Priče iz doba jazza

Francis Scott Fitzgerald is one of the most famous American (and world) writers of the 20th century, but it is interesting that his fame is de facto based on a single work, the novel "The Great Gatsby", and the uninhibited lifestyle that he and his wife Zelda promoted during the "roaring 20s" or "jazz age".

Fitzgerald was the first of the great writers of his generation (Dos Passos, Faulkner, Hemingway) to achieve great success; he became famous overnight, fashionable magazines paid him fabulous fees for stories, and when he moved to New York and married Zelda, they became the first celebrities in today's sense of the word. The most fashionable dressed people went to the wildest parties in the most attractive cars, or they organized them themselves...

"Tales of the Jazz Age" is Fitzgerald's second collection of short stories, consisting of eleven works, including two of his most appreciated short prose pieces, "May Day" and "A Diamond as Big as the Ritz" and, thanks to the film adaptation directed by David Fincher, today probably the author's best-known story, "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button".

The collection is characterized by two fundamental intonational components of Fitzgerald's poetics - playful irony and melancholy, and viewed as a whole, "Tales of the Jazz Age" presents its author as a master of the short story and convincingly testifies to the immense talent of the writer, unfortunately far more often abandoned to the uncontrollable waves of life's joys and sorrows than to detailed and meticulous literary creation.

Although Fitzgerald used to say that writing stories was prostitution for him, representative ones, and almost all of them are here, show that he is a master of short and shorter prose forms.