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Anne Margaret Daniel first engaged with F Scott Fitzgerald's work on a critical level when she attended a seminar at Princeton in 1996 as a graduate student.
There, the great critic A Walton Litz recommended she dive into the Fitzgerald archive.
Twenty-one years later, she's emerged with I'd Die for You and Other Lost Stories, a collection of some of Fitzgerald's unpublished short stories, released in Australia this week.
It might seem ridiculous that one of the titans of American literature still has unpublished works, but as Daniel reminds us, Fitzgerald was full of surprises.
"He's a very gifted writer: he does beautiful things with words, he creates beautiful patterns that solve themselves into artful paragraphs and memorable phrases," she says.
"But I love working with the Fitzgerald papers in the archive because you literally never know what you're going to come across.
"This archive has been extant in its current form with a few major additions, since the late 1940s.
"A lot of scholars have pored through it but it depends on what you're looking for and how ready you are to be surprised. Always.
"You turn over a paper, you look in a margin where you haven't seen what he's scribbled there before."
The stories were "lost" in the most part because Fitzgerald withdrew them after disagreeing with journal and magazine editors who wanted changes.
Daniel's new publication includes extensive header notes, and she says she is most interested in the things Fitzgerald did not want changed.
"When an editor sends it back and says, 'Oh, we don't like X,' or 'Can we have a little more of Y?' [there are] instances in which Fitzgerald says: 'No, I'd rather actually not see it printed and I'll hold onto it for a while.'"
More than novels
These days, Fitzgerald is mostly remembered for novels like The Great Gatsby and Tender is the Night, but it was short stories that paid for his famously lavish lifestyle.
In the early days of his fame Fitzgerald was regularly earning US$4,000 a story from publications like the Saturday Evening Post, which Daniel calculates to be roughly the equivalent of US$55,000 in today's money.
Even more surprising than the jaw-dropping fee is the mercantile and, frankly, a little cynical approach Fitzgerald took when writing many of these stories, as Daniel reveals.
"He did call it hack work, and at other times he called it trash, but you must remember that he did so when speaking privately to critics."
Although Fitzgerald made a clear distinction between his moneymaking efforts and his real artistic work, there were times when the two intersected.
"He was thrilled when a story he appreciated for its artistic merit and had been a favourite story of his own sold for a lot of money — it made him very happy," Daniel says.
We like to imagine that literary greats like Fitzgerald were devoted only to the purity of their art form, so it can be a bit jarring to hear that they too were prepared to drop their standards to pay a bill or two.
And in Fitzgerald's case it was more than just a bill or two. The novelist and his wife Zelda — herself a prominent writer — were well known for their Gatsby-esque social life.
"There was a certain style, not just to which [Zelda] was accustomed, but to which Fitzgerald really wanted her to stay accustomed. He adored her, he was very proud of her and proud to be married to her and he wanted the best things for her."
But Fitzgerald's hard graft was not just in service of luxury — it was also necessary in order to fund the treatment of Zelda's increasingly severe mental health problems.
"It was part of what pushed him, certainly, as a young writer and then, increasingly, as a middle aged man when she was in need of hospitalisation and in need of medical care," says Daniel.
"Scott very much wanted Zelda to have the best care money could buy ... There is no question that he did work very hard so that she could be cared for as well as was possible."
Fitzgerald 'typecast' as an author
While being hugely lucrative, Fitzgerald's flashy and crowd-pleasing short stories did have a detrimental effect on his career, at least as far as Daniel is concerned.
While the work of other writers of his generation such as Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein developed and changed with the times, Fitzgerald's huge popularity meant that he was typecast in the publishing world.
"These stories do come from the 1930s, and this was a time that not just America but the whole world was in the grip of a massive economic depression," says Daniel.
"People were out of work, people were hungry and nobody had a lot of money, in terms of magazine editors, to pay for stories that repeated the current circumstances.
"Fitzgerald was a go-to figure for editors and publishers who wanted some magic, who wanted some jazz and fizz and something to brighten people up and remind them of the good old happy days which, of course, weren't so happy."
This was the second reason some stories never saw the light of day.
Many tales in this collection show a darker, rawer side to Fitzgerald's worldview, a side the literary establishment didn't want to publish, despite the work's aesthetic merit.
Now, with the publishing of I'd Die for You and Other Lost Stories, we have a fresh opportunity to reassess the scope and concerns of Fitzgerald's work — no doubt one of the most enigmatic and complex novelists of last century.
Topics: books-literature, author, arts-and-entertainment, united-states
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