false
Flappers and Philosophers by F. Scott Fitzgerald
BUY IT NEW
- Limited Time Offer! Everyone receives the Member Price on books.
See Details - This item is currently out of stock.
- Add To List uiAction=GetAllLists&page=List&pageType=list&ean=9780735100749&productCode=BK&maxCount=100&threshold=3
(Library Binding - Reprint)
- Pub. Date: April 2001
- 280pp
| More Formats | |
|---|---|
| Available in eBook | $7.49 |
| Hardcover | $24.99 |
| Paperback | $5.95 |
| Audio - Unabridged, 5 Cassettes | $37.95 |
| MP3 Book - Unabridged | $14.06 |
Buy it Used: 2 copies from $20.00 See All Available
Customers who bought this also bought
Product Details
- Pub. Date: April 2001
- Publisher: Replica Books
- Format: Library Binding, 280pp
- ISBN-13: 9780735100749
- ISBN: 0735100748
- Edition Description: Reprint
Synopsis
All the glamour and cynicismof the dawning Jazz Age are on display in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s debut story collection.
Flappers and Philosophers was first published in 1920, on the heels of the young author’s smash hit novel This Side of Paradise. The collection contains some of his most famous early stories, including “Bernice Bobs Her Hair,” “The Ice Palace,” “Head and Shoulders,” and “The Offshore Pirate.” In these pages we meet many of Fitzgerald’s trademark character types: the beautiful and headstrong young women and the dissolute young men of what came to be called the Lost Generation. With their bobbed hair and dangling cigarettes, his characters are sophisticated, witty, and, above all, modern: the spoiled heiress who falls for her kidnapper, the intellectual student whose life is turned upside-down by a chorus girl, the feuding debutantes whose weapons are cutting words and a pair of scissors.
Annotation
First published in 1920, this book marked F. Scott Fitzgerald's entry into the realm of the short story. This is the only edition available containing the complete original collection of all eight classic stories. This short story collection plumbs the depths of human feeling with a perspicacity that is quintessential Fitzgerald. Reprint.
More Reviews and RecommendationsBiography
Inseparably associated with a point in history he claimed to despise, F. Scott Fitzgerald is both the quintessential Jazz-Age writer and perhaps the era’s harshest critic. However, the complexity and sheer timelessness of classics such as The Great Gatsby has ensured that Fitzgerald’s work will never be regarded as mere period pieces.
More About the AuthorFact File
Name:
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Also Known As:
Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald (real name)
Date of Birth:
September 24, 1896
Place of Birth:
St. Paul, Minnesota
Date of Death
December 21, 1940
Education:
Princeton University
Biography
The greatest writers often function in multifaceted ways, serving as both emblems of their age and crafters of timeless myth. F. Scott Fitzgerald surely fits this description. His work was an undeniable product of the so-called Jazz Age of the 1920s, yet it has a quality that spans time, reaching backward into gothic decadence and forward into the future of a rapidly decaying America. Through five novels, six short story collections, and one collection of autobiographical pieces, Fitzgerald chronicled a precise point in post-WWI America, yet his writing resonates just as boldly today as it did nearly a century ago.
Fitzgerald's work was chiefly driven by the disintegration of America following World War I. He believed the country to be sinking into a cynical, Godless, depraved morass. He was never reluctant to voice criticism of America's growing legions of idle rich. Recreating a heated confrontation with Ernest Hemingway in a short story called "The Rich Boy," Fitzgerald wrote, "Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves. Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are. They are different."
The preceding quote may sum Fitzgerald's philosophy more completely than any other, yet he also hypocritically embodied much of what he claimed to loathe. Fitzgerald spent money freely, threw lavish parties, drank beyond excess, and globe-trotted with his glamorous but deeply troubled wife Zelda. Still, in novel after novel, he sought to expose the great chasm that divided the haves from the have-nots and the hollowness of wealth. In This Side of Paradise (1920) he cynically follows opulent, handsome Amory Blaine as he bounces aimlessly from Princeton to the military to an uncertain, meaningless future. In The Beautiful and the Damned (1922) Fitzgerald paints a withering portrait of a seemingly idyllic marriage between a pair of socialites that crumbles in the face of Adam Patch's empty pursuit of profit and the fading beauty of his vane wife Gloria.
