“Idol of the Whole Body of Young Men”: Football, Heroes, and the Performance of Social Status

Amory Blaine was not Fitzgerald’s first attempt at examining the question of how football functions in a culture-nor would he be the last. Much of Fitzgerald’s “material,” as he put it, was utilized in short fiction written for both the “slick” mass-market periodicals (notably The Saturday Evening Post and Esquire) as well as for literary magazines (such as H.L. Mencken’s The Smart Set). The game of football (most often as played at the college level) makes an appearance in more than two dozen of these stories. More significantly, football plays a major narrative role in at least eight.