Review Essay | New Short Story Collections
Where All Good Flappers Go: Essential Stories of the Jazz Age. Selected and introduced by David M. Earle. Pushkin Press, 2023. 238 pp. $18.00 (paperback); $13.99 (e-book).
Reviewed by Michelle E. Moore, College of Dupage
What was once considered the new, popular, and scandalous work of modernist writers and artists may not speak so easily to twenty-first-century readers. It makes sense, then, that the last twenty years of modernist studies has been spent refocusing the field. Thanks to new technologies, a tremendous amount of work can now be done in both physical and online archives. With the passage of time, more modernist texts have become available as they move out of copyright and into the public domain. As a result, scholars can reexamine once popular and influential works in new contexts, in turn generating new understandings of well-read and frequently taught works. More recently, scholarship on early-twentieth-century magazine cultures has stressed the importance of understanding not just what was published, but where it was published, by whom, under what conditions, and for which audience. This work has shifted away from modernism’s New Critical impulse, instead situating the work firmly in its relationships with editors, periodicals, and audience. This new focus on reception and print networks has reinvigorated modernist studies, as novels and short stories are understood as cultural and historical artifacts as well as art, and the relationships of the two realms can be explored anew.
The Complete Magazine Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1921-1924, edited by Alexandra Mitchell and Jennifer Nolan, and Where All Good Flappers Go: Essential Stories of the Jazz Age, edited by David M. Earle, are superficially contrasting collections. The Complete Magazine Stories is a formidable volume focused on Fitzgerald’s stories. All Good Flappers, part of Pushkin Press’s Essential Stories series, is a small, packable paperback with an illustration of a jaunty flapper on the cover; the volume features 13 short stories by various US writers, including the Fitzgeralds, of the 1920s and early 1930s. Both volumes deftly reconsider the relationship of modernist to modernism, and together they demonstrate how F. Scott Fitzgerald’s and others’ work is a part of a wider modernist impulse, rather than using individual writers to define the era.
The eighteen stories Fitzgerald published in magazines between 1921 and 1924 form the core of Mitchell and Nolan’s volume, which includes among its selections the lesser-known stories “Jemina, the Mountain Girl,” “Hot and Cold Blood,” “Gretchen’s Forty Winks,” and “John Jackson’s Arcady,” in addition to well-known and often anthologized stories, “Winter Dreams” and “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz.” If the volume’s only purpose were to republish overlooked and underrepresented stories, it would still be a noteworthy addition to Fitzgerald studies because it demonstrates that recovery work is still possible even with a writer as documented and researched as Fitzgerald. The collection takes a more innovative and refreshing approach to anthology curation: it replicates the order in which the stories were published in Vanity Fair, Metropolitan, The Smart Set, The Saturday Evening Post, Collier’s, Hearst’s International, The American Mercury, McCall’s, and Liberty. In the introduction, Nolan points out that this editorial strategy “shifts the authority from Fitzgerald to the contexts in which his short stories were published and read by his largest audiences” (xxv). Thus, the volume “offers a gateway into the living textual history of Fitzgerald’s work, warts and all, and how he was being framed by the magazines for his largest audiences” (xxxiii). This replication breaks with all previous collections of Fitzgerald’s short work, including the collections published in his lifetime, teaching anthologies of American literature, Matthew J. Bruccoli’s 1995 collection, and, most notably, L.W. West III’s Cambridge University Press editions. The volume shows implicitly that one of the most valuable approaches to reading Fitzgerald's stories is with an awareness of their manner of circulation and reception.
What makes this edition of Fitzgerald’s work indispensable are Mitchell and Nolan’s extensive introduction, notes, and appendices. Nolan’s thorough introduction considers the period that the volume covers within the context of Fitzgerald’s life and the magazine market for short stories. These stories date from the period in which Fitzgerald had begun his second novel and appeared to abandon the form, yet Fitzgerald had never published so many stories in so many magazines. The early 1920s were also a period of change and fluctuation in the U.S. magazine market, and Nolan demonstrates how intertwined Fitzgerald’s career became with this altered marketplace, including the impact of changes at the helms of the magazines, the possibilities for serialization of the short story, and a new interest among publishers in the possibilities of the short story as a literary form. Nolan’s introduction traces Fitzgerald through the magazines, providing an overview of the magazines in which these stories first appeared, and ends with a discussion of the various magazines’ editorial principles, the stories’ textual variants, and their paratexts.
