The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Modern Library Classics)

Edited and with an Introduction by Bryant Mangum
Foreword by Roxana Robinson

Benediction • Head and Shoulders • Bernice Bobs Her Hair • The Ice Palace • The Offshore Pirate • May Day • The Jelly Bean • The Diamond as Big as the Ritz • Winter Dreams • Absolution

In the euphoric months before and after the publication of This Side of Paradise, F. Scott Fitzgerald, the flapper’s historian and poet laureate of the Jazz Age, wrote the ten stories that appear in this unique collection. Exploring characters and themes that would appear in his later works, such as The Beautiful and Damned and The Great Gatsby, these early selections are among the very best of Fitzgerald’s many short stories.

This Modern Library Paperback Classic includes notes, an appendix of nonfiction essays by Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald and their contemporaries, and vintage magazine illustrations.

Bryant Mangum is a professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University. He is the author of A Fortune Yet: Money in the Art of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Short Stories.


Roxana Robinson is the author of three novels, Summer Light, Sweetwater, and This Is My Daughter; a biography of Georgia O’Keeffe; and three short story collections, including A Perfect Stranger and Other Stories. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the MacDowell Colony. She lives in New York.