The Price Was High
The Price Was High: Fifty Uncollected Stories by F. Scott Fitzgerald is a volume of short fiction by F. Scott Fitzgerald published by Harcourt Brace & Company in 1979.
The volume comprises stories originally appearing in popular literary journals, but never authorized for collection by Fitzgerald during his lifetime.
Stories
The stories in the collection are presented here chronologically by the date they were first published.Background
During Fitzgerald’s professional career he sold 164 of his stories to popular literary journals of the 1920s and 30s, the so-called "slicks." Forty-six of these stories were collected in four volumes: Flappers and Philosophers, Tales of the Jazz Age, All the Sad Young Men, and Taps at Reveille.After Fitzgerald’s death in 1940, six more volumes of as yet uncollected short fiction appeared: The Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Afternoon of an Author, The Pat Hobby Stories, The Apprenticeship Fiction of F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Basil and Josephine Stories, and Bits of Paradise.
The Price Was High represents a selection of 49 of the remaining 57 previously uncollected works first published in magazines. Eight stories remain uncollected at the behest of Fitzgerald’s daughter Scottie Fitzgerald Smith, deemed too undistinguished for inclusion. The volume adds a single piece, "On Your Own," one of nine stories never published so as to make The Price Was High an even fifty stories. Biographer Matthew J. Bruccoli, editor of The Price Was High, acknowledges that these stories lack the "facility" that characterize Fitzgerald's most outstanding short fiction: "The stories in this volume are not Fitzgerald’s best."
Reception
Kirkus Reviews questions the judgment of editor Matthew J. Bruccoli in publishing works that Fitzgerald declined to collect in his own lifetime: "ot a single one of these stories takes the time to stand back and really achieve the pause, gravity, and sweetness of Fitzgerald's best work."Literary critic Aaron Latham of The Washington Post considers the stories in The Price Was High to be "bootleg" magazine fiction: "The best of Fitzgerald’s magazine work, of course, had been published from long ago." Latham argues that Fitzgerald would have benefited from writing less short fiction and finishing The Last Tycoon, which remained uncompleted when he died in 1940.
Literary critic Malcolm Cowley in The New York Times, after reading all 50 stories, found merit in a number of them, writing: "almost all of them contain something to surprise us, if only a sentence or a passing observation…" Cowley adds this caveat:
Critical appraisal
Fitzgerald approached his short stories as a means of financing his primary creative endeavor: to write novels. As his short fiction was "written for money", he often despaired at his commercial relationship with The Saturday Evening Post and other "slick" journals. Writing to editor H. L. Menken in 1925, he complained that "my trash for the Post grows worse and worse as there is less and less heart in it...People don’t seem to realize that to an intelligent man writing down is about the hardest thing in the world."In a 1929 note to fellow writer Ernest Hemingway, Fitzgerald identified himself with a sexual prostitute: "The Post now pays the old whore $4000 a screw. But now it’s because she’s mastered the 40 positions—in her youth, one was enough."
Bruccoli notes that despite Fitzgerald’s doubts as to the value of much of his short fiction, "he expended a major part of his talent on them".
Matthew J. Bruccoli, who edited the collection, reminds readers that Fitzgerald was fastidious about the work that was included in his collections and argues that the fact that the material in The Price Was High only appeared posthumously is a measure of his discrimination. Bruccoli writes: "Fitzgerald maintained a distinction between magazine and book publication, insisting that inclusion of a story in one of his collections gave it permanence and literary standing.