“La Côte Basque” brought both his social and literary careers to a flaming, cataclysmic end. It’s hard to imagine today something as simple as the publication of a short story in a magazine causing that kind of radioactive fallout for a writer. But no short story before or since has been quite as poisonous as “La Côte Basque.” One critic memorably called it “shit served up on a gold dish.”
