There’s a doomed, romantic quality to the relationship between F. Scott Fitzgerald and The New Yorker; they were perfect for each other but never quite got together. By the time The New Yorker’s first issue hit newsstands, in February, 1925, Fitzgerald—who had published “This Side of Paradise” in 1920, and “The Beautiful and the Damned” in 1922—was a little too famous to appear often in its upstart pages. (Collier’s and The Smart Set were more appealing.) For its part, the magazine seemed to suffer from a case of what Freud, not long before, had called der Narzissmus der kleinen Differenzen—the narcissism of minor differences. Like Fitzgerald, the magazine was determined to capture the fretful, sad-sack glamour of the nineteen-twenties; it also wrote about the rich young men who drove their naiadic girlfriends to speakeasies in long, low cars. The New Yorker wasn’t sure whether to treat Fitzgerald as a creation of the period or a chronicler of it. (He was, of course, both.)
Between 1929 and 1937, Fitzgerald published two poems and three humorous short stories in The New Yorker. He was also the subject of a 1926 Profile, “That Sad Young Man,” which was, in today’s lingo, snarky. (“All was quiet on the Riviera, and then the Fitzgeralds arrived,” its author, John C. Mosher, wrote.) Fitzgerald, for his part, appeared to take a rather snobbish view of Harold Ross’s new publication, referring to the short stories he published in it as “hors d’oeuvres” and, in a letter, cautioning his young daughter, Scottie, to expand her knowledge of literature “instead of skimming Life + The New Yorker.”
Fitzgerald died in 1940, at the age of forty-four. Five years later, the New Yorker book critic Edmund Wilson published “The Crack-Up,” a collection of Fitzgerald’s nonfiction, which created renewed interest in the novelist’s work. Since then, The New Yorker has published dozens of pieces about the Fitzgeralds. They include Calvin Tomkins’s “Living Well Is the Best Revenge” (about the couple who inspired “Tender Is the Night”), Andrew W. Turnbull’s “Scott Fitzgerald at La Paix” (on the author’s encounters with the Fitzgeralds as a child), Claudia Roth Pierpont’s “For Love and Money” (about an early version of “The Great Gatsby”), and Adam Gopnik’s “As Big As the Ritz” (on Fitzgerald’s legacy).
On Monday, we’ll be publishing a long-lost and darkly hilarious short story by Fitzgerald, “The I.O.U.” Deborah Treisman, our fiction editor, has interviewed Anne Margaret Daniel, the editor of “I’d Die for You and Other Lost Stories,” the forthcoming collection in which it appears. In 2012, we published another lost story also collected in that volume, “Thank You for the Light,” which Fitzgerald’s grandchildren had discovered among his papers. We hope you enjoy them.
_Read the story here, and Treisman's conversation with Daniel here. _
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