“Flappers and Philosophers” by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Published in 1920, Flappers and Philosophers was F. Scott Fitzgerald’s first collection of short stories. First appearing separately in such magazines at The Saturday Evening Post and Esquire, these eight stories were collected and published the same year has his first novel, This Side of Paradise. It was the novel that turned Fitzgerald into an overnight literary sensation – and at age 24. But it was the short stories that he continued to write for the rest of his life that supported him financially.  

The stories are generally about people in the upper middle and upper classes. They’re set in the first two decades of the 20^th century and are something of period pieces – the slang, the music references, and social manners mark them with their time. Two of the stories, “The Offshore Pirate” and “The Ice Palace,” also contain references that today, 100 years after their publication, could only be called racist.

 

“The Offshore Pirate” is about a young woman who is bored with life and chooses only the worst men, whose uncle and guardian is at his wits end to marry her off (and make someone else responsible for her). She’s agreeably kidnapped on her uncle’s yacht by a young irate who, with his band of musicians, is making off with a stolen fortune. “The Ice Palace” is about a young woman from the South who’s determined to escape her town (and the young men it contains) and marry a Northerner. She almost gets her wish.

 

The young F. Scott Fitzgerald

“Head and Shoulders” concerns what seem to be a highly mismatched couple, a brainy man who exists only for the study of his books and a stage actress. They’ll end up changing positions. “The Cut-Glass Bowl” is the story of a woman of fading beauty mirrors the decline in the family wealth.

 

“Bernice Bobs Her Hair” is set right at the beginning of the flapper age. A young woman visiting her cousin undergoes something of a “Pygmalion” change at the hands of the cousin, whose verbal cruelty will eventually get its comeuppance. “Benediction” is something of an abrupt change of subject – a young woman visits the brother she hasn’t seen for 17 years – the brother who is studying to become a Jesuit priest. During the visit, she has an unexpected experience.

 

“Dalyrimple Goes Wrong” is about a war hero from the Great War who comes home to adulation which quickly fades. He takes something of a menial job, until he realizes that burglary might be more lucrative. And “The Four Fists” is the story of a young men who’s punched in the jaw on four separate occasions of his life – and each punch teaches him something important.

 

The collection is eight very different stories, showing Fitzgerald at the very beginning of his literary career. Each has something of a surprising twist. And each has characters who are recognizable, even at a distance of a century.

 

"The Great Gatsby" by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Sometimes, you’re remembered for your commercial failures rather than the books the critics celebrate.

 

In 1925, F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) published The Great Gatsby. Following the commercial and critical successes of This Side of Paradise (1920) and The Beautiful and the Damned (1922), Gatsby received generally favorable reviews from the critics, but it flopped commercially. Nine years passed before he published his final novel, Tender is the Night(1934). An uncompleted novel, The Last Tycoon, was finished by a friend and published in 1941. 

 

Yet of all his novels (and a multitude of stories and articles written for magazines), it is The Great Gatsby that is the best remembered and the book that made his literary reputation. And more than one critic has named it in the running for “the great American novel.”

 

Gatsby is both a novel of its time and a novel that captured its time. Its heart is a love story, one between a young soldier from a poor farming family in Minnesota and a Louisville debutante. But the love story, mostly existing in the past, only gradually unfolds. 

 

Jay Gatsby is an extremely wealthy man living in an opulent mansion on Long Island. Next door, in a small, rented house sandwiched between estates, lives Nick Carraway, the narrator of the story, a 30-year-old trying to make his way as a salesman in the bond market. Just across the bay is the home of Tom and Daisy Buchanan. Tom has inherited his wealth from his Chicago family; Daisy is a former debutante from Louisville who was wooed and sought after by man young men.

 

F. Scott Fitzgerald about 1921

Tom, despite his wealth, is something of a brute. He has little polish and considerable vulgarity; he’s also having an affair with the wife of the owner of the local gas station. The polish and manners seem to belong to Jay Gatsby, who throws ongoing lavish parties that people seem to invite themselves to. Rumors abound about the source of Gatsby’s wealth, including ties he has to the gangster who supposedly fixed the 1919 World Series.

