The St. Paul Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald

by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Patricia Hampl (Introduction), Dave Page (Editor)

F Scott Fitzgerald's St Paul is a city of winter dreams and ice palaces, lakeside parties and neighbourhood hijinks. These are stories of ambition and young love, insecurity and awkwardness, where a poor boy with energy and intelligence can break into the upper classes and become a glittering success. This selection brings together the best of Fitzgerald's St Paul stories -- some virtually unknown, others classics of short fiction. Patricia Hampl's incisive introduction traces the trajectory of Fitzgerald's blazing celebrity and its connections to his life in the city that gave him his best material. Headnotes by Dave Page provide specific ties between the stories and Fitzgerald's life in St Paul.

Genres: Fiction, Short Stories, Classics, Book Club

328 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1931

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

[Mattea Gernentz · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 stars. I've been swooning over Fitzgerald since high school, and I don't anticipate this changing anytime soon. His prose is divine, and he has an uncanny way of portraying adolescence just as it is, then and now. It was enlightening to see how his short stories related back to his place of birth. I do have many mixed feelings through regarding his women characters. Yes, they have cheeks flushed like sunsets and voices like money. Yes, they float sublimely around the dance floor. And I think there is palpable power found in their beauty; in most of his stories, the women possess some form of control and agency. For instance, Jay Gatsby pines away for Daisy for years, and, when she reenters his life, he is captive to her whims. Still, it's evident that, in many ways, Fitzgerald's women are still confined by the dictations of turn-of-the-century society, still viewed as marriageable commodities. I think, at the root, I take issue with the entitlement and possessiveness of Fitzgerald's male narrators, particularly in "At Your Age" found in this edition—which felt alarmingly Lolita-like and seemed to be an account of grooming between a 50 year old man and an 18 or 19 year old girl. Scott, you continue to confound me, and I may never forgive you for your treatment of Zelda, but you sure had a way with words.

[Rene K · Rating 4 out of 5]

It was a bit difficult to get into this book. But once I did it was enjoyable. The writing style took awhile to get used to. Not sure what I was expecting but it did not deliver the wow factor with me Just enjoyable!

[Mark Taylor · Rating 5 out of 5]

F. Scott Fitzgerald was born in Saint Paul, Minnesota, on September 24, 1896. His family moved to Buffalo, New York in 1898, but they returned to Saint Paul in 1908, and the city would be Scott’s home, off and on, until 1922.

Fitzgerald led a peripatetic life, spending considerable amounts of time in Minnesota, New York, Montana, Louisiana, Connecticut, Delaware, Alabama, Maryland, North Carolina, and California. And that’s not even counting the numerous places where he and Zelda lived in France. Scott and Zelda never owned a home of their own. It’s difficult to say that any one place has a special claim on him. However, Saint Paul was where he first entertained the idea of becoming a writer, where he published his first writings, and where he finished his first two novels. Fitzgerald always saw places through the lens of an outsider, and I suspect that he secretly wondered if he truly belonged anywhere.

The 2004 collection The St. Paul Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald, edited by Patricia Hampl and Dave Page, does a superb job of advocating for the importance of Saint Paul in Fitzgerald’s writings. Fitzgerald’s family was socially well-connected in Saint Paul, as his mother, Mollie McQuillan Fitzgerald, was born into a prominent and wealthy family. Mollie’s father, P.F. McQuillan, had come to Saint Paul from Ireland when he was just a boy. He eventually established a very successful wholesale grocery business, and built a mansion in the section of downtown Saint Paul known as Lowertown. (The mansion was torn down, as were all the mansions of Lowertown.) The McQuillans rubbed shoulders with people like the shipping and railroad tycoon James J. Hill, who had a nearby mansion of his own in Lowertown. Unfortunately, P.F. McQuillan died at the age of 43 in 1877 of Bright’s Disease, a kidney disorder. He left behind a fortune of about $250,000, a significant sum of money. However, after grandfather McQuillan’s death, no new money was being earned by the family, so by the time Scott was a young man, the family was still very well off, but they weren’t in the financial stratosphere like the Hills. In 1891 James J. Hill finished building his gigantic mansion on Summit Avenue, which totaled 36,000 square feet and included an art gallery. In contrast, Scott Fitzgerald was born in 1896 in a spacious rented apartment, one of six units in a building on Laurel Avenue, four blocks off of the prestigious Summit Avenue. It was still a very nice residence in the best part of town, but it was most definitely not a mansion.

Fitzgerald’s father, Edward, was from Maryland, and was the epitome of the Southern gentleman. Handsome, courtly, and well-dressed, he was unfortunately not successful at business. Nevertheless, young Scott Fitzgerald grew up rubbing shoulders with the elite of Saint Paul. He attended Saint Paul Academy, the most prestigious private school in the city, and also attended dancing school, which was a must in those days for anyone in the upper classes. He went to parties at the University Club, and Town & Country Club. Fitzgerald’s unique social position gave him access to the world of the very wealthy, but he knew that he would have to make his own way in the world. There was not enough family money for him to coast idly through life.

