Flappers and Philosophers Stories [Paperback]

Flappers and Philosopherswas published in 1920 on the heels of Fitzgerald’s sensational debut,This Side of Paradise, and anticipated themes inThe Great Gatsby. This iconic collection marks the writer’s entry into short fiction, and 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 Fitzgerald’s trademark characters: the beautiful, headstrong young women and the dissolute, wandering young men who comprised 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. An instant classic in its time, a confirmed part of the canon today, this collection evokes 1920s America through the eyes of a writer indelibly linked to that singular era.  

“Fitzgerald is a master of the American short story.”
—The Philadelphia Inquirer

“His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly’s wings.”
—Ernest HemingwayF. Scott Fitzgerald, author ofThe Great Gatsby, was born in 1896 and died in 1940.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-wlc‹