Collected Short Stories by F Scott Fitzgerald

I really don’t like F Scott Fitzgerald – I’ve tried and tried but his gloomy view of the world and the people in it just gets me down. I got through three of his stories before I decided to give in and return the book to the library.

The Cut Glass Bowl: an upwardly mobile young couple receive a cut glass bowl as a wedding gift; it almost becomes a malevolent character in their lives, being somehow connected with a series of tragic events that alter the course of their lives

May Day: an unpleasant story of Yale graduates and their drunk partying and returning soldiers and their drunk rioting – a real event I think – and the shallow people caught up in between.

The Diamond as Big as the Ritz: a fantasy tale where John Unger is invited to a fantastically rich classmate’s home to discover the sinister and immoral origins of the wealth and the evil his narcissistic hosts will enact to preserve it. It’s an anticapitalist tale indeed.