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
Porcelain and Pink
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Just when you thought your stocking couldn't get any more stuffed this Christmas, we're slipping underneath your holly jolly to drop our second episode of season two. "Porcelain and Pink" appeared in the January 1920 issue of The Smart Set, one month before F. Scott Fitzgerald debuted in the Saturday Evening Post and two before the publication of This Side of Paradise. A charming trifle, "P&P" tells the story of a young flapper, Julie, luxuriating in a blue bathtub who teases a young literary beau by pretending to be her sister (the gentleman's girlfriend), Lois. Written as a one-act play, the slight (and we do mean slight) comedy reminds us that early in his career Fitzgerald was fond of cranking out fiction written in the form of a theater script. Our discussion takes us to the vaudeville halls where the story's tantalizing set-up (Julie is bathing au naturel, naturally) makes burlesque sense. Trying to find a theme here is like trying to snatch a floating bubble, but we do connect "Porcelain and Pink" to other, more significant stories from 1920 such as "Head and Shoulders" and "Bernice Bobs Her Hair." We also offer a history of the bathtub (!) and a long list of iconic bathing moments in art, music, and literature. Rub-a-dub-dub!