In addition to the eighteen stories, the volume includes three appendices as well as Mitchell’s explanatory notes. The Notes construct a matrix for understanding the different magazine contexts for each of the stories. Appendix one illustrates the value of digitization in the archives, as Mitchell and Nolan use Ngram language analysis, a technique of searching within Google’s extended collection of texts, to gain insights into Fitzgerald’s work that would previously have required untold hours of meticulous reading and annotation. The analysis explains how often Fitzgerald used a particular word or phrase, and how those patterns may have changed over time. The fascinating analysis of fashion terms, such as “gold dress” and “bobbed hair,” as well as such slang as “flapper,” “hectic,” “slick,” “marvelous,” “skiddoo,” and “business speak” allows “us to see that Fitzgerald caught the words ‘hectic’ and ‘slick’ at the start of their ascent into the language of youth” (390). Appendix two charts the magazine publication details for all the stories in the volume, and appendix three provides examples of the visual contexts for Fitzgerald’s stories to show how the stories were marketed alongside images in the magazines. While Mitchell and Nolan were unable to reproduce all the illustrations and advertisements that accompanied the stories in the magazines due to exorbitant reproduction costs, the volume contains representative reproductions—the cover of the 1922 issue of Metropolitan that included “Winter Dreams,” for example—and an extensive analysis of image-text interactions in the magazines. Despite the limited inclusion of reproductions, The Complete Magazine Stories contains a fairly extensive list, ranging from the cover of the February 1921 Metropolitan issue, containing “His Russet Witch,” to the opening page of “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz” in the June 1922 issue of The Smart Set, that will guide interested scholars to the archives. With the introduction and explanatory notes, the appendices provide a wealth of data pulled from, information about, and analysis of Fitzgerald’s magazine stories.
The Complete Magazines Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald models a new approach to literary curation that combines a creative approach with an impressive understanding of what it is to do meticulous archival research. The volume achieves fully its promise to “allow the reader to experience all of these stories in order, [as it also] tells the story of how those magazines published and promoted his work in this era, and opens the door for students and scholars to consider what it means to put Fitzgerald back into his original context, the American magazine of the 1920s” (xxxiii).
Earle’s collection Where All Good Flappers Go offers another lens by which to understand Fitzgerald’s contributions in cultural context. As the title indicates, this volume focuses thematically on the figure of the flapper. Taken together, the stories provide a compelling overview of the ways in which this figure evolved in the popular Black and white press—in McCall’s, The Saturday Evening Post, Snappy Stories, The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, The Pittsburgh Courier, National News, and College Humor—ultimately creating the new genre of flapper literature. The volume comprises two stories by the Fitzgeralds—Zelda’s “What Became of the Flappers?” and F. Scott’s “Bernice Bobs her Hair”—and eleven stories by other writers, both Black and white. These authors, including Dana Ames, Katherine Brush, Zora Neale Hurston, and Gertrude Schalk, are not necessarily associated with the flapper or the Jazz Age. Earle’s brief introduction provides a short history of the way in which the word flapper evolved linguistically, and he briefly considers the flapper as “both a figure of feminine empowerment and risqué sexuality, as the many chorus girls and gold diggers in flapper fiction illustrate” (10). He points out that like the decade that created the flapper, “the flapper phenomenon was neither simple nor homogenous,” and notes that some of the writers, like Dorothy Parker, “skewer preconceptions of the flapper even as they rely on them” (9).
The main strength of this collection is in the breadth of authors represented: so-called literary and pulp, well-known and unknown. The inclusion of Rudolph Fisher’s 1930 “Common Meter,” Hurston’s “Monkey Junk,” and Schalk’s “The Chicago Kid” destroy the old shibboleths of the flapper as a white girl, and they break the walls between the New Negro Renaissance, white modernism, and popular magazine and newspaper culture. Earle notes how the flapper evolves from the fun and playfulness of the jazz culture, and he points out how Blackness is both present and overlooked in the stories by white authors. Because the flapper features across stories by such diverse writers, the collection succeeds in making its case that reconsidering the flapper genre allows new ideas about the relationships of individual modernist writers and modernism to emerge, implicitly and subtly repositioning the Fitzgeralds as simply two writers about flappers.
Both volumes demonstrate the new possibilities for scholarship engendered through the digital availability of periodical material from the archive. While The Complete Magazine Stories is a dense and impressive archival resource, Where All Good Flappers Go gathers an accessible array of otherwise dispersed newspaper and magazine stories arranged around a major figure epitomizing the Roaring Twenties. Both are noteworthy additions to modernist studies in general, and to short story and magazine fiction scholarship in particular, because they make the stories of these writers accessible to a wide range of readers, including students, and both could serve as an introduction to modernist fiction and the potential of archival work.