The Apprentice Fiction

by F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Kuehl (Editor)

John Kuehl has collected here some of the prep-school and college stories discovered during the 1950s in a Fitzgerald scrapbook. Fitzgerald's subjects range from football to war, from entering the priesthood to flunking out of college. Foreshadowings of many of his major themes can be found in these early pieces of fiction, and he was even then exploring the writing techniques that were later to appear in his full-length fiction, particularly in his use of the narrator-observer. These stories illuminate the entire body of Fitzgerald's fiction, and show an astonishing process over a mere eight years from talented boy to incipient artist.

184 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1917

About the author

Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald, widely known simply as Scott Fitzgerald, was an American novelist, essayist, and short story writer. He is best known for his novels depicting the flamboyance and excess of the Jazz Age, a term he popularized in his short story collection Tales of the Jazz Age. During his lifetime, he published four novels, four story collections, and 164 short stories. Although he achieved temporary popular success and fortune in the 1920s, Fitzgerald received critical acclaim only after his death and is now widely regarded as one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century.
Born into a middle-class family in Saint Paul, Minnesota, Fitzgerald was raised primarily in New York state. He attended Princeton University where he befriended future literary critic Edmund Wilson. Owing to a failed romantic relationship with Chicago socialite Ginevra King, he dropped out in 1917 to join the United States Army during World War I. While stationed in Alabama, he met Zelda Sayre, a Southern debutante who belonged to Montgomery's exclusive country-club set. Although she initially rejected Fitzgerald's marriage proposal due to his lack of financial prospects, Zelda agreed to marry him after he published the commercially successful This Side of Paradise (1920). The novel became a cultural sensation and cemented his reputation as one of the eminent writers of the decade.
His second novel, The Beautiful and Damned (1922), propelled him further into the cultural elite. To maintain his affluent lifestyle, he wrote numerous stories for popular magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post, Collier's Weekly, and Esquire. During this period, Fitzgerald frequented Europe, where he befriended modernist writers and artists of the "Lost Generation" expatriate community, including Ernest Hemingway. His third novel, The Great Gatsby (1925), received generally favorable reviews but was a commercial failure, selling fewer than 23,000 copies in its first year. Despite its lackluster debut, The Great Gatsby is now hailed by some literary critics as the "Great American Novel". Following the deterioration of his wife's mental health and her placement in a mental institute for schizophrenia, Fitzgerald completed his final novel, Tender Is the Night (1934).
Struggling financially because of the declining popularity of his works during the Great Depression, Fitzgerald moved to Hollywood, where he embarked upon an unsuccessful career as a screenwriter. While living in Hollywood, he cohabited with columnist Sheilah Graham, his final companion before his death. After a long struggle with alcoholism, he attained sobriety only to die of a heart attack in 1940, at 44. His friend Edmund Wilson edited and published an unfinished fifth novel, The Last Tycoon (1941), after Fitzgerald's death. In 1993, a new edition was published as The Love of the Last Tycoon, edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli.

Reviews

[Mark Taylor · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Apprentice Fiction of F. Scott Fitzgerald, edited by John Kuehl and first published in 1965, collects Fitzgerald’s first 15 short stories, written from 1909-1917. The stories take us through Fitzgerald’s school career, from Saint Paul Academy to the Newman School, a prestigious Catholic prep academy in New Jersey, to Princeton University, which Fitzgerald left in 1917 before completing his degree. (Fitzgerald was posthumously awarded an honorary diploma from the Princeton class of 2017.)

Fitzgerald was very selective about the short stories that he selected for the collections that were published during his lifetime, so he might be annoyed if he knew that future generations of readers could pore over his prep school works. However, as juvenile as some of these stories might be, they do give us some insight into the future of Fitzgerald’s writing career.

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s very first appearance in print was at the age of 13 in the October, 1909 issue of Now and Then, the school newspaper of Saint Paul Academy. His short story “The Mystery of the Raymond Mortgage” was included in that issue. It was something of an inauspicious debut, as the readers of the detective story never actually learn who stole the titular mortgage. The story could almost be read as a parody of detective stories, as the mystery of the mortgage remains unsolved. However, it’s more likely that the shortcomings of the plot stem from the youth of the author, rather than a deliberate attempt on Fitzgerald’s part to parody the conventions of detective stories.

By the time Fitzgerald wrote “A Luckless Santa Claus,” in 1912 he had learned more about grabbing the reader’s attention. The first sentence of the story is: “Miss Harmon was responsible for the whole thing.” (p.48) Instantly, your curiosity is piqued. What whole thing is Miss Harmon responsible for?

Lifelong preoccupations of Fitzgerald’s surface in these early stories. His second story, published in the February, 1910 issue of Now and Then, is “Reade, Substitute Right Half.” It’s a brief sketch that shows us how a scrawny youth wins recognition for his stellar play on the football field. Fitzgerald longed for glory of his own on the athletic fields, but at 5 foot 8 and of slender build, it was unlikely that he would succeed at football. (According to F. Scott Fitzgerald in Minnesota: Toward the Summit, he weighed 138 pounds. P.77) One of Fitzgerald’s keenest disappointments during his college years was that he didn’t make the Princeton football team. While football never became a major theme in Fitzgerald’s work, he remained a devoted fan of the sport his whole life. When he suffered his fatal heart attack on December 21, 1940, he was reading and annotating his copy of the Princeton Alumni Weekly, making notes about the current Princeton football team.

