Master the 40: The Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald
In 1929 F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote Ernest Hemingway that because his short stories now earned $4000 a pop he was "an old whore" who had "mastered the 40 positions" when "in her youth one was enough." But were the upwards of 180 stories he cranked out when not writing The Great Gatsby really the work of a literary prostitute selling out his talent for a fast buck? Kirk Curnutt and Robert Trogdon don't think so. Each episode they draw a random title from a hat and explore its place in Fitzgerald's career, in the magazines such as the Saturday Evening Post or Esquire where it may have appeared, and in the overall development of the American short story. Along the way, they talk literary politics, history, and gossip from the 1920s and 1930s, rediscovering the lively personalities and rivalries that tried to define the porous boundaries between commercial and artistic fiction, between the popular and the avant-garde, between the forgotten and the canonized.
Episodes
22 episodes
"The Love Boat"
Imagine F. Scott Fitzgerald in the afterlife, some thirty-six years after his premature passing, discovering to his dismay that the cheesiest TV producer ever has copped the title to a little-known short story of his and turned it into a landma...
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Season 3
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Episode 3
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59:16
"What a Handsome Pair!"
Published in the August 27, 1932, issue of the Saturday Evening Post, "What a Handsome Pair!" clearly reflects F. Scott Fitzgerald's dour view of marital relationships amid the relapse that took Zelda to the Phipps Clinic in Baltimore....
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Season 3
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Episode 2
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57:22
"The Sensible Thing"
Published on July 5, 1924 as F. Scott Fitzgerald was writing The Great Gatsby, this Liberty short story has always been seen as a key rehearsal for his magnum opus. In the story of George Rollins (or George O'Kelly i...
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Season 3
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Episode 1
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49:26
The Ants at Princeton
Appearing in the June 1936 issue of Esquire, "The Ants at Princeton" is by any measure a singularly kooky entry in F. Scott Fitzgerald's short-story corpus. A fantasy about a human-sized ant who steps onto the field to save the ga...
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Season 2
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Episode 9
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50:28
Her Last Case
Published in fall 1934 in the Saturday Evening Post, "Her Last Case" is one of F. Scott Fitzgerald's most important stories about the South. Indeed, it challenges consensus opinions about the writer's regard for the region that the Tar...
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Season 2
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Episode 8
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55:25
Diamond Dick and the First Law of Woman
A contender for one of the strangest Fitzgerald titles ever, "Diamond Dick and the First Law of Woman," published in April 1924, tells the story of a maverick young debutante, Diana Dickey, who returns from the Western front where she ser...
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Season 2
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Episode 7
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50:59
"Babylon Revisited"
In late 1930 as Zelda Fitzgerald remained hospitalized in a sanitarium trying to regain her sanity her husband cranked out a frenzied series of stories to pay for her treatment. Out of this whirlwind of effort came "Babylon Revisited," which ap...
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Season 2
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Episode 6
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1:05:23
The Four Fists
As spring turned to summer in 1920 and This Side of Paradise was making a celebrity of F. Scott Fitzgerald, the periodical published by his very own publisher, Scribner's Magazine, featured an atypical story by him: ...
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Season 2
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Episode 5
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46:35
Crazy Sunday
In late 1931 F. Scott Fitzgerald traveled to Hollywood for a second attempt to crack the lucrative movie market. While there he attended a party at the home of MGM studio chieftain Irving Thalberg and his wife, Norma Shearer, at which he perfor...
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Season 2
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Episode 4
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58:27
The Fiend
Of all the commercial genres F. Scott Fitzgerald attempted in his stories (romance, moral tales, even fantasy and supernatural fiction), he was probably least adept at crime writing. That may seem odd considering The Great Gatsby'...
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Season 2
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Episode 3
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44:50
Porcelain and Pink
Just when you thought your stocking couldn't get any more stuffed this Christmas, we're slipping underneath your holly jolly to drop our second episode of season two. "Porcelain and Pink" appeared in the January 1920 issue of The Smart Set, one...
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Season 2
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Episode 2
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1:01:15
He Thinks He's Wonderful
We kick off season 2 of Master the 40 with our first foray into the series of "juveniles" Fitzgerald wrote for the Saturday Evening Post between 1928 and 1931. Actually, he wrote two coming-of-age series for the magazine, one ...
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Season 2
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Episode 1
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54:42
One Trip Abroad
For our tenth episode we explore a short story we think falls just outside of the Top 10: October 11, 1930's "One Trip Abroad," which totally blows anything else in that issue of the Saturday Evening Post out of the water. Many critics consider...
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Season 1
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Episode 10
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59:24
John Jackson's Arcady
Some critics have dismissed this story of a man who escapes his worldly woes by fleeing his office to return to his small-town, rundown origins as "pure trash," but we uncover some historical reasons it should be of interest. First, "John Jacks...
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Season 1
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Episode 9
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49:05
The Lost Decade
Our eighth episode focuses on the shortest short story Fitzgerald ever published, "The Lost Decade," which clocks in at only 1,100 words, making it Depression-era kin to today's flash fiction. Appearing in Esquire in December 1939 (exa...
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Season 1
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Episode 8
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55:42
At Your Age
Our first episode of 2021 examines a story that has been completely ignored both by fans and scholars: August 17, 1929's "At Your Age." The lack of interest is curious for a couple of reasons. For starters, this tale of a fifty-year-old b...
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Season 1
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Episode 7
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52:56
Pat Hobby and Orson Welles
Hot on the heels of David Fincher's Mank, a hotly disputed retelling of the origins of Citizen Kane, we explore F. Scott Fitzgerald's own take on the rise of Orson Welles. In the final year of his life, without income from Hollywood studi...
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Season 1
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Episode 6
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56:45
The Rich Boy: Special Nov 15 Bonus Episode
For reasons you have to tune in to discover, November 15 is an important day for at least three Fitzgerald diehards. So to celebrate we're offering a special bonus episode featuring our first ever special guest: James L. W. West III, the master...
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Season 1
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Episode 5
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57:48
Gretchen's Forty Winks
In this episode we nibble on a Fitzgerald comedy so light it could be meringue. Granted, the storyline of a harried husband who slips his wife a Mickey Finn of a sleeping potion so he can finish an important advertising campaign is probably tod...
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Season 1
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Episode 4
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53:38
May Day
Most fans agree that "May Day" is among Fitzgerald's all-time greatest stories: certainly Top 10, arguably Top 5, quite possibly No. 2 behind only "Babylon Revisited." Some might even argue that this ambitious "novelette," first published in Th...
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Season 1
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Episode 3
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1:08:41