Fitzgerald - all the stories

Apparently, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote something like 160 stories over his career.  For almost everyone except the fanatics, the short story collection edited by Bruccoli in 1989 (just called The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald) will do.  It collects 43 of the best of them, about half the well known stories from the 4 story collections Fitzgerald published during his lifetime and the rest collected from various magazines.  However, this blog is mostly about delving deep and catering to fanatics, so I will try to pull together what I have learned to date.

The core story collections are
Flappers and Philosophers (1921)
Tales of the Jazz Age (1922)
All the Sad Young Men (1926)
Taps at Reveille (1935)

Note that the first two are out of copyright in the U.S. and thus are on the Project Gutenberg site.  They are also part of the LOA Fitzgerald collection.  That said, the Cambridge editions of these collections are quite nice, as they include additional Fitzgerald stories published around the same time.  (I'm fortunate that Robarts has the full set.)

Cambridge also put out a volume called The Lost Decade, which collected stories from 1934-41 that were published in Esquire.  I'm not sure if this included the entire run of the The Pat Hobby Stories or not.  There is a thin stand-alone book of these stories, and that is more likely to be in a general library.  Similarly, The Basil and Josephine Stories was also published as a stand-alone collection.  There are a few posthumous collections, focusing on unpublished stories, most notably Afternoon of an Author (1957) and Bits of Paradise (1974).  I might go ahead and order Bits of Paradise, but Afternoon of an Author will probably just be borrowed from the library.

Then we have The Price Was High: Fifty Uncollected Stories (1979).  Note that Bruccoli was the editor of this effort as well, and a few of these uncollected stories made their way into his 1989 collection.  This is available as a two volume set from the UK, and that was tempting, but I ultimately bought a used copy of the hardback with all 50 stories (for $1 plus shipping!).  Incidentally nearly all of Fitzgerald's work is out of copyright in Australia, so take a look at http://www.gutenberg.net.au to see if a particular story of interest is on-line.

While this isn't really about short stories, I was intrigued to learn that there are two versions of Tender is the Night, Fitzgerald's last completed novel.  The vast majority of printed books are based on the 1934 version, which was serialized in Scribner's Magazine.  It wasn't a roaring success, however, as the Depression was at its heights, and the novel seemed to be too much of a throwback to the Roaring 20s.  Fitzgerald considered rearranging the novel and rewriting sections.  After Fitzgerald's death, Malcolm Cowley finished this effort and the new version was published in 1953.   A decent academic library will probably have this version, though I am not sure how likely I am to read both.  I'm much more likely to stick with the original.

Finally, in terms of breaking Fitzgerald news, there is a new (2017) collection of truly unpublished stories -- I'd Die For You, And Other Lost Stories.  Note that the other collections drew together stories that had been published in magazines but previously uncollected.  Most of these unpublished stories had been rejected because they were too dark, and Fitzgerald didn't want to revise them.  One of them (The IOU) apparently was set aside because the magazine requested some edits, but Fitzgerald was deep into writing The Great Gatsby and never got back around to it.  The New Yorker was recently able to publish it in its original form.

I don't know if reading every one of these books will actually get you to 160 (or more) stories, but it must be fairly close.  I'm not sure I will get through all of them myself, but I suppose it is something to aim for.  I'm fairly interested in I'd Die For You, so I have requested that from the library.

Edit (11/6): I'm sorry to report back that I'd Die For You, And Other Lost Stories is incredibly weak with perhaps 3 passable stories and a bunch that are very poor indeed.  I honestly wouldn't waste your time.