“A generation grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken”, was how F. Scott Fitzgerald defined his age. Perhaps nowhere in American fiction is this statement better exemplified than in Fitzgerald’s first two volumes of short fiction: Flappers and Philosophers and Tales of the Jazz Age. Penguin’s new Jazz Age Stories gathers all of these early pieces in one volume, which together capture the shine and seductive sound of early American jazz, the scandalous affronts to religious pieties, the nights of drunken revelry, and the impending doom of financial, moral, and intellectual dissolution. Spanning the early twentieth-century American landscape — the Minnesota of his youth, the Princeton college years, the squalor and opulence of New York — this collection contains unforgettable images of modern America, and eloquently expresses Fitzgerald’s theme of the enchantment and disillusionment of materialism. Jazz Age Stories includes “The Ice Palace”, “Bernice Bobs Her Hair”, and “A Diamond as Big as The Ritz”.
