Short Story Collection: Tales Of The Jazz Age

Overview

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tales of the Jazz Age (1922) gathers a strikingly varied set of pieces that bottle the mood of postwar America at once giddy with new freedoms and shadowed by exhaustion and loss. Arranged by the author into three sections, My Last Flappers, Fantasies, and Unclassified Masterpieces, the collection moves from bright social comedies to mordant satires and melancholic fables, revealing both the glitter and the hangover of an era that would soon define Fitzgerald’s name.

My Last Flappers

The opening group tracks flapper-age flirtations and follies with an eye for class, idleness, and uneasy desire. In The Jelly-Bean, a listless Southern drifter is galvanized by a dazzling young woman, only to watch the possibility of reinvention slip away; its languid afternoons and brief, bright nights end in a return to inertia. The Camel’s Back turns to farce as a lovelorn man, desperate to reclaim a sweetheart at a costume ball, arrives in a full camel suit and tumbles into increasingly absurd misadventures that underline how romance curdles under social performance. May Day, the longest piece in the section, sprawls across New York in 1919, counterpointing jaded Ivy League elites, exhausted soldiers, and radical unrest; champagne suites and street riots collide, and personal collapses mirror a society losing its balance. Porcelain and Pink closes the set on a brittle, theatrical note, a one-act boudoir play built on a bath-time misunderstanding and rapid-fire, featherweight banter.

Fantasies

Fitzgerald’s taste for the fabulous and the grotesque surfaces in four tales that stretch realism to expose American dreams. The Diamond as Big as the Ritz follows a schoolboy’s visit to a secret mountain of solid diamond owned by an American plutocrat; behind the fairy-tale wealth lie cruelty and paranoia, and the inevitable reckoning melts opulence into air. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, a parable of time’s perverse arithmetic, begins with a baby born old who grows younger each year; social roles invert as he passes through life backward, a clever conceit that becomes rueful as love, ambition, and identity fail to align with the body’s clock. Tarquin of Cheapside offers a sly Elizabethan vignette of ambition and seduction in London, a quick, jeweled piece that hints at the costs beneath artistic glory. O Russet Witch! tracks a bookshop clerk who spends decades haunted by a free-spirited woman who embodies roads not taken; the chase for enchantment fades into a sober inventory of compromises.

Unclassified Masterpieces

The Lees of Happiness is a stark inversion of honeymoon bliss: a radiant young couple is devastated by sudden illness, and years of care and attrition distill the title’s bitter image, the dregs that remain when joy has been drunk. Mr. Icky, a brief, absurdist play, skewers fashionable postures and generational chatter with nonsensical dialogue and anticlimax. Jemina, the Mountain Girl parodies rural melodrama, gleefully piling coincidence, feud, and violent twist into a send-up of American tall-tale sensationalism.

Themes and Legacy

Across the collection, champagne sparkle coexists with moral hangover. Flapper charm is both invitation and mirage; wealth glitters until it reveals its prison bars; fantasy amplifies the truths that realism resists. Narrative tones ricochet from farce to despair, but the sensibility is continuous: brisk, stylish, and always attentive to how people perform themselves in public and pay for it in private. Tales of the Jazz Age showcases Fitzgerald’s range at an early peak and plants seeds for his later work; its best-known pieces, especially The Diamond as Big as the Ritz and Benjamin Button, have proved durable, while the lesser-read tales deepen the portrait of an age that was always dancing on a fault line.