I'd Die for You: And Other Lost Stories (Hardback)

I'd Die for You is a collection of the last remaining unpublished short stories by F. Scott Fitzgerald, iconic author of The Great Gatsby and Tender is the Night.

All eighteen short fictions collected here were lost in one sense or another: physically lost, coming to light only recently; lost in the turbulence of Fitzgerald's later life; lost to readers because his editors sometimes did not understand what he was trying to write.

These fascinating stories offer a new insight into the arc of Fitzgerald's career, and demonstrate his stylistic agility and imaginative power as a writer at the forefront of Modern literature. As editor Anne Margaret Daniel notes in her introduction, these stories ‘are about divorce and despair; working days and lonesome nights… American history, with its wars, its horrors and its promises.’

We are, then, worlds away from the yearning glitter of The Great Gatsby, and for an editorship still in the thrall of the ‘jazz age’ Fitzgerald, this new and progressive fiction largely failed to find its place. Now we have the advantage to see these stories for what they really were, extraordinary examples of their form by a writer with talent to burn. 

Like Jay Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) has acquired a mythical status in American literary history, and his masterwork The Great Gatsby is considered by many to be the 'great American novel'. In 1920 he married Zelda Sayre, dubbed 'the first American Flapper', and their traumatic marriage and Zelda's gradual descent into insanity became the leading influence on his writing. As well as many short stories, Fitzgerald wrote five novels This Side of Paradise, The Great Gatsby, The Beautiful and the Damned, Tender is the Night and, incomplete at the time of his death, The Last Tycoon. After his death The New York Times said of him that 'in fact and in the literary sense he created a "generation"'.