"To write it took three months; to conceive it--three minutes; to collect the data in it--all my life." So said F. Scott Fitzgerald regarding This Side of Paradise, the novel he began writing in November 1917 and published on March 26, 1920. This Side of Paradise launched Fitzgerald as the "Prophet of the Jazz Age" and the spokesman for his generation. It is still one of the major reasons for his fame today. The story of how Fitzgerald wrote and published the book is fascinating. In The Making of "This Side of Paradise", James West studies the inception, composition,...

F. Scott Fitzgerald's Taps at Reveille is one of the author's strongest collections of short fiction. It brings together several of his best stories from the late 1920s and early 1930s, including 'Crazy Sunday', and 'Babylon Revisited', a story considered by many to be his masterpiece in the genre. Fitzgerald assembled the collection in a time of debt and personal difficulty, working with texts that had, in many cases, been censored by the Saturday Evening Post and other magazines. Using evidence from the drafts that bear Fitzgerald's final revisions, this edition presents for the first time...

The twenty short stories in A Change of Class were published by F. Scott Fitzgerald between September 1931 and March 1937. Fitzgerald wrote these stories for money, which he badly needed. His wife was being treated at expensive sanitariums and he was heavily in debt to his publisher and literary agent. The stories in A Change of Class are not all among Fitzgerald's best, but they are important in his career. They concern the Great Depression, social striving, class divisions, and professionalism. Several are set in the world of medicine and depict the lives of doctors, nurses, and their...