A Fortune Yet: Money in the Art of F. Scott Fitzgerald's Short Stories. - book reviews

Studies in Short Fiction, Spring, 1993 by Thomas K. Meier

Bryant Mangum's A Fortune Yet takes up the ambitious task of analyzing all of F. Scott Fitzgerald's more than 150 short stories and thus serves as a kind of companion volume to Alice Hall Petry's excellent work, Fitzgerald's Craft of Short Fiction, which limits itself to describing only those stories that Fitzgerald collected into volumes during his lifetime. Mangum deals capably with this mass of material and relates it soundly and sensibly to the novels, and in the end he proves his claim that Fitzgerald's short stories "functioned as moneymakers, as proving ground for his ideas, as workshops for his craft, and as dictators of his popular reputation."

To prove his point about stories as "moneymakers," Mangum marshals his data well, proving that Fitzgerald indeed made most of his living from writing stories, not from novels, noting that in his productive 1925-33 period his earnings from 58 short stories were "nearly four times greater than his income from three novels." He further points out that Fitzgerald earned from the stories "a small fortune-scarcely a penny of which was left at his death." While he gives all the figures, however, Mangum would have done well by his own readers to relate Fitzgerald's earnings in the 1920s and 30s to contemporary values: what would the $210,497 Fitzgerald earned from 1925 to 1933 be worth today?

Mangum successfully demonstrates as well that Fitzgerald used the stories as "proving grounds for his ideas" and as "workshops for his craft," outlining a "familiar creative cycle" in which he "experiments with subjects, themes and techniques in short stories before working them out in final form in a novel." Furthermore, he demonstrates that this pattern becomes more sophisticated over time, pointing out that while one reviewer snidely called This Side of Paradise "the collected works of F. Scott Fitzgerald," he was using the magazines for "disciplined practice" by the time he was preparing to write The Great Gatsby. Mangum shows as well that his contemporary reputation was shaped primarily by the short stories, particularly by the early Saturday Evening Post pieces.

What A Fortune Yet does, it does well, but its subtitle, Money in the Art of F. Scott Fitzgerald's Short Stories, promises more than it delivers. Perhaps the most often remembered quotation from Fitzgerald is "the very rich are not like you and me," and this subtitle seems to suggest that the major thrust of the book will be an exploration of the role in Fitzgerald's short fiction of the acquisition, possession, and use of wealth and its perquisites. To be sure, Mangum does notice wealth and position in a few of the stories--"winter Dreams," "The Rich Boy," "Six of One--," and "The Rubber Check"--but he gives these issues rather less attention than many other themes he treats in this engaging book. It would be a useful addition to Fitzgerald scholarship to have a study of money in the art of Fitzgerald's fiction, and perhaps with A Fortune Yet as prelude, Mangum is the right person for the job.