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
The Rich Boy: Special Nov 15 Bonus Episode
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For reasons you have to tune in to discover, November 15 is an important day for at least three Fitzgerald diehards. So to celebrate we're offering a special bonus episode featuring our first ever special guest: James L. W. West III, the mastermind behind the Cambridge Edition of the Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald. From 1995 to 2019, Jim singlehandedly produced sixteen of the eighteen volumes that establish FSF's standard texts employing those alchemical arts known as textual editing. For our conversation, we dissect another of Fitzgerald's all-time greatest short stories, "The Rich Boy," which appeared in Red Book in January and February 1926 and went on to kick off All the Sad Young Men that same year. The story dissects the sense of superiority that at once drives Anson Hunter and yet leaves him leading a lonely life when he cannot commit to either the doomed Paula Legendre or Dolly Karger. We ask whether this story is an indictment of the rich in general or an anatomy of one aloof man. We also explore how the story's most famous line ("Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me") stereotyped its author, most notably when Ernest Hemingway appropriated it to insult Fitzgerald by name in "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" (1936). We also test Jim's patience by forcing him to play a game of "Flapper or Not a Flapper?", quizzing his name recognition of Fitzgerald heroines. Finally, we learn that like Ludlow Fowler, the friend who inspired "The Rich Boy," Jim once found his life fodder for a novel. When he declines to name it for us, we make hunting it down our new mission.