Library of America’s authoritative Fitzgerald edition continues with his greatest masterpiece and best story collection of stories in newly edited texts
This long-awaited second volume of Library of America’s authoritative edition of F. Scott Fitzgerald features the author’s acknowledged masterpiece and most popular book, The Great Gatsby.
It was Gatsby that solidified his reputation as the chronicler of the Jazz Age and established him as one of the leading American novelists of his generation. Perhaps no other novel of the twentieth century makes a greater claim to being our Great American Novel—for its poetic prose, its exploration of the broad, intertwined themes of money, class, and American optimism (Daisy Buchanan’s voice is “full of money”), its dominance of high school and college curricula, and its claims upon the public imagination. The novel is presented in a newly edited text, correcting numerous errors and restoring Fitzgerald’s preferred American spellings.
Also included in this volume are Fitzgerald’s third collection of stories, All the Sad Young Men, which includes some of the author’s best short fiction—"Winter Dreams,” “The Rich Boy,” and “Absolution”—as well as a generous selection of stories and nonfiction from the period 1920–1926, all in newly corrected texts.
Born in 1896 in St. Paul, Minnesota, F. Scott Fitzgerald attended Princeton University but never completed his degree, dropping out in 1917 to join the army. He was stationed in Alabama, where he met the socialite Zelda Sayre, whom he married in 1920 after the success of This Side of Paradise. Fame, money, and excessive drinking took their toll on both Scott and Zelda. After’s Zelda was institutionalized, Fitzgerald moved to Hollywood in 1937 to write scripts and attempt to revive a flagging career; his experiences there inspired the unfinished novel The Last Tycoon (1941). Fitzgerald died of a heart attack in Hollywood in 1940. His major works include This Side of Paradise (1920), The Beautiful and Damned (1922), Tales of the Jazz Age (1922), The Great Gatsby (1925), All the Sad Young Men (1926), and Tender is the Night (1934).
James L. W. West III, editor, is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English, Emeritus, at Pennsylvania State University. He is the author of William Styron: A Life (1998) and The Perfect Hour: The Romance of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ginevra King (2005), among other books. From 1994 to 2019, West was the General Editor of the Cambridge Edition of the Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald; his variorum edition of The Great Gatsby was the final volume in the series.
