were working in the lines between the grain. . . . For five hours now hot fertile life had burned in the afternoon. It would be night in three hours, and all along the land there would be these blonde Northern girls and the tall young men from the farms lying outside beside the wheat, under the moon.

This paean to the sensual, physical world could hardly be more vivid or heartfelt, nor could it offer a more absolute antithesis to the incoherent thicket of philosophical abstractions surrounding Rudolph. Religion seems here to lose its centrality and purpose, yielding to something more immediate, more tangible and more real.

But perhaps the most powerful and familiar aspect of the work represented in this collection is neither a character nor a subject but a state of mind. In the beautiful “Winter Dreams,” Fitzgerald creates an elegiac realm which he will establish as his own: this is the landscape of loss.

Dexter, the protagonist, lies on a raft, in a lake, at night.

There was a fish jumping and a star shining and the lights around the lake were gleaming. Over on a dark peninsula a piano was playing the songs of last summer . . . and because the sound of a piano over a stretch of water had always seemed beautiful to Dexter he lay perfectly quiet and listened.

The tune the piano was playing at that moment had been gay and new five years before when Dexter was a sophomore at college. They had played it at a prom once and because he could not afford the luxury of proms in those days he had stood outside the gymnasium and listened. The sound of the tune and the splash of the fish jumping precipitated in him a sort of ecstasy and it was with that ecstasy he viewed what happened to him now. The ecstasy was a gorgeous appreciation. It was his sense that, for once, he was magnificently atune to life and that everything about him was radiating a brightness and a glamor he might never know again.

When Fitzgerald wrote this he was twenty-six, married to his adored Zelda and the father of a ten-month-old daughter. His first novel had received critical acclaim and commercial success. He was rich, beloved, and successful. Didn’t the world lie easily within his grasp? Didn’t he have every cause for jubilation?

Perhaps. But instead of jubilation, Fitzgerald’s twenty-six-year-old voice is full of longing. The gorgeous moment, even as he celebrates it, is permeated by the sense that this ecstasy may be the last he will ever savor. The sense of loss, its mysterious potency and its presence, deep within the heart, provides a dark and steady undertow within Fitzgerald’s work. His gaze was directed backward. It was as though he sat in a carriage watching life unrolling steadily behind him, receding, in all its beauty and complexity, into the blue distance; held up, as it was vanishing, to his musing scrutiny. His task was not to chronicle the splendor of what was to come, but to record the loveliness of what was gone.

Maybe all great fiction is about loss. Maybe the purpose of great fiction is to reveal the chasm that lies between ourselves and the exquisite vanished world that—we realize now—we so cherished. Certainly that is what the great fiction of F. Scott Fitzgerald does, and it does so with such elegance, such strength and tenderness and intimacy, that it seems as though each moment he creates is one that we have lived through. Each one strikes deep into us, reverberant and powerful and sobering, like the sound of a gong, recalling to us something we once knew.

ROXANA ROBINSON has written three story collections, A Glimpse of Scarlet, Asking for Love, and, most recently, A Perfect Stranger . She is also the author of three novels, Summer Light, This Is My Daughter, and Sweetwater, and a biography of Georgia O’Keeffe. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the MacDowell Colony. Robinson’s fiction has appeared in Best American Short Stories, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Harper’s, Daedalus, and Vogue. She lives in New York City and Maine.

INTRODUCTION

Bryant Mangum

The stories in this collection come from a brief moment that F. Scott Fitzgerald would recall as the most thrilling and enchanted time of his life. In a retrospective essay, “Early Success,” he describes an episode at the height of the Jazz Age—a time near the publication of The Great Gatsby—when he drove through