If Fitzgerald had been either higher or lower in the social strata, he might not have developed into the brilliant observer of class and status that he became. Had he been a member of the idle rich, he might not have fully understood how his life was different from other people’s, and he might not have been interested in chronicling it. If Fitzgerald had been lower class, he wouldn’t have had access to the rich to see how they lived. But Fitzgerald had enough access to the rich to absorb their social milieu, and he knew how unique it was. There’s a brilliant quote from the critic Malcolm Lowry about Fitzgerald: “It was as if all his novels described a big dance to which he had taken the prettiest girl, and as if at the same time he stood outside the ballroom, a little Midwestern boy with his nose to the glass, wondering how much the tickets cost and who paid for the music.” Lowry called this Fitzgerald’s “double vision” and I think it sums up Fitzgerald perfectly. He is at once both involved participant and detached observer, and that’s one reason why he was such a great writer.

The St. Paul Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald includes some of his greatest short stories, like “Bernice Bobs Her Hair,” “The Ice Palace,” and “Winter Dreams.” It also features the very funny “The Camel’s Back,” which Fitzgerald said he pounded out in a sleepless twenty-two hour stretch.

“Bernice Bobs Her Hair” was one of Fitzgerald’s first short stories to be published in The Saturday Evening Post, and concerns the popular Marjorie and her seemingly hopeless cousin Bernice, who is visiting her for the summer. A young man thinks about Bernice: “He wondered idly whether she was a poor conversationalist because she got no attention or got no attention because she was a poor conversationalist.” (p.52) However, with Marjorie’s help, Bernice is able to achieve social popularity. The story also features this beautiful line, which shows how Fitzgerald was wise beyond his years: “At eighteen our convictions are hills from which we look; at forty-five they are caves in which we hide.” (p.56)

“Winter Dreams” is one of Fitzgerald’s finest short stories, and he wrote that it was a “sort of 1st draft of the Gatsby idea.” (p.107) It’s a beautiful, haunting story, as Dexter Green tries to win the heart of the cold Judy Jones. Dexter Green isn’t exactly Jay Gatsby, but they have similarities in their single-minded focus to achieve their fantasies.

As usual in Fitzgerald’s writing, there are beautiful, poetic sentences in “Winter Dreams,” such as: “When the scarlet corners of her lips curved down, it was less a smile than an invitation to a kiss.” (p.119) And: “In the middle of May when the weather balanced for a few days on the thin bridge that led to deep summer he turned in one night at Irene’s house.” (p.125)

“Winter Dreams” was the last short story that Fitzgerald wrote while he was living in Saint Paul, but his hometown continued to be a setting and influence on his work. The 1927 short story “A Short Trip Home” is an interesting one. It mixes the supernatural with more typical Fitzgerald story material about young love. The story connects to Fitzgerald’s strong morality. While he’s often seen as the epitome of Jazz Age excesses, Fitzgerald had a strong moral sense of good and evil. As his friend Oscar Kalman said of him: “Poor Scott, he never really enjoyed his dissipation because he disapproved intensely of himself all the time it was going on.” (The Far Side of Paradise, by Arthur Mizener, p.93) Fitzgerald himself said, “Parties are a form of suicide. I love them, but the old Catholic in me secretly disapproves.” (The Far Side of Paradise, p.135) In Fitzgerald’s first novel, This Side of Paradise, the main character Amory Blaine sees a physical manifestation of the devil, just as the mysterious man in “A Short Trip Home” functions as a physical manifestation of evil.

In 1928 and 1929, Fitzgerald was suffering from a severe case of writer’s block as he attempted to write the novel that would become Tender is the Night. So he returned to his adolescence in Saint Paul for a series of stories about Basil Duke Lee. The stories are excellent, and I strongly suspect that the young Basil Duke Lee shared many similarities with the young F. Scott Fitzgerald. The first Basil story was “The Scandal Detectives,” the short story taking its name from an actual club that the teenaged Fitzgerald started with his friends. The story features this lovely sentence, as Basil stares at Imogene Bissel: “For the first time in his life he realized a girl completely as something opposite and complementary to him, and he was subject to a warm chill of mingled pleasure and pain.” (p.167)

Fitzgerald describes Basil’s youthful idea of what his life will be like: “This summer he and his mother and sister were going to the lakes and next fall he was starting away to school. Then he would go to Yale and be a great athlete, and after that—if his two dreams had fitted onto each other chronologically instead of existing independently side by side—he was due to become a gentleman burglar.” (p.168) Like Basil, Fitzgerald dreamed of finding glory on the athletic fields, but it was not to be. He badly wanted to make the football team at Princeton, but he was cut the first day of tryouts.

