The Price Was High: Fifty Uncollected Stories by F. Scott Fitzgerald is a volume of short fiction by F. Scott Fitzgerald published by Harcourt Brace & Company in 1979.
The volume comprises stories originally appearing in popular literary journals, but never authorized for collection by Fitzgerald during his lifetime.
The stories in the collection are presented here chronologically by the date they were first published.
During FitzgeraldâÂÂs professional career he sold 164 of his stories to popular literary journals of the 1920s and 30s, the so-called "slicks." Forty-six of these stories were collected in four volumes: Flappers and Philosophers (1920), Tales of the Jazz Age (1922), All the Sad Young Men (1926), and Taps at Reveille (1935).
After FitzgeraldâÂÂs death in 1940, six more volumes of as yet uncollected short fiction appeared: The Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald (1951), Afternoon of an Author (1957), The Pat Hobby Stories (1962), The Apprenticeship Fiction of F. Scott Fitzgerald (1965), The Basil and Josephine Stories (1973), and Bits of Paradise (1974).
The Price Was High represents a selection of 49 of the remaining 57 previously uncollected works first published in magazines. Eight stories remain uncollected at the behest of FitzgeraldâÂÂs daughter Scottie Fitzgerald Smith, deemed too undistinguished for inclusion. The volume adds a single piece, "On Your Own," one of nine stories never published so as to make The Price Was High an even fifty stories. Biographer Matthew J. Bruccoli, editor of The Price Was High, acknowledges that these stories lack the "facility" that characterize Fitzgerald's most outstanding short fiction: "The stories in this volume are not FitzgeraldâÂÂs best."
Kirkus Reviews questions the judgment of editor Matthew J. Bruccoli in publishing works that Fitzgerald declined to collect in his own lifetime: "[N]ot a single one of these stories takes the time to stand back and really achieve the pause, gravity, and sweetness of Fitzgerald's best work."
Literary critic Aaron Latham of The Washington Post considers the stories in The Price Was High to be "bootleg" magazine fiction: "The best of FitzgeraldâÂÂs magazine work, of course, had been published from long ago." Latham argues that Fitzgerald would have benefited from writing less short fiction and finishing The Last Tycoon (1941), which remained uncompleted when he died in 1940.
Literary critic Malcolm Cowley in The New York Times, after reading all 50 stories, found merit in a number of them, writing: "almost all of them contain something to surprise us, if only a sentence or a passing observationâ¦" Cowley adds this caveat:
Fitzgerald approached his short stories as a means of financing his primary creative endeavor: to write novels. As his short fiction was "written for money", he often despaired at his commercial relationship with The Saturday Evening Post and other "slick" journals. Writing to editor H. L. Menken in 1925, he complained that "my trash for the Post grows worse and worse as there is less and less heart in it...People donâÂÂt seem to realize that to an intelligent man writing down is about the hardest thing in the world."
In a 1929 note to fellow writer Ernest Hemingway, Fitzgerald identified himself with a sexual prostitute: "The Post now pays the old whore $4000 a screw. But now itâÂÂs because sheâÂÂs mastered the 40 positionsâÂÂin her youth, one was enough."
Bruccoli notes that despite FitzgeraldâÂÂs doubts as to the value of much of his short fiction, "he expended a major part of his talent on them".
Matthew J. Bruccoli, who edited the collection, reminds readers that Fitzgerald was fastidious about the work that was included in his collections and argues that the fact that the material in The Price Was High only appeared posthumously is a measure of his discrimination. Bruccoli writes: "Fitzgerald maintained a distinction between magazine and book publication, insisting that inclusion of a story in one of his collections gave it permanence and literary standing.} Bruccoli reminds readers that, during the Roaring Twenties, Fitzgerald was widely regarded as "a radical writer who announced the existence of new social values and new sexual roles." With respect to women during the era of the Flapper, Bruccoli writes:
That Fitzgerald was fully aware of the cultural prohibitions concerning popular literature in the United States, and as a social conservation, was not unduly thwarted by these strictures. As to whether he "compromised or diluted his stories" to make them suitable for publication, this "remains an open question" according to Bruccoli.