Tales of the Jazz Age

The defining period of Fitzgerald's life and work was the 1920s, the decade-long flowering of culture and literature that Fitzgerald himself named "the Jazz Age." As scholars have pointed out, the Jazz Age as captured in Fitzgerald's fiction is more reflective and self-aware than the cartoonish image of flappers and fur coats we often associate with the period today. Fitzgerald saw the waste as well as the wealth, the pain that rattled below the surface of the parties. It pained him in later life that he was so closely identified with the frippery he found in many ways abhorrent. But the fact remains that the Jazz Age was such a sustaining, inspiring time for Fitzgerald that when it crashed out of existence, Fitzgerald himself struggled simply to exist. Tales of the Jazz Age (1922) is a collection of eleven short stories. Divided into three separate parts. "The Jelly-Bean" "The Camel's Back" "May Day" "Porcelain and Pink" "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" "Tarquin of Cheapside" "Oh Russet Witch!" "The Lees of Happiness" "Mr. Icky" "Jemina"