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  • Published: 15 March 2010
  • ISBN: 9780307474520
  • Imprint: Knopf US
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 240
  • RRP: $22.99

Flappers And Philosophers




All the glamour and cynicism of the dawning Jazz Age are on display in F. Scott Fitzgerald's debut story collection. FIRST TIME IN VINTAGE.

Flappers and Philosophers was published in 1920 on the heels of Fitzgerald’s sensational debut, This Side of Paradise, and anticipated themes in The Great Gatsby. This iconic collection marks the writer’s entry into short fiction, and contains some of his most famous early stories, including “Bernice Bobs Her Hair,” “The Ice Palace,” “Head and Shoulders,” and “The Offshore Pirate.” In these pages we meet Fitzgerald’s trademark characters: the beautiful, headstrong young women and the dissolute, wandering young men who comprised what came to be called the Lost Generation. With their bobbed hair and dangling cigarettes, his characters are sophisticated, witty, and, above all, modern: the spoiled heiress who falls for her kidnapper, the intellectual student whose life is turned upside-down by a chorus girl, the feuding debutantes whose weapons are cutting words and a pair of scissors. An instant classic in its time, a confirmed part of the canon today, this collection evokes 1920s America through the eyes of a writer indelibly linked to that singular era.  

  • Published: 15 March 2010
  • ISBN: 9780307474520
  • Imprint: Knopf US
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 240
  • RRP: $22.99

About the author

F Scott Fitzgerald

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896 -1940) is widely considered the poet laureate of the Jazz Age. He wrote many short stories and four novels, This Side of Paradise, The Beautiful and the Damned, Tender is the Night and The Great Gatsby. An unfinished novel, The Last Tycoon, was published posthumously.

F. Scott Fitzgerald was born in 1896 in St Paul, Minnesota, and went to Princeton University, which he left in 1917 to join the army. He was said to have epitomized the Jazz Age, which he himself defined as 'a generation grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken'. In 1920 he married Zelda Sayre. Their traumatic marriage and her subsequent breakdowns became the leading influence on his writing. Among his publications were five novels, This Side of Paradise, The Great Gatsby, The Beautiful and the Damned, Tender is the Night and The Last Tycoon (his last and unfinished work); six volumes of short stories and The Crack Up, a selection of autobiographical pieces.

Fitzgerald died suddenly in 1940. After his death The New York Times said of him that 'He was better than he knew, for in fact and in the literary sense he invented a 'generation'. . . he might have interpreted and even guided them, as in their midle years they saw a different and nobler freedom threatened with destruction.'

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