The richest example of Fitzgerald's disdain for the upper class arrived three years later. The Great Gatsby is an undoubted American classic, recounting naďve Nick Carraway's involvement with a coterie of affluent Long Islanders, and his ultimate rejection of them when their casual decadence leads only to internal back-stabbing and murder. Nick is fascinated by the mysterious Jay Gatsby, who had made the fatal mistake of stepping outside of his lower class status to pursue the lovely but self-centered Daisy Buchanan.
In The Great Gatsby, all elements of Fitzgerald's skills coalesced to create a narrative that is both highly readable and subtly complex. His prose is imbued with elegant lyricism and hard-hitting realism. "It is humor, irony, ribaldry, pathos and loveliness," Edwin C. Clark wrote of the book in the New York Times upon its 1925 publication. "A curious book, a mystical, glamorous story of today. It takes a deeper cut at life than hitherto has been essayed by Mr. Fitzgerald."
Gatsby is widely considered to be Fitzgerald's masterpiece and among the very greatest of all American literature. It is the ultimate summation of his contempt for the Jazz-Age with which he is so closely associated. Gatsby is also one of the clearest and saddest reflections of his own destructive relationship with Zelda, which would so greatly influence the mass of his work.
Fitzgerald only managed to complete one more novel -- Tender is the Night -- before his untimely death in 1940. An unfinished expose of the Hollywood studio system titled The Love of the Last Tycoon would be published a year later. Still The Great Gatsby remains his quintessential novel. It has been a fixture of essential reading lists for decades and continues to remain an influential work begging to be revisited. It has been produced for the big screen three times and was the subject of a movie for television starring Toby Stephens, Mira Sorvino, and Paul Rudd as recently as 2000. Never a mere product of a bygone age, F. Scott Fitzgerald's greatest work continues to evade time.
Good to Know
In 1937, Fitzgerald moved to Hollywood to pursue a screenwriting career. He only completed a single screenplay Three Comrades during this time before being fired for his excessive drinking.
He held a very romantic view of Princeton before attending the university in 1913. However, his failure to maintain adequate grades or become the football star he dreamed to be lead to an early end to his studies in 1917.
Fitzgerald owes a his name to another famous American writer. He was named after Francis Scott Key, the composer of "The Star Spangled Banner," who also happened to be a distant relative of Fitzgerald's.
From the Publisher
All the glamour and cynicismof the dawning Jazz Age are on display in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s debut story collection.
Flappers and Philosophers was first published in 1920, on the heels of the young author’s smash hit novel This Side of Paradise. The collection contains some of his most famous early stories, including “Bernice Bobs Her Hair,” “The Ice Palace,” “Head and Shoulders,” and “The Offshore Pirate.” In these pages we meet many of Fitzgerald’s trademark character types: the beautiful and headstrong young women and the dissolute young men of what came to be called the Lost Generation. With their bobbed hair and dangling cigarettes, his characters are sophisticated, witty, and, above all, modern: the spoiled heiress who falls for her kidnapper, the intellectual student whose life is turned upside-down by a chorus girl, the feuding debutantes whose weapons are cutting words and a pair of scissors.
