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Scott Fitzgerald wrote these stories about America in the 1920s, when everyone seemed to be dancing, spending money, and having parties. Some stories are silly and funny, like the man who wears half a camel costume to a party. Others are sad or strange: one man is born as an old man and grows younger every year. It is like opening a window into a loud, shiny party and noticing that not everyone there is happy.
Fitzgerald arranged the collection himself and even annotated it: the contents pages carry his own short notes on where each story came from and what he thought of it. The book opens with the section he called My Last Flappers, stories of young people at parties and dances, then moves through tales like May Day and The Diamond as Big as the Ritz, and closes with pieces he labelled unclassified masterpieces: fables, a play, and Benjamin Button.
Under the sparkle runs a steady set of themes: money and what it buys, youth and its brief blaze, love pursued at the wrong parties, and the sadness waiting at the edge of the dance floor. Fitzgerald could write a joke and a heartbreak in the same paragraph, and his sentences still gleam a century later.
The collection lasts because it is both a party and a warning. It gave the era its name, the Jazz Age, and it still defines how we picture the 1920s: the dresses, the bands, the money, the crash still to come. Read it and you meet the twenties as their brightest witness saw them, from inside.
F. Scott Fitzgerald published Tales of the Jazz Age in 1922, gathering the stories that named an era. Some are feather-light: The Camel’s Back was written in one day in New Orleans to buy a six hundred dollar wrist watch. Others turn dark: May Day follows a mob through a night of riots, and The Diamond as Big as the Ritz makes American wealth a fable. Benjamin Button is born old and ages backward. Party music, with doom underneath.
This collection is where the Jazz Age named itself. Fitzgerald published it in 1922, two years after This Side of Paradise made him the voice of young America, and he built the book as a deliberate self portrait: eleven pieces in sections he called My Last Flappers, Fantasies, and Unclassified Masterpieces, each introduced by his own wry notes on how it was written and what it cost him. Expect range. There is pure farce in The Camel’s Back, dashed off in one day in New Orleans to pay for a six hundred dollar wrist watch, and there is May Day, a long, cold story of a drunken night, a mob, and men the war had broken. The Diamond as Big as the Ritz stretches American money until it becomes fairy tale and horror at once, while The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, a man born old who ages in reverse, has outlived nearly everything else he wrote. The sentences are the real event: bright, musical, exact. Starvard shelves this as the essential short Fitzgerald, the place where his gift is most various and his famous sadness already audible under the dance music.
Edition: Text: Project Gutenberg ebook 6695.
The first chapter
Title: Tales of the Jazz Age
Author: F. Scott Fitzgerald
Release date: October 1, 2004 [eBook #6695]
Most recently updated: August 6, 2025
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/6695
Credits: Steve Schulze, Charles Franks, the Online Distributed Proofreading Team and Henry Flower
TALES OF THE JAZZ AGE
BY
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
1922
Copyright, 1922, by
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
Copyright, 1920, by THE VANITY FAIR PUB. CO., INC.
Copyright, 1920, 1921, by THE METROPOLITAN PUBLICATIONS, INC.
Copyright, 1920, by THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE
Copyright, 1920, by THE CURTIS PUBLISHING CO.
Copyright, 1920, 1921, by THE SMART SET CO.
Printed in the United States of America
Published September, 1922
QUITE INAPPROPRIATELY
TO MY MOTHER
Source: Project Gutenberg. Published 1922. US public domain (author died 1940). Share this book: WhatsApp
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