Tales of the Jazz Age

Prose dipped in gin and flung across the dance floor of the Roaring Twenties.

By 1922, F. Scott Fitzgerald was both darling and daredevil of the literary scene. This Side of Paradise had launched him into fame, The Beautiful and Damned had cemented his reputation, and magazines like The Saturday Evening Post were scrambling to publish anything he sent. But it wasn’t just novels that made his name sparkle—it was the short stories. Quick, quippy, and soaked in jazz-age rhythm, Fitzgerald’s stories captured a generation both enchanted and undone by its own freedom.

Tales of the Jazz Age was his second short story collection, and it reads like a cocktail menu of the times—sharp satire, wistful romance, fantastical fables, and a touch of disillusionment stirred in. Many of the stories had appeared in magazines prior to the collection’s release, but Fitzgerald grouped them with intent, dividing them into three categories: My Last Flappers, Fantasies, and Unclassified Masterpieces. It was both an archive and an aesthetic—his personal tour through the highs and heartbreaks of the decade.

The Story

Tales of the Jazz Age isn’t a novel. It’s a mood. A glitter-drenched grab bag of voices, vices, and visions from an author who knew his generation’s pulse—and wasn’t afraid to feel its arrhythmia.

The collection opens with flappers on the brink of rebellion (The Jelly-Bean, Bernice Bobs Her Hair), swerves into surrealism (The Diamond as Big as the Ritz, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button), and drifts into existential ache (May Day, The Camel’s Back). It’s a genre-bending kaleidoscope of youthful bravado and quiet ruin, with Fitzgerald acting as both chronicler and critic of the American dream on champagne-soaked legs.

Some stories feel like parties. Others like hangovers. But every one of them hums with that inimitable Fitzgerald flair—language like silk, characters like smoke, and endings that linger like perfume on a lost letter.