Product Details
- Pub. Date: April 2001
- Publisher: Replica Books
- Format: Library Binding, 280pp
- ISBN-13: 9780735100749
- ISBN: 0735100748
- Edition Description: Reprint
Table of Contents
Contents
The Offshore Pirate
The Ice Palace
Head and Shoulders
The Cut-Glass Bowl
Bernice Bobs Her Hair
Benediction
Dalyrimple Goes Wrong
The Four Fists
Critical Excerpts
Suggestions for Further Reading
Read an Excerpt
The Offshore PirateThis unlikely story begins on a sea that was a blue dream, as colorful as blue-silk stockings, and beneath a sky as blue as the irises of children's eyes. From the western half of the sky the sun was shying little golden disks at the sea—if you gazed intently enough you could see them skip from wave tip to wave tip until they joined a broad collar of golden coin that was collecting half a mile out and would eventually be a dazzling sunset. About half-way between the Florida shore and the golden collar a white steam-yacht, very young and graceful, was riding at anchor and under a blue-and-white awning aft a yellow-haired girl reclined in a wicker settee reading The Revolt of the Angels, by Anatole France.
She was about nineteen, slender and supple, with a spoiled alluring mouth and quick gray eyes full of a radiant curiosity. Her feet, stockingless, and adorned rather than clad in blue-satin slippers which swung nonchalantly from her toes, were perched on the arm of a settee adjoining the one she occupied. And as she read she intermittently regaled herself by a faint application to her tongue of a half-lemon that she held in her hand. The other half, sucked dry, lay on the deck at her feet and rocked very gently to and fro at the almost imperceptible motion of the tide.
The second half-lemon was well-nigh pulpless and the golden collar had grown astonishing in width, when suddenly the drowsy silence which enveloped the yacht was broken by the sound of heavy footsteps and an elderly man topped with orderly gray hair and clad in a white-flannel suit appeared at the head of the companionway. There he paused for a moment untilhis eyes became accustomed to the sun, and then seeing the girl under the awning he uttered a long even grunt of disapproval.
If he had intended thereby to obtain a rise of any sort he was doomed to disappointment. The girl calmly turned over two pages, turned back one, raised the lemon mechanically to tasting distance, and then very faintly but quite unmistakably yawned.
"Ardita!" said the gray-haired man sternly.
Ardita uttered a small sound indicating nothing.
"Ardita!" he repeated. "Ardita!"
Ardita raised the lemon languidly, allowing three words to slip out before it reached her tongue.
"Oh, shut up."
"Ardita!"
"What?"
"Will you listen to me—or will I have to get a servant to hold you while I talk to you?"
The lemon descended slowly and scornfully.
"Put it in writing."
"Will you have the decency to close that abominable book and discard that damn lemon for two minutes?"
"Oh, can't you lemme alone for a second?"
"Ardita, I have just received a telephone message from the shore—"
"Telephone?" She showed for the first time a faint interest.
"Yes, it was—"
"Do you mean to say," she interrupted wonderingly, "'at they let you run a wire out here?"
"Yes, and just now—"
"Won't other boats bump into it?"
"No. It's run along the bottom. Five min—"
"Well, I'll be darned! Gosh! Science is golden or something—isn't it?"
"Will you let me say what I started to?"
"Shoot!"
"Well, it seems—well, I am up here—" He paused and swallowed several times distractedly. "Oh, yes. Young woman, Colonel Moreland has called up again to ask me to be sure to bring you in to dinner. His son Toby has come all the way from New York to meet you and he's invited several other young people. For the last time, will you—"
"No," said Ardita shortly, "I won't. I came along on this darn cruise with the one idea of going to Palm Beach, and you knew it, and I absolutely refuse to meet any darn old colonel or any darn young Toby or any darn old young people or to set foot in any other darn old town in this crazy state. So you either take me to Palm Beach or else shut up and go away."
"Very well. This is the last straw. In your infatuation for this man—a man who is notorious for his excesses, a man your father would not have allowed to so much as mention your name—you have reflected the demi-monde rather than the circles in which you have presumably grown up. From now on—"
"I know," interrupted Ardita ironically, "from now on you go your way and I go mine. I've heard that story before. You know I'd like nothing better."
