Master the 40: The Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald
In 1929 F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote Ernest Hemingway that because his short stories now earned $4000 a pop he was "an old whore" who had "mastered the 40 positions" when "in her youth one was enough." But were the upwards of 180 stories he cranked out when not writing The Great Gatsby really the work of a literary prostitute selling out his talent for a fast buck? Kirk Curnutt and Robert Trogdon don't think so. Each episode they draw a random title from a hat and explore its place in Fitzgerald's career, in the magazines such as the Saturday Evening Post or Esquire where it may have appeared, and in the overall development of the American short story. Along the way, they talk literary politics, history, and gossip from the 1920s and 1930s, rediscovering the lively personalities and rivalries that tried to define the porous boundaries between commercial and artistic fiction, between the popular and the avant-garde, between the forgotten and the canonized.
Master the 40: The Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald
Diamond Dick and the First Law of Woman
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A contender for one of the strangest Fitzgerald titles ever, "Diamond Dick and the First Law of Woman," published in April 1924, tells the story of a maverick young debutante, Diana Dickey, who returns from the Western front where she served as a canteen girl to spend the next five years wondering what to do with her life. Only when wounded aviator Charlie Abbott returns from a long convalescence in Paris does Diana seem to reenact her decidedly masculine persona of "Diamond Dick," the hero of hundreds of nineteenth-century dime novels, and find her purpose. Weirdly, her plan to save Charlie from dissipation involves a gun, which Diana uses to shake him from a bad case of ... amnesia. That's right, long before it became a soap-opera cliche, Fitzgerald resorted to a dubious trope that can prompt some whiplash-inducing plot twists. We look at the story's flawed construction and explore Fitzgerald's unhappy relationship with Hearst's International, the lesser sibling to William Randolph Hearst's more famous fiction magazine, Cosmopolitan. "Diamond Dick" may not be perfect, but it's never boring. More importantly, it belongs in the Venn diagram overlap between two important circles of Fitzgerald stories: "The Vegetable" cluster (stories written to relieve the writer's finances from his disastrous foray into the theater) and "The Gatsby" cluster (stories that rehearse themes and specific lines that will reappear in his classic 1925 novel).