 

Carraway is a cousin of Daisy, and Gatsby invites him to a party. What Gatsby really wants is to meet Daisy privately, at Nick’s house. He and Daisy have a past. 

 

Fitzgerald gradually builds the tension of the story, using Carraway as both an agent of narrative development and the recorder of events. The reader senses that this will not end well; some kind of tragedy seems to be inevitably unfolding. The surprise is what and how it happens – and who ends up being the character the reader admires the most.

 

There are numerous editions of the book available. The one I read was recently published by T.S. Poetry Press. With an introduction by poet Tania Runyan, it includes the full text of the story, historical context, fashion notes, vintage illustrations, and a Gatsby poem and poetry prompt. 

 

The Great Gatsby is a novel of the Jazz Age, a story of rich people whose main occupation seems to be drinking and entertaining themselves. It’s also a story of old money and new money, the decay of values, and the superficiality of what passes as society and celebrity. 

“The Benson Murder Case” by S.S. Van Dine

It’s 1926. It’s the Jazz Age. Calvin Coolidge is in the White House. Prohibition is in full flood, or drought; so is the crime associated with it. Evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson disappears for a time. A hurricane devastates Miami. Greta Garbo makes her American film debut. Rudolph Valentino dies. A.A. Milne publishes Winnie-the-Pooh. The St. Louis Cardinals beat the New York Yankees to win their first World Series title. 

Willard Huntington Wright (1888-1939) was an art critic who had been literary editor of the Los Angeles Times, an editor of The Smart Set, a novelist, an art historian, and art exhibition organizer. A friend of H.L. Mencken and an admirer of the novels of Theodore Dreiser, Wright hated romance and detective fiction with a passion. 

Willard Huntington Wright, aka S.S. Van Dine

But in 1923, recovering officially from a nervous breakdown but actually from a cocaine addiction, Wright began to binge on mystery and detective novels. He talked with an old Harvard classmate, the legendary Max Perkins of Scribner’s, about a book centering on a private detective who was snobbish, erudite, and educated in art and music. Perkins was intrigued, and in 1926, Wright published the first Philo Vance detective story, The Benson Murder Case. 

Too embarrassed to use his own name, he adopted the pen name of S.S. Van Dine. He even made S.S. Van Dine a character in the story – “Van,” an attorney and Philo Vance’s sidekick and chronicler. Vance is close friends with John F.-X. Markham, district attorney for New York County. 

Alvin Benson is a stockbroker and financial advisor. Early one morning, his housekeeper discovers his body in the living room of his apartment on West 48^th Street in New York City. He’s seated in a chair, legs still crossed, a book open in front of him – and a bullet hole through his head. A woman’s handbag and gloves are found on the fireplace mantle. Both the police and the district attorney’s office investigate, and Markham invites his friend Philo Vance along to learn how investigations are done. 

Vance soon realizes that Markham and the police tend to follow circumstantial evidence, ignoring what he calls the “psychology of the crime.” In his breezy, irreverent, and borderline condescending manger, Vance slowly educates his friend on how to consider and investigate the crime.

This first Philo Vance mystery is important for its introduction to how the man thinks and analyzes. Considerable and detailed attention is paid to his methods, his thought processes, and his personality, which can often be as maddening to the reader as it is to Markham and the police. The novel is also filled with descriptions of Jazz Age New York – the clubs, the concerts, the entertainments, and how people of the servant class and upper middle class lived. Almost everyone seems to smoke, and smoke rather elegantly. 

Markham considers suspect after suspect, and then he watches Vance demolish one evidentiary case after another, gradually brining the focus to the one person the killer must be. In the process, we realize that The Benson Murder Casemay be as much a sociology and psychology text as it is a murder mystery. The author has an incredibly detailed eye for people, settings, and the New York City of the period.

Wright would publish 12 Philo Vance mysteries between 1926 and his death in 1939. The books were highly successful and made him a lot of money. As successful as his mysteries were, he camouflaged his name behind the pseudonym; he was too embarrassed to acknowledge his work openly.

Over the next several weeks, I’ll be looking at the Philo Vance mysteries, the author, and what place the stories have in the Golden Age of the Mystery Novel.

Top photograph: New York City in the 1920s.