"From now on," he announced grandiloquently, "you are no niece of mine. I—"
"O-o-o-oh!" The cry was wrung from Ardita with the agony of a lost soul. "Will you stop boring me! Will you go 'way! Will you jump overboard and drown! Do you want me to throw this book at you!"
"If you dare do any—"
Smack! The Revolt of the Angels sailed through the air, missed its target by the length of a short nose, and bumped cheerfully down the companionway.
The gray-haired man made an instinctive step backward and then two cautious steps forward. Ardita jumped to her five feet four and stared at him defiantly, her gray eyes blazing.
"Keep off!"
"How dare you!" he cried.
"Because I darn please!"
"You've grown unbearable! Your disposition—"
"You've made me that way! No child ever has a bad disposition unless it's her family's fault! Whatever I am, you did it."
Muttering something under his breath her uncle turned and, walking forward, called in a loud voice for the launch. Then he returned to the awning, where Ardita had again seated herself and resumed her attention to the lemon.
"I am going ashore," he said slowly. "I will be out again at nine o'clock to-night. When I return we will start back to New York, where I shall turn you over to your aunt for the rest of your natural, or rather unnatural, life."
He paused and looked at her, and then all at once something in the utter childishness of her beauty seemed to puncture his anger like an inflated tire and render him helpless, uncertain, utterly fatuous.
"Ardita," he said not unkindly, "I'm no fool. I've been round. I know men. And, child, confirmed libertines don't reform until they're tired—and then they're not themselves—they're husks of themselves." He looked at her as if expecting agreement, but receiving no sight or sound of it he continued. "Perhaps the man loves you—that's possible. He's loved many women and he'll love many more. Less than a month ago, one month, Ardita, he was involved in a notorious affair with that red-haired woman, Mimi Merril; promised to give her the diamond bracelet that the Czar of Russia gave his mother. You know—you read the papers."
"Thrilling scandals by an anxious uncle," yawned Ardita. "Have it filmed. Wicked clubman making eyes at virtuous flapper. Virtuous flapper conclusively vamped by his lurid past. Plans to meet him at Palm Beach. Foiled by anxious uncle."
"Will you tell me why the devil you want to marry him?"
"I'm sure I couldn't say," said Ardita shortly. "Maybe because he's the only man I know, good or bad, who has an imagination and the courage of his convictions. Maybe it's to get away from the young fools that spend their vacuous hours pursuing me around the country. But as for the famous Russian bracelet, you can set your mind at rest on that score. He's going to give it to me at Palm Beach—if you'll show a little intelligence."
"How about the—red-haired woman?"
"He hasn't seen her for six months," she said angrily. "Don't you suppose I have enough pride to see to that? Don't you know by this time that I can do any darn thing with any darn man I want to?"
She put her chin in the air like the statue of France Aroused, and then spoiled the pose somewhat by raising the lemon for action.
"Is it the Russian bracelet that fascinates you?"
"No, I'm merely trying to give you the sort of argument that would appeal to your intelligence. And I wish you'd go 'way," she said, her temper rising again. "You know I never change my mind. You've been boring me for three days until I'm about to go crazy. I won't go ashore! Won't! Do you hear? Won't!"
"Very well," he said, "and you won't go to Palm Beach either. Of all the selfish, spoiled, uncontrolled, disagreeable, impossible girls I have—"
Splush! The half-lemon caught him in the neck. Simultaneously came a hail from over the side.
"The launch is ready, Mr. Farnam."
Too full of words and rage to speak, Mr. Farnam cast one utterly condemning glance at his niece and, turning, ran swiftly down the ladder.
Read a Sample Chapter
Chapter One: The Offshore Pirate
This unlikely story begins on a sea that was a blue dream, as colorful as blue-silk stockings, and beneath a sky as blue as the irises of children's eyes. From the western half of the sky the sun was shying little golden disks at the sea -- if you gazed intently enough you could see them skip from wave tip to wave tip until they joined a broad collar of golden coin that was collecting half a mile out and would eventually be a dazzling sunset. About half-way between the Florida shore and the golden collar a white steam-yacht, very young and graceful, was riding at anchor and under a blue-and-white awning aft a yellow-haired girl reclined in a wicker settee reading The Revolt of the Angels, by Anatole France.
