The Basil and Josephine Stories

by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780684826189
Publisher:	Scribner
Publication date:	01/24/1997
Pages:	336
Sales rank:	455,452
Product dimensions:	5.25(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

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.

Date of Birth:

September 24, 1896

Date of Death:

December 21, 1940

Place of Birth:

St. Paul, Minnesota

Education:

Princeton University

Table of Contents

CONTENTS

Introduction

Textual Note and Acknowledgments

I. BASIL

That Kind of Party

The Scandal Detectives

A Night at the Fair

The Freshest Boy

He Thinks He's Wonderful

The Captured Shadow

The Perfect Life

Forging Ahead

Basil and Cleopatra

II. JOSEPHINE

First Blood

A Nice Quiet Place

A Woman with a Past

A Snobbish Story

Emotional Bankruptcy

A Brief Life of E Scott Fitzgerald