ABSTRACT
Fitzgerald’s first priority in the fall of 1919 was to do all he could to become a full-fledged writer: “While waited for the novel to appear, the metamorphosis of amateur into professional began to take place—a sort of stitching together of whole life into a pattern of work, so that the end of one job is automatically the beginning of another,” he recalled in 1937. In September, 1920, Scribner’s brought out eight of the fourteen stories Fitzgerald wrote between September, 1919, and March, 1920, in a book called Flappers and Philosophers. A canvass of the stories Fitzgerald saw fit to collect and those he passed over reveal several pertinent things about Fitzgerald in the process of becoming a professional writer, an autonomous being who has shed the shackles of his Catholic faith. To Fitzgerald, it must have seemed only fitting that he should be at Princeton when his Princeton book appeared.