She was about nineteen, slender and supple, with a spoiled alluring mouth and quick gray eyes full of a radiant curiosity. Her feet, stockingless, and adorned rather than clad in blue-satin slippers which swung nonchalantly from her toes, were perched on the arm of a settee adjoining the one she occupied. And as she read she intermittently regaled herself by a faint application to her tongue of a half-lemon that she held in her hand. The other half, sucked dry, lay on the deck at her feet and rocked very gently to and fro at the almost imperceptible motion of the tide.
The second half-lemon was well-nigh pulpless and the golden collar had grown astonishing in width, when suddenly the drowsy silence which enveloped the yacht was broken by the sound of heavy footsteps and an elderly man topped with orderly gray hair and clad in a white-flannel suit appeared at the head of the companionway. There he paused for a moment until his eyes became accustomed to the sun, and then seeing the girl under the awning he uttered a long even grunt of disapproval.
If he had intended thereby to obtain a rise of any sort he was doomed to disappointment. The girl calmly turned over two pages, turned back one, raised the lemon mechanically to tasting distance, and then very faintly but quite unmistakably yawned.
"Ardita!" said the gray-haired man sternly.
Ardita uttered a small sound indicating nothing.
"Ardita!" he repeated. "Ardita!"
Ardita raised the lemon languidly, allowing three words to slip out before it reached her tongue.
"Oh, shut up."
"Ardita!"
"What?"
"Will you listen to me -- or will I have to get a servant to hold you while I talk to you?"
The lemon descended slowly and scornfully.
"Put it in writing."
"Will you have the decency to close that abominable book and discard that damn lemon for two minutes?"
"Oh, can't you lemme alone for a second?"
"Ardita, I have just received a telephone message from the shore -- "
"Telephone?" She showed for the first time a faint interest.
"Yes, it was -- "
"Do you mean to say," she interrupted wonderingly, "'at they let you run a wire out here?"
"Yes, and just now -- "
"Won't other boats bump into it?"
"No. It's run along the bottom. Five min -- "
"Well, I'll be darned! Gosh! Science is golden or something -- isn't it?"
"Will you let me say what I started to?"
"Shoot!"
"Well, it seems -- well, I am up here -- " He paused and swallowed several times distractedly. "Oh, yes. Young woman, Colonel Moreland has called up again to ask me to be sure to bring you in to dinner. His son Toby has come all the way from New York to meet you and he's invited several other young people. For the last time, will you -- "
"No," said Ardita shortly, "I won't. I came along on this darn cruise with the one idea of going to Palm Beach, and you knew it, and I absolutely refuse to meet any darn old colonel or any darn young Toby or any darn old young people or to set foot in any other darn old town in this crazy state. So you either take me to Palm Beach or else shut up and go away."
"Very well. This is the last straw. In your infatuation for this man -- a man who is notorious for his excesses, a man your father would not have allowed to so much as mention your name -- you have reflected the demi-monde rather than the circles in which you have presumably grown up. From now on -- "
"I know," interrupted Ardita ironically, "from now on you go your way and I go mine. I've heard that story before. You know I'd like nothing better."
"From now on," he announced grandiloquently, "you are no niece of mine. I -- "
"O-o-o-oh!" The cry was wrung from Ardita with the agony of a lost soul. "Will you stop boring me! Will you go 'way! Will you jump overboard and drown! Do you want me to throw this book at you!"
"If you dare do any -- "
Smack! The Revolt of the Angels sailed through the air, missed its target by the length of a short nose, and bumped cheerfully down the companionway.
The gray-haired man made an instinctive step backward and then two cautious steps forward. Ardita jumped to her five feet four and stared at him defiantly, her gray eyes blazing.
