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May Day

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May Day

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Overview

May Day, Fitzgerald's first great novelette, mingles autobiographical details with events from contemporary history. In May 1919, after an interfraternity dance at Delmonico's, Fitzgerald was bounced out of the Fifty-ninth-Street Childs for a disturbance similar to the one created by Peter Himmel in the story. At the same time, the assault on the New York Trumpet by a mob of drunken soldiers parallels a raid on the socialist New York Call during the red scare of 1919. Like many of Fitzgerald's stories from Tales of the Jazz Age, May Day includes a "touch of disaster"--in this case the violent despair of down-and-out Yale man Gordon Sterrett--which is contrasted with the oblivious pursuit of pleasure by Gordon's double, his wealthy, man-about-town classmate, Philip Dean. May Day is a masterpiece from one of America's greatest writers. Newly designed and typeset in a modern 6-by-9-inch format by Waking Lion Press.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781434116819
Publisher:	Waking Lion Press
Publication date:	07/30/2008
Pages:	72
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.31(d)

About the Author

Francis Scott Fitzgerald was born in St. Paul, Minnesota in 1896, the son of a salesman, and namesake of his distant relative, Francis Scott Key. While attending Princeton University, he wrote a novel that a Scribner’s editor thought good enough to publish, if Fitzgerald would revise it. Fitzgerald, however, was in academic trouble and left school to join the army. Stationed in Alabama, he met and proposed marriage to Zelda Sayre, who refused to marry him until his rewritten novel, This Side of Paradise, made him an irresistible success. Two years later, the Fitzgeralds were leading a furious, booze-fueled social life, and his story collection of 1922, Tales of the Jazz Age, gave the era its name. In 1925, while sojourning in France—where he befriended Ernest Hemingway—he wrote The Great Gatsby. But his relationship with Zelda grew destructive, and by 1932 she was in a mental institution and he had descended into alcoholism. Fitzgerald moved to Hollywood to work as a scriptwriter, and died there of a heart attack in 1940.

Date of Birth:

September 24, 1896

Date of Death:

December 21, 1940

Place of Birth:

St. Paul, Minnesota

Education:

Princeton University

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Editorial Reviews

"I wanted them all, even those I'd already read."
—Ron Rosenbaum, The New York Observer

"Small wonders."
—Time Out London

"[F]irst-rate…astutely selected and attractively packaged…indisputably great works."
—Adam Begley, The New York Observer

"I’ve always been haunted by Bartleby, the proto-slacker. But it’s the handsomely minimalist cover of the Melville House edition that gets me here, one of many in the small publisher’s fine 'Art of the Novella' series."
—The New Yorker

"The Art of the Novella series is sort of an anti-Kindle. What these singular, distinctive titles celebrate is book-ness. They're slim enough to be portable but showy enough to be conspicuously consumed—tiny little objects that demand to be loved for the commodities they are."
—KQED (NPR San Francisco)

"Some like it short, and if you're one of them, Melville House, an independent publisher based in Brooklyn, has a line of books for you... elegant-looking paperback editions ...a good read in a small package."
—The Wall Street Journal

From the Publisher