I'd Die for You: And Other Lost Stories

A collection of the last remaining unpublished and uncollected short stories by F. Scott Fitzgerald, the iconic American writer of The Great Gatsby who is more widely read today than ever. “A treasure trove of tales too dark for the magazines of the 1930s. Lucky us” (Newsday). “His best readers will find much to enjoy” (The New York Times Book Review).

I’d Die For You, edited by Anne Margaret Daniel, is a collection of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s stories never widely shared. Some were submitted individually to major magazines during the 1930s and accepted for publication during Fitzgerald’s lifetime, but never printed. Some were written as movie scenarios and sent to studios or producers, but not filmed. Others are stories that could not be sold because their subject matter or style departed from what editors expected of Fitzgerald.

Some of the eighteen stories were physically lost, coming to light only in the past few years. All were lost, in one sense or another: lost in the painful shuffle of the difficulties of Fitzgerald’s life in the middle 1930s; lost to readers because contemporary editors did not understand or accept what he was trying to write; lost because archives are like that. Readers will experience here Fitzgerald writing about controversial topics, depicting young men and women who actually spoke and thought more as young men and women did, without censorship. Rather than permit changes and sanitizing by his contemporary editors, Fitzgerald preferred to let his work remain unpublished, even at a time when he was in great need of money and review attention.

Written in his characteristically beautiful, sharp, and surprising language, exploring themes both familiar and fresh, these stories provide new insight into the bold and uncompromising arc of Fitzgerald’s career. I’d Die For You is a revealing, intimate look at Fitzgerald’s creative process that shows him to be a writer working at the fore of modern literature—in all its developing complexities.

F. Scott Fitzgerald was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1896. He attended Princeton University, joined the United States Army during World War I, and published his first novel, This Side of Paradise, in 1920. That same year he married Zelda Sayre and for the next decade the couple lived in New York, Paris, and on the Riviera. Fitzgerald’s novels include The Beautiful and Damned, The Great Gatsby, and Tender Is the Night. He died at the age of forty-four while working on The Last Tycoon. Fitzgerald’s fiction has secured his reputation as one of the most important American writers of the twentieth century.

Anne Margaret Daniel teaches literature at the New School. Her articles, essays, and reviews have appeared in books, critical editions, magazines, and journals from The New York Times to The Times Literary Supplement. Anne Margaret has degrees in American history and English literature from Harvard (A.B.), Georgetown (M.A.), and Princeton (Ph.D). As a graduate student at Princeton in 1996, she gave the keynote lecture at the F. Scott Fitzgerald Centenary Conference, and has published extensively on his writing, and on American Modernism. Anne Margaret lives in Manhattan and in upstate New York with her husband.