Another Basil story, “A Night at the Fair,” describes the wonders of the Minnesota State Fair. If you haven’t had the good fortune to attend the Minnesota State Fair, let me assure you, it is a wonderful event, and one that most Minnesotans feel quite passionately about. Fitzgerald perfectly captures the mood of the Fair in this passage:

“The first lights of the evening were springing into pale existence; the afternoon crowd had thinned a little, and the lanes, empty of people, were heavy with the rich various smells of popcorn and peanuts, molasses and dust, and cooking Wienerwurst and a not-unpleasant overtone of animals and hay. The Ferris wheel, pricked out now in lights, revolved leisurely through the dusk; a few empty cars of the roller coaster rattled overhead. The heat had blown off and there was the crisp stimulating excitement of Northern autumn in the air.” (p.190)

At the Fair, Basil meets a girl. In Fitzgerald’s stories, there is always a girl, and she is always beautiful: “Her eyes, dark and intimate, seemed to have wakened at the glowing brilliance of the illumination overhead; there was the promise of excitement in them now, like the promise of the cooling night.” (p.191)

As Basil waits for his first pair of long pants to arrive by courier, Fitzgerald sums up Basil’s thoughts: “Like most of us, he was unable to perceive that he would have any desires in the future equivalent to those that possessed him now.” (p.198)

In another Basil story, “He Thinks He’s Wonderful,” Fitzgerald comes close to describing what Malcolm Cowley called his “double vision” as an author: “Passing from the gleaming store into the darkness, Basil was submerged in an unreality in which he seemed to see himself from the outside, and the pleasant events of the evening began to take on fresh importance.” (p.212) I think Fitzgerald was able to be both participant and observer in his own life, which was a trait that rankled some of his acquaintances. Donald Ogden Stewart, a friend of Fitzgerald’s who met him in Saint Paul in 1919, and encountered him again in Hollywood in the late 1930’s, wrote in his memoirs that Fitzgerald’s “note-taking watchfulness…kept me from ever feeling that he was really my friend.” Everything in Fitzgerald’s life was a possible story idea or a line of dialogue.

“At Your Age” is an interesting story of a much older man falling for a younger woman. The story was published in The Saturday Evening Post in August of 1929, and Fitzgerald was paid $4,000 for it—which would be approximately $58,000 today. One particularly lyrical passage was incorporated into Fitzgerald’s 1934 novel Tender is the Night. Here is the passage from “At Your Age”:

“They came near and Tom admired the faint dust of powder over her freshness, the guarded sweetness of her smile, the fragility of her body calculated by Nature to a millimeter to suggest a bud, yet guarantee a flower.” (p.281)

In Tender is the Night this very similar passage occurs as Dick Diver admires the much younger Rosemary Hoyt: “It took him a moment to respond to the unguarded sweetness of her smile, her body calculated to a millimeter to suggest a bud yet guarantee a flower.” (Tender is the Night, p.104)

“At Your Age” also contains this beautiful description of Minnesota winters: “It was a long winter, even in a land of long winters. March was full of billowy drift, and when it seemed at last as though the cold must be defeated, there was a series of blizzards, desperate as last stands.” (p.291)

“A Freeze-Out,” from 1931, was the last short story by Fitzgerald that mentioned Minnesota. It’s an interesting, if somewhat slight story. But it features this nice line, once again about Minnesota weather: “On the day spring broke through and summer broke through—it is much the same thing in Minnesota—Forrest stopped his coupe in front of a music store and took his pleasant vanity inside.” (p.296)

Fitzgerald never wrote about his home town again, but he did mention it in letters that reveal his complicated relationship to Saint Paul. He wrote to his childhood friend Marie Hersey in 1934, “Having rambled so much I no longer regard Saint Paul as my home any more than the eastern seaboard or the Riviera. This is said with no disloyalty but simply because after all my father was an easterner and I went east to college and I never did quite adjust myself to those damn Minnesota winters. I was always freezing my cheeks, being a rotten skater, etc.—though many events there will always fill me with a tremendous nostalgia.” (The Letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald, p.536-7)

Fitzgerald contradicted himself in a 1936 letter to Hersey: “St. Paul contacts have been so infrequent that I am practically determined to go out there next summer for a while and bring the daughter. In spite of a fifteen-year absence, it still is home to me.” (The Letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald, p.568)

One wonders what Fitzgerald’s true feelings about Saint Paul were, but surely they were feelings that ran deep, given how often his hometown was referenced in his fiction.

