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
"No Flowers"
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
Published in the 21 July 1934 issue of the Saturday Evening Post, "No Flowers" is one of Fitzgerald's Great Depression stories that teaches a lesson about the frugality and humility many mainstream American outlets felt were necessary to survive the economic devastation of the decade. At first glance, the story can seem frivolous or even silly compared to the proletarian fiction pouring from the pens of more radical writers. A young woman, Marjorie, struggles to accept that she lives in "the tin age," as opposed to the golden age her mother, Amanda, enjoyed as a teenager. And what makes it a tin age? Her boyfriend, Billy Johns (no relation to Billy Joel, although we try our best to force one), not only can't afford a corsage for the prom they're scheduled to attend, but due to the austerity dictates of the time, aren't allowed. The story contrasts Marjorie's moral challenges at the dance to those of her mother and her grandmother, Lucy, both of whom have melancholy experiences at their own proms that challenge their ethical sensibilities. As its strangely renunciatory title suggests, "No Flowers" is an anti-romanticist story that explores the struggles of the post-jazz generation to find some purpose in maturation in a world that seems to have lost all sense of fun. It's not a great story by any means, but as we argue, even the most expendable of Fitzgerald stories have interesting ideas.