online) are at the University of South Carolina’s Irvin Department of Rare Books and Special Collections. The original card files of Fitzgerald’s story submissions and revisions, still the property of Harold Ober Associates, provided correct dates and in some cases alternate titles, as well as the responses from contemporary magazines to which stories were submitted.
In his scrapbooks, Fitzgerald himself compiled a comprehensive record of the contemporary critical reception of his writings. He kept reviews, columns, and even advertisements that often cannot be recovered in any searches of online newspaper and magazine databases—essential material that would otherwise be lost. Mary Jo Tate’s Critical Companion to F. Scott Fitzgerald, the entire run of the Fitzgerald/Hemingway Annual (1969–1979), and the F. Scott Fitzgerald Review (2002–present) are where the ladders start for complex contemporary scholarship on Fitzgerald.
Books about the Fitzgerald family have proliferated in recent years. The standard biography of Fitzgerald himself remains Bruccoli’s Some Sort of Epic Grandeur: The Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Versions of his life as viewed through Zelda’s include Nancy Milford’s Zelda and Sally Cline’s Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in Paradise. Zelda Fitzgerald’s novel Save Me the Waltz is a fictionalized account of the Fitzgeralds’ lives that has more resonance than biographies of Zelda completed to date. Eleanor Lanahan’s Scottie: The Daughter Of . . . is a compassionate biography of Scottie Fitzgerald Lanahan Smith, based on primary sources.