My favorite page in all of Fitzgerald (probably my favorite page in all of literature) is page 112 in the Scribner's Library Edition of The Great Gatsby (page 134 in the first printing) where Nick reports that Gatsby "knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God." Certainly I don't want to do is to trivialize this wonderful passage in which the ideal vision becomes incarnate in Daisy for Gatsby, but I must tell you that when I signed a contract to write A Reader's Guide to the Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald several years ago for G.K. Hall I, like Nick, was reminded of "an elusive rhythm, a fragment of lost words" (which I assume to be Nick's acknowledgemt that somewhere in all of us is a remnant in partially remembered form of the ideal quest) and after I had put the contract in the mailbox out on the corner of Franklin and Shaffer Streets, I stood back and said, "What in the world have I just done." The romping of my mind over what had been for a number of years a kind of ideal reader's guide to Fitzgerald's stories in the abstract now gave way to a confrontation with the real problems of a complex and complicated project, one that I have been working on now for a number of years and which I am, in part, going to describe today.

Generally the volume that I agreed to write in what was the Hall Reader's Guide series is designed to provide in some form or other the following kinds of information about the body of short stories of the writer in question: (1)composition and publication history of each story; (2)sources and influences; (3)relationship of each story to other of the author's stories; (4)summary of criticism on each story; and (5)a bibliography of works containing discussions of individual stories. At the onset a number of questions related to the conception and organization of the Fitzgerald guide in the context of the loose guidelines of the series presented themselves, questions such as these: Should each story be discussed in a separate chapter (thus a book of some 170 chapters), each divided into five formal sections and each containing a bibliography? Should the bibliographies be comprehensive or selective? Should the chapters be ordered chronologically by composition date of the stories, or alphabetically by story title? And, of course, the list went on and on. I have answered some of the questions, but by no means all of them.

Taking into account the series guidelines, the refinements that have evolved over the course of the first three volumes in the series, and the particular demands of the Fitzgerald story canon, I have moved toward a half way point with the Fitzgerald Reader's Guide. The work in progress as it now stands looks like this: There is a chapter on every Fitzgerald story and the chapters are arranged in chronological order by date of composition of the stories. It is a fairly easy matter to date each story using the dates provided by Fitzgerald in the Ledger up through 1937 when he stopped recording composition dates. In most cases he provides the date after which he had stopped making revisions on a given story, thus it is usually necessary to qualify Fitzgerald's dates by reconstructing stages of composition from the Fitzgerald/Ober correspondence. For the stories after 1937, without dates from the Ledger and without correspondence on the Esquire stories (which Ober did not handle), it becomes much more difficult to be precise. At this point in the Reader's Guide the composition dates for some of the Esquire stories are educated guesses.

There are now two different types of chapters in the Fitzgerald Reader's Guide: "major" chapters for all stories contained in the four collections authorized in Fitzgerald's lifetime (45 stories), each chapter consisting of five formal sections (those mentioned above) with section headings; and "minor" chapters for the remaining stories (some 125 stories), containing the same information though usually in abbreviated form and without the formal section breaks. This means that a story such as "The Passionate Eskimo" has information about composition history, sources and influences, etc. in the same sequence as, say,"Babylon Revisited," but without subheads separating the sections. These abbreviated chapters are typically (though not always) shorter than the ones with formal sections. "The Passionate Eskimo" chapter, as it stands for example, is four double-spaced pages; the "Babylon Revisited" one is twenty-five. An exception to this would be the chapter on a story such as "One Trip Abroad," which did not appear in Taps at Reveille, but whose discussion will be longer than that of, say, "A Short Trip Home" or "Two Wrongs," which did appear in the collection but about which little has been written. Each chapter has a complete bibliography containing every entry listed in Bryer's bibliographies and in PMLA annual bibliographies, ALS, and all other similar bibliographical sources available. I've also included in each bibliography, page references to primary sources which mention the story in question.

The first section of each discussion (Composition and Publication History) creates a biographical backdrop for each story. If, while living at "La Paix" and at last busily at work on Tender Is the Night during the fall and winter of 1932, Fitzgerald is frustrated that Zelda is not entering into the daily operation of the house, and if he is busily occupied with making schedules for the smooth running of the household during the month of the composition of "On Schedule," this information goes in the Circumstances of Composition section of that story. These first sections of each discussion, if read in order, would provide an abbreviated biography constructed from the Ledger, from letters, from biographies, and other available information such as The Romantic Egotists. Deciding what to include in the Publication History part of these sections has been more difficult. At present I've referred the reader to the first collected American printing of each story and have used that text for quotations in the text of the Reader's Guide. All other printings have been listed in a table in the appendix.

The sections in the center sandwiched between Composition and Publication History and Bibliography pose different kinds of problems. Relatively little has been done on either sources or influences for Fitzgerald's stories. Occasionally there is some dialogue in the criticism of a particular story about what prompted Fitzgerald to write it at the time he did. In the case of "The Adjuster," for example, several critics cite the often quoted "light and glitter" passage as originating in Fitzgerald's frustration with Zelda and with their marriage in late 1924, the time of the story's composition. And there is some dialogue over whether Fitzgerald had met the English actress Rosalind Fuller in time for her to have become the model for of Marcia Meadow in "Head and Shoulders." In one rare case, in relation to "One Interne" and "Zone of Accident," Fitzgerald himself described in an interview going to the hospital emergency room in Baltimore for fifteen consecutive nights in order to get material for hospital stories that he wanted to write for the Post. But it is amazing how little has been done to connect specific stories with particular episodes in Fitzgerald's life. The same is true with the establishing of literary influence for specific stories. Henry Dan Piper laid the groundwork for looking at the influence of the naturalists on some of the Beautiful and Damned cluster stories and Alice Petry has a number of provocative suggestions about literary influences for specific stories (for example, a suggestion that the story line of "Head and Shoulders" may have owed something to Fitzgerald's reading of The Picture of Dorian Gray). And there are a few other such studies. But the area of Sources and Influences for the majority of the stories is a greatly neglected one.

In the case of the "Relationship (of a given story) to Other Fitzgerald Works" I have started with the foundation of natural large groupings such as the Basil/Josephine group or the Tender Is the Night cluster group, for example. Then I have attempted when possible to suggest ways in which certain stories cut across these groups. An obvious example is "Emotional Bankruptcy," a Josephine Perry story in which a serious Tender Is the Night theme is linked with a relatively trivial character when compared with Dick Diver. A less obvious example for studying relationships between works is a story like "The Bowl," very much a neglected story in which even character names like Dolly Harlan, Daisy Cary, Devlin, Devereux, and Josephine Pickman suggest symbolically the collision in the late 1920's of old and new Fitzgerald worlds. In many instances connections have already been established, as in the numerous studies which demonstrate the possible relationship between "Absolution" and The Great Gatsby. Clearly, though, this section of the Guide is a challenging one in which existing "relationship" studies can be noted and new observations about connections in the story canon can be made.

In the section on criticism my intention is to refer, even if briefly, to every study of every story that mentions the story in question more than simply in passing. Here the task is one of being thorough and of being true to the developing critical debate on each story. For the majority of stories (over 125 of them) there is relatively little criticism. For those stories like "Babylon Revisited" and "Absolution," for which there is substantial criticism, I have typically discussed the individual pieces of criticism as they have appeared in chronological sequence.