[Thomas Elert · Rating 3 out of 5]

The introduction makes it clear that Fitzgerald viewed writing short stories as simply a financial endeavor and reserved his true art for his novels, and reading through them, this was somewhat noticeable. Though they were all perfectly acceptable, with a handful of moments that resonated, overall they lacked that indescribable something extra to make them memorable.

Additionally, despite a couple references to city names and snow, the essence of Minnesota wasn’t really delved into as much as I would have hoped. The stories could have played out just as easily in any other setting.

Finally, especially with his short stories, Fitzgerald was a bit of a one trick pony, formulaically describing the acquisition or loss of youthful love in almost every single one.

Fitzgerald is still without a doubt my favorite author, but there’s not much in this specific collection that really struck a chord.

[John Mitchell · Rating 4 out of 5]

I took a tour of the James J. Hill house in St. Paul, MN this past Summer and grew interested in the time period of the 1920s and St. Paul’s Summit Avenue neighborhood. Then I happened upon “The St. Paul Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald” at a used book store and bought it. Fitzgerald wrote a good number of short stories located in St. Paul which incorporate landmarks such as Summit Avenue (called Crest Avenue in the short stories), the Seven Corners area near downtown St. Paul, the White Bear Yacht Club (called Sherry Island Golf Club) and the Minnesota State Fair, to name a few. As I read these short stories, I imagined myself living in the 1910s, 20s and 30s and rubbing elbows with Summit Avenue residents and St. Paulites. It was a good read. In high school I read The Great Gatsby, and now I’m interested in reading Fitzgerald’s novels: This Side of Paradise, The Beautiful and the Damned, and Tender is the Night.

[Judy Evenson · Rating 2 out of 5]

Ok so a highly acclaimed author who wrote nearly 100 years ago frankly sounds trite and superficial as he describes the antics of youth in a bygone era. I was hoping for at least some additional insight into 3rd generation Catholics of St. Paul. I was even disappointed there. I expected more....

[Kate Vogl · Rating 5 out of 5]

Interesting to see how Fitzgerald built to Gatsby. He’s so efficient in developing trouble and in bringing the reader to the next delicious conflict. Interesting how his point of view is all over the place in this collection. Hampl provides valuable insight to the history of the source material.

[Dean Harring · Rating 5 out of 5]

An entertaining collection of stories that provides a wonderful view into the writing of a young, developing F. Scott Fitzgerald.

[Harris · Rating 4 out of 5]

Having not had the chance to read any of F. Scott Fitzgerald's works (uncouth, I know) I found these short stories to be engrossing. I enjoy the style of the "Roaring '20s" and these stories are an example, I think of how Fitzgerald did much to cement the feeling of the time in public memory. One thing I really enjoyed was the recreation of St. Paul during these time periods complete with local landmarks still in existence today. I particularly enjoyed the Basil Duke Lee stories, which chronicles the everyday life of a wealthy teenager on Summit Avenue during the time which shows how little things have changed since then. However, many of the stories are quite similar in plot; young man pines for young woman, something unforeseen happens (either bad luck or bad actions on the characters' parts) and they drift apart. It can be easy for the stories to blend into each other.

[T · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great / Leisure love stories. Each story is full of language that stirs the imagination. I can feel as if I live on Summit Avenue - the son of James J. Hill, a boy of inherited wealth carelessly moving through life as an extended party. The stories have wonderful turns at the end; never the way I'm expecting. Sometimes the hero loses, which mirrors real life. You can feel cold Minnesota.

[Teresa · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm not a huge fan of short stories, but I found myself enjoying these stories in spite of myself. I particularly liked the story, "Bernice Bobs her Hair." I absolutely adored the ending. The Basil Duke Lee stories are also quite good. These stories evoke the feeling from the reader what it was like to be in St. Paul during Fitzgerald's formative years.

[Beth · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked the series of stories about young Basil. The bizarrely erudite world of young wealthy St. Paulites was fascinating, although hard to relate to across time and culture. But my first foray into Fitzgerald gave me a sense of why he's such an iconic writer.

[Tom · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gave this a higher rating after reading it the second time. Some of Fitzgerald's best stories, grouped around the theme of his hometown. A must-read if you have any interest in Fitzgerald, or in St. Paul, for that matter.

[Amy · Rating 3 out of 5]

I only read Winter Dreams, and I cannot remember why I had intended to read that story (I saw something somewhere...). It was okay. I could see some of The Great Gatsby in it. I might check this out again in the future to try a few of his other stories.

[Terry · Rating 5 out of 5]

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[Jjmarsh · Rating 4 out of 5]

A tough one to review. I still have a Fitzgerald allergy, but this volume helped me understand FSF AND St. Paul better... I was quoting it for weeks!

[Frank Tempone · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this collection. I bore witness to the evolution of Fitzgerald's craft and his sensibility as a man.