"Keep off!"
"How dare you!" he cried.
"Because I darn please!"
"You've grown unbearable! Your disposition -- "
"You've made me that way! No child ever has a bad disposition unless it's her family's fault! Whatever I am, you did it."
Muttering something under his breath her uncle turned and, walking forward, called in a loud voice for the launch. Then he returned to the awning, where Ardita had again seated herself and resumed her attention to the lemon.
"I am going ashore," he said slowly. "I will be out again at nine o'clock to-night. When I return we will start back to New York, where I shall turn you over to your aunt for the rest of your natural, or rather unnatural, life."
He paused and looked at her, and then all at once something in the utter childishness of her beauty seemed to puncture his anger like an inflated tire and render him helpless, uncertain, utterly fatuous.
"Ardita," he said not unkindly, "I'm no fool. I've been round. I know men. And, child, confirmed libertines don't reform until they're tired -- and then they're not themselves -- they're husks of themselves." He looked at her as if expecting agreement, but receiving no sight or sound of it he continued. "Perhaps the man loves you -- that's possible. He's loved many women and he'll love many more. Less than a month ago, one month, Ardita, he was involved in a notorious affair with that red-haired woman, Mimi Merril; promised to give her the diamond bracelet that the Czar of Russia gave his mother. You know -- you read the papers."
"Thrilling scandals by an anxious uncle," yawned Ardita. "Have it filmed. Wicked clubman making eyes at virtuous flapper. Virtuous flapper conclusively vamped by his lurid past. Plans to meet him at Palm Beach. Foiled by anxious uncle."
"Will you tell me why the devil you want to marry him?"
"I'm sure I couldn't say," said Ardita shortly. "Maybe because he's the only man I know, good or bad, who has an imagination and the courage of his convictions. Maybe it's to get away from the young fools that spend their vacuous hours pursuing me around the country. But as for the famous Russian bracelet, you can set your mind at rest on that score. He's going to give it to me at Palm Beach -- if you'll show a little intelligence."
"How about the -- red-haired woman?"
"He hasn't seen her for six months," she said angrily. "Don't you suppose I have enough pride to see to that? Don't you suppose I have enough pride to see to that? Don't you know by this time that I can do any darn thing with any darn man I want to?"
She put her chin in the air like the statue of France Aroused, and then spoiled the pose somewhat by raising the lemon for action.
"Is it the Russian bracelet that fascinates you?"
"No, I'm merely trying to give you the sort of argument that would appeal to your intelligence. And I wish you'd go 'way," she said, her temper rising again. "You know I never change my mind. You've been boring me for three days until I'm about to go crazy. I won't go ashore! Won't! Do you hear? Won't!"
"Very well," he said, "and you won't go to Palm Beach either. Of all the selfish, spoiled, uncontrolled, disagreeable, impossible girls I have -- "
Splush! The half-lemon caught him in the neck. Simultaneously came a hail from over the side.
"The launch is ready, Mr. Farnam."
Too full of words and rage to speak, Mr. Farnam cast one utterly condemning glance at his niece and, turning, ran swiftly down the ladder.
Copyright © Copyright 1920 by Charles Scribner's Sons; renewal copyright 1948 by Zelda Fitzgerald. Copyright 1920 by The Curtis Publishing Company; renewal copyright 1948. Copyright 1920 by Charles Scribner's Sons; renewal copyright 1948. Copyright 1920 by Charles Scribner's Sons; renewal copyright 1948 by Zelda Fitzgerald and Frances Scott Fitzgerald Lanahan.
loading...
Related EssentiaListsuiAction=GetRelatedListsByEanFromProductPage&page=List&pageType=list&ean=9780735100749&productCode=BK&maxCount=5&threshold=10
loading...
Fans of this BookuiAction=GetProfileBlurbsWithEANinFavorites&page=UserProfile&pageType=profile&eanInput=9780735100749
loading...