Tales of the Jazz Age (Oxford World´s Classics New Edition)

• Fitzgerald's second collection of short stories, Tales of the Jazz Age includes two of his best stories, 'May Day' and 'The Diamond as Big as the Ritz' as well as 'The Curious Case of Benjamin Button'.
• The only critical edition available in paperback of this collection as it was first published.
• The eleven stories demonstrate Fitzgerald's talent and versatility as a writer of short fiction and his wry tone across a range of styles including one-act plays, parody, and fantasies.
• Fitzgerald scholar Jackson R. Bryer provides an in-depth appreciation of the stories and examines the making of the volume and its reception.
• Includes up-to-date bibliography, chronology of the author, and explanatory notes identifying contemporary references and allusions.

'I tender these tales of the Jazz Age into the hands of those who read as they run and run as they read.'

Tales of the Jazz Age (1922) was Fitzgerald's second collection of short stories, and it contains some of the best examples of his talent as a writer of short fiction. Often overshadowed by his major novels, Fitzgerald's short stories demonstrate the same originality and inventive range, as he chronicles with wry and astute observation the temper of the hedonistic 1920s. In 'May Day' and 'The Diamond as Big as the Ritz', two of his greatest stories, he conjures up the spirit of the age; in other stories he adopts a variety of forms - parody, a one-act play, fantasy - with unrivalled versatility. 'The Curious Case of Benjamin Button', a tale of a man living his life backwards, features among the 'Fantasies' in Fitzgerald's self-deprecatory Table of Contents, alongside the groupings 'My Last Flappers' and 'Unclassified Masterpieces'.

In these eleven stories, Fitzgerald establishes the style that was to make him one of the greatest American writers of the twentieth-century.

Readership: Readers of short stories, American fiction, Scott Fitzgerald; students of American literature, twentieth-century literature, the short story, literature of the 1920s.