Tales of the Jazz Age (1922)

"The Montana sunset lay between two mountains like a gigantic bruise from which dark arteries spread themselves over a poisoned sky. An immense distance under the sky crouched the village of Fish, minute, dismal, and forgotten." (from the story "The Diamond As Big As the Ritz")

Tales of the Jazz Age was F. Scott Fitzgerald's second collection of short stories, published in the same year as his sophomore novel The Beautiful and the Damned and three years before his masterpiece The Great Gatsby. The collection is divided into three parts: My Last Flappers, Fantasies, and Unclassified Masterpieces. The stories are, for the most part, comedic in tone but several take on distinctly dark overtones, such as the stories May Day, The Diamond as Big as the Ritz, and The Lees of Happiness. That final story, which centers on a young wife whose life comes to revolve around her ailing husband, feels particularly poignant given what would become of Fitzgerald's wife, Zelda, though of course the story predates Zelda's troubles by several years. It is the saddest and arguably most compelling of all the stories, a heartbreaking tale of devotion, friendship, and loss.

The best of the stories are The Diamond as Big as the Ritz, a darkly comedic thriller which centers on a young man who finds himself in the unenviable position of having to escape the compound of a man whose property rests atop a mountain made of diamond and who never lets guests leave alive lest they reveal his treasure to the world; The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, a vastly different tale in Fitzgerald's telling than as told by the film of the same name; The Lees of Happiness; and The Camel's Back, a ridiculous story about a man who gets dumped, gets drunk, goes to a costume party as a camel (paying a cabbie to be the other half of the costume), and accidentally marries his ex-girlfriend in what is supposed to be a mock ceremony between "the camel" and "the Egyptian snake charmer." This story is a lot funnier than it has any right to be and gets funnier with each development of the plot.

Not all of the stories are successful. May Day, which involves several characters and plot threads which cross over the course of a day (or so), is a bit unfocused, while Porcelain and Pink, Tarquin of Cheapside and Mr. Icky are all a bit thin, though not without their moments of beauty. Fortunately, even when the stories themselves are somewhat lacking in the plot, Fitzgerald's prose makes them worth the read. The elegant precision of his writing is always a treat and though few of the stories take on the grandeur of his more celebrated novels, they are beautifully written and terrifically engaging pieces of work.