The Basil and Josephine Stories

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Simon and Schuster, Jan 24, 1997 - Biography & Autobiography - 334 pages
Fourteen of F. Scott Fitzgerald's best-loved and most beguiling stories, together in a single volume
In 1928, while struggling with his novel Tender Is the Night, Fitzgerald began writing a series of stories about Basil Duke Lee, a fictionalized version of his younger self. Drawing on his childhood and adolescent experiences, Fitzgerald wrote nine tales that were published in the Saturday Evening Post about his life from the time he was an eleven-year-old boy living in Buffalo, New York, until he entered Princeton University in 1913. Then from 1930 to 1931, with Tender Is the Night still unfinished, Fitzgerald wrote five more stories (also published in the Post) that centered around Josephine Perry, Basil's female counterpart. Although Fitzgerald intended to combine the fourteen Basil Lee and Josephine Perry stories into a single work, he never succeeded in doing so in his lifetime. Here, The Basil and Josephine Stories brings together in one volume the complete set, resulting in one of Fitzgerald's most charming and evocative works.
 

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Contents

Introduction
7
Textual Note and Acknowledgments
27
That Kind of Party
33
The Scandal Detectives
47
A Night at the Fair
69
The Freshest Boy
87
He Thinks Hes Wonderftxl
111
The Captured Shadow
134
Forging Ahead
182
Basil and Cleopatra
202
First Blood
225
A Nice Quiet Place
243
A Woman with a Past
264
A Snobbish Story
285
Emotional Bankruptcy
309
Life and Career
329

The Perfect Life
157

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About the author (1997)

F. Scott Fitzgerald was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1896. He attended Princeton University, joined the United States Army during World War I, and published his first novel, This Side of Paradise, in 1920. That same year he married Zelda Sayre and for the next decade the couple lived in New York, Paris, and on the Riviera. Fitzgerald’s masterpieces include The Beautiful and Damned, The Great Gatsby, and Tender Is the Night. He died at the age of forty-four while working on The Last Tycoon. Fitzgerald’s fiction has secured his reputation as one of the most important American writers of the twentieth century.

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