The volume comprises stories originally appearing in popular literary journals, but never authorized for collection by Fitzgerald during his lifetime.[2]
Stories
The stories in the collection are presented here chronologically by the date they were first published.[3]
"On an Ocean Wave by Paul Elgin" (Esquire, February 1941)
"The Woman From Twenty-One" (Esquire, June 1941)
"Discard [Director’s Special]" (Harper’s Bazaar, January 1948)
Background
“I have asked a lot of my emotions—one hundred and twenty stories. The price was high, right up with Kipling, because there was one little drop of something not blood, not a tear, not my seed, but me more intimately than these, in every story, it was the extra I had. Now it is gone and I am just like you now.”
— “Our April Letter” from The Notebooks of F. Scott Fitzgerald (1978)[6][7][8]
After Fitzgerald’s death in 1940, six more volumes of as yet uncollected short fiction appeared: The Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald (1951), Afternoon of an Author (1957), The Pat Hobby Stories (1962), The Apprenticeship Fiction of F. Scott Fitzgerald (1965), The Basil and Josephine Stories (1973), and Bits of Paradise (1974).[10][11][12]
The Price Was High represents a selection of 49 of the remaining 57 previously uncollected works first published in magazines. Eight stories remain uncollected at the behest of Fitzgerald’s daughter Scottie Fitzgerald Smith, deemed too undistinguished for inclusion.[13] The volume adds a single piece, "On Your Own," one of nine stories never published so as to make The Price Was High an even fifty stories.[14] Biographer Matthew J. Bruccoli, editor of The Price Was High, acknowledges that these stories lack the "facility" that characterize Fitzgerald's most outstanding short fiction: "The Stories in this volume are not Fitzgerald’s best."[15]
Reception
Kirkus Reviews questions the judgment of editor Matthew J. Bruccoli in publishing works that Fitzgerald declined to collect in his own lifetime: "[N]ot a single one of these stories takes the time to stand back and really achieve the pause, gravity, and sweetness of Fitzgerald's best work."[16]
Literary critic Aaron Latham of the Washington Post terms the stories in The Price Was High as "bootleg" magazine fiction: "The best of Fitzgerald’s magazine work, of course, had been published from long ago." Latham argues that Fitzgerald would have benefited from writing less short fiction and finishing The Last Tycoon (1941), uncompleted when he died in 1940.[17]
Literary critic Malcolm Cowley in The New York Times, after reading all 50 stories, found merit in a number of them, and "almost all of them contain something to surprise us, if only a sentence or a passing observation…"[18] Cowley adds this caveat:
The sad fact remains that three-fourths of the stories in "The Price Was High" are below his usual level of achievement. In general they depend too much on coincidence, melodramatic turns of plot and information withheld from the reader until the last moment so as to end the story with an O. Henry twist.[19]
Critical appraisal
Fitzgerald approached his short stories as a means of financing his primary creative endeavor: to write novels.[20][21] As his short fiction was "written for money", he often despaired at his commercial relationship with The Saturday Evening Post and other "slick" journals. Writing to editor H. L. Menken in 1925, he complained that "my trash for the Post grows worse and worse as there is less and less heart in it...People don’t seem to realize that to an intelligent man writing down is about the hardest thing in the world."[22][23]
In a 1929 note to fellow fiction writer Ernest Hemingway, Fitzgerald identified himself with a sexual prostitute: "The Post now pays the old whore $4000 a screw. But now it’s because she’s mastered the 40 positions—in her youth, one was enough."[24]
Bruccoli notes that, despite Fitzgerald’s doubts as to the value of much of his short fiction, "he expended a major part of his talent on them".[25]
Critic Matthew J. Bruccoli reminds readers that Fitzgerald was fastidious about the work that was included in his collections. That the material in The Price Was High only appeared posthumously is a measure of his discrimination. Bruccoli writes: "Fitzgerald maintained a distinction between magazine and book publication, insisting that inclusion of a story in one of his collections gave it permanence and literary standing.}[26] Broccoli reminds readers that, during the Roaring Twenties, Fitzgerald was widely regarded as "a radical writer who announced the existence of new social values and new sexual roles."[27] With respect to women during the era of the Flapper, Bruccoli writes:
Fitzgerald’s girls are not dumb dolls. At their best they are courageous and self-reliant, determined to make the best of their assets in a man’s world. They are frankly sensual, though chaste—warm and promising. At an extreme there are man-eating women who dominate or destroy men, though this condition is unusual in his short stories.[28]
That Fitzgerald was fully aware of the cultural prohibitions concerning popular literature in the United States, and as a social conservation, was not unduly thwarted by these strictures. As to whether he "compromised or diluted his stories" to make them suitable for publication, this "remains an open question" according to Bruccoli.[29]
^Fitzgerald, 1979: the contents in The Price Was High does not conform perfectly to sequential dates in some cases
^Bruccoli, 1978 p. 256: See footnote on Bodley Head Scott Fitzgerald edition, 1963)
^Bruccoli, 1979 p. 591: Written in "early" 1935, rejected by Post and Ladies HJ. Esquire published an abridged version in 1971, the original 1935 manuscript appears in this volume.
^Kuehl, 1991 p. 186: See Nonfiction, from The Notebooks of F. Scott Fitzgerald (1979)
^Bruccoli, 1979 p. xi Kuehl, 1991 p. 184-185: Selected Bibliography Cowley, 1979: "Fifty stories, then - or nearly one-third of Fitzgerald's magazine work - are collected for the first time in The Price Was High."
Bruccoli, Matthew J.. 1979. Introductions to the stories in The Price Was High: Fifty Uncollected Stories by F. Scott Fitzgerald. MJF Books, New York. ISBN1-56731-106-7
