The great popularity and at the same time the critical esteem of the short story in the early part of the twentieth century is nowhere more evident than in the short stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940), and the tension between the popular and the estimable – the two not always at odds, but often pulling in different directions – is at the heart of his work. Fitzgerald published four major volumes of short stories during his lifetime: Flappers and Philosophers (1920), Tales of the Jazz Age (1922), All the Sad Young Men (1926) and Taps at Reveille (1935). Most of these stories, together with many others, were also published initially in the magazines – most notably the popular Saturday Evening Post and the more seriously literary Scribner's. None of his short story collections as a whole is as significant as his achievement in the genre of the novel, particularly his masterpiece The Great Gatsby (1925), but the best of them, which would include ‘The Diamond as Big as the Ritz’, ‘The Rich Boy’, ‘May Day’, ‘Absolution’ and ‘Babylon Revisited’, show both the romantic verve and élan and the counter-romantic critical edge of his best writing and gave him the opportunity to add a number of brilliant facets to his treatment of the American scene.

Fitzgerald rarely had anything good to say on behalf of his short stories.