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
"Babylon Revisited"
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In late 1930 as Zelda Fitzgerald remained hospitalized in a sanitarium trying to regain her sanity her husband cranked out a frenzied series of stories to pay for her treatment. Out of this whirlwind of effort came "Babylon Revisited," which appeared originally in the February 21, 1931, issue of the Saturday Evening Post and later anchored the fourth and final story collection of his life, Taps at Reveille (1935). "Babylon" is the mack daddy of all Fitzgerald stories, widely hailed as the best of his short fiction and his most widely anthologized. This episode asks why the story enjoys that exalted status. While celebrating its virtuoso craftsmanship and complex characterization, we also note that the story appeals in part because it offers such a capsule portrait of the Fitzgeralds' own biographical tragedy, a hymn to their own self-destruction against the sudden shift from the Boom to the Great Depression. The story also captures the romance of expatriate Paris, which many of its central sites---the Right Bank's Ritz Bar, most famously---still attracting Fitzgerald fans galore each year. This story is hard to top, but we also recognize that it's important not to let its reputation overshadow his other stories.