Fitzgerald’s interest in the Civil War shows up in his stories “A Debt of Honor,” and “The Room with the Green Blinds.” Fitzgerald was somewhat torn between the North and the South. He was raised in the North, in Minnesota and New York, but his father’s family was from Maryland, a border state that remained in the Union but retained slavery and had many Southern sympathizers. Fitzgerald was always drawn towards lost causes, and he seems to have retained a romantic vision of a languid Southern aristocracy. And, of course, he married a Southern belle, Zelda Sayre, from Montgomery, Alabama. Zelda’s family was well entrenched in the Old South—her father was a Justice on the Alabama Supreme Court.

The weirdest story in The Apprentice Fiction is “Tarquin of Cheepside,” later revised and reprinted in Fitzgerald’s 1922 short story collection Tales of the Jazz Age. The story describes a young man’s flight from angry pursuers, and the friend who shelters him. Although the man who is fleeing remains unnamed, we learn that he had assaulted a woman. Once the pursuers have left, the young man starts writing a poem—“The Rape of Lucrece.” The young man is William Shakespeare! Fitzgerald is calling the greatest writer of all time a rapist! Didn’t anticipate that plot twist! The writing in “Tarquin” is impressionistic and poetic, but I would guess that the subject matter irked some readers.

Fitzgerald’s interest in the theater is also on display in his early stories. As a teenager, he wrote four plays for the Elizabethan Dramatic Club, a group of young amateur actors in Saint Paul. Fitzgerald also contributed to several shows for the Triangle Club, Princeton University’s dramatic club. “Shadow Laurels,” from April 1915, is presented as a play, complete with stage directions. There’s a marvelous line in it, as one of the characters says, “He was bright and clever—when we worked, he worked feverishly hard, but he was always drunk, night and day.” (p.74) The same could be said of F. Scott Fitzgerald himself.

The Princeton short story “Babes in the Woods” later shows up as Amory and Isabelle’s initial meeting in Fitzgerald’s first novel, This Side of Paradise, published in March of 1920. A line in the story “Sentiment—and the Use of Rouge” is later repeated in This Side of Paradise, as Eleanor is asked if she is a sentimentalist. She replies, “No, I’m a romantic. There’s a huge difference; a sentimental person thinks things will last, a romantic person hopes they won’t.” (p.150) This quote seems to be an apt description of Fitzgerald himself.

“The Pierian Springs and the Last Straw” is a very interesting story. I read the characters of Uncle George and Mrs. Fulham as portraits of Scott and his lost love, Ginevra King. That might be too much of a stretch, but Fitzgerald got much of his inspiration from his own life. Ginevra King was one of the most famous debutantes of the era. She was from a wealthy family in Lake Forest, Illinois. King and Fitzgerald dated a few times, but later in life she didn’t even remember if she had kissed him or not. Their relationship was mainly through letters. Scott kept all of Ginevra’s letters to him, and later had them bound into a book. The book was 227 pages long. Ginevra didn’t keep any of Scott’s letters to her. Many Fitzgerald biographers believe that Ginevra was the model for Daisy Buchanan in The Great Gatsby.

Throughout The Apprentice Fiction you see Fitzgerald working out what will become his classic themes—class, status, money, love, drinking. There are flashes of good writing and insight, but also clunky sentences and hackneyed plots. There are no real hints that the author of the stories in The Apprentice Fiction will become one of the major American authors of the 20th century. However, you can see that Fitzgerald has progressed a long way from the juvenilia at the beginning of the book.

I wouldn’t recommend The Apprentice Fiction for casual readers of Fitzgerald’s work, but it’s a very useful collection for readers interested in Fitzgerald’s youthful writings.

[Ronald Weston · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Apprentice Fiction of F. Scott Fitzgerald is not a volume that would impress a casual reader interested in Fitzgerald. I found it to be worth reading since I am interested in the fledgling work of writers and how they developed later, well-known stories and novels.

The seven selections written, and published (1909 - 1913), while at the St. Paul Academy (Minnesota) and the Newman School (New Jersey) give an inkling to Fitzgerald's search for material and how to present it. Later, at Princeton (1915-1917), the final eight pieces display more maturity and insight with themes and techniques he would use throughout his career. Three of these Nassau Literary Magazine stories were revised and published in The Smart Set: "Babes in the Woods (September and November 1919 respectively) and "Tarquin of Cheepside [sic]" (February 1921, correctly spelled "Cheapside"). Some of the Princeton work was integrated into his first novel This Side of Paradise; the play "The Debutant" was reworked and appears in that form in the novel, "Babes in the Woods" was expanded into an episode, and a portion of "The Spire and the Gargoyle" was absorbed into Amory Blaine's experience. The last two stories, "Sentiment -- and the Use of Rouge" and "The Pierian Springs and the Last Straw" are indicators that Fitzgerald was at the threshold of the success he so greatly desired.

The book ends with an undated facsimile of a handwritten six-page document titled "The Death of My Father" (Edward Fitzgerald died in 1931). A transcription in included in the introductory piece to the play "Shadow Laurels," which concerns the relationship of a father and son.

The Apprentice Fiction of F. Scott Fitzgerald, published in 1965, was the first book to print his earlier work. The introduction by John Kuehl is illuminating and puts the work in context with reference to themes and technique. Introductory material, with greater detail, to the individual stories is quite helpful. Four pages of photos are included. Two later books contain the same stories, except for "The Death of My Father" and add additional work: F. Scott Fitzgerald in His Own Time: A Miscellany, edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli and Jackson R. Bryer, 1971 and F. Scott Fitzgerald, the Princeton Years: Selected Writings, 1914-1920, edited by Chip Deffaa, 1996. A more recent book, Spires and Gargoyles (Cambridge Edition of the Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald), edited by James L. W. West, III in 2010 includes more early work and is a scholarly edition with an emphasis on ensuring the texts are as they originally appeared on first publication, with word variants noted.

[Steve · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some of this is very silly, some of it juvenile, still......................