May Day [short story]
by F. Scott Fitzgerald
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This somewhat unpleasant tale, published as a novelette in the Smart Set in July 1920, relates a series of events that took place in the spring of the previous year. Each of the three events made a great impression upon F. Scott Fitzgerald. In life they were unrelated, except by the general hysteria of that spring which inaugurated the Age of Jazz, but in this story, he has tried to weave them into a pattern-a pattern which would give the effect of those months in New York as they appeared show more to at least one member of what was then the younger generation. show lessTags
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Member Reviews
A novella, a story and 25 Aphorisms. The aphorisms are by far the most enjoyable.
The title novella takes place during the de-mobilization after The Great War, and two of the recently freed soldiers are one thread, another is a young man visiting the city for pleasure including a dance for his Yale fraternity, a previous roommate who has made a mess of his life, and a young woman once of some importance to the distressed young man. Everyone is mostly drunk, most of the story and it feels like you are getting all of their hangovers.
The male gaze is poisonous enough to read. The drunken male gaze is even worse.
In Winter Dreams, well, a man enthralled by his own enthrallment to the object of that gaze is about as bad as it gets without the show more incels getting involved. show less
The title novella takes place during the de-mobilization after The Great War, and two of the recently freed soldiers are one thread, another is a young man visiting the city for pleasure including a dance for his Yale fraternity, a previous roommate who has made a mess of his life, and a young woman once of some importance to the distressed young man. Everyone is mostly drunk, most of the story and it feels like you are getting all of their hangovers.
The male gaze is poisonous enough to read. The drunken male gaze is even worse.
In Winter Dreams, well, a man enthralled by his own enthrallment to the object of that gaze is about as bad as it gets without the show more incels getting involved. show less
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630+ Works 142,902 Members
F(rancis) Scott Fitzgerald was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, on September 24, 1896. He was educated at Princeton University and served in the U.S. Army from 1917 to 1919, attaining the rank of second lieutenant. In 1920 Fitzgerald married Zelda Sayre, a young woman of the upper class, and they had a daughter, Frances. Fitzgerald is regarded as one show more of the finest American writers of the 20th Century. His most notable work was the novel, The Great Gatsby (1925). The novel focused on the themes of the Roaring Twenties and of the loss of innocence and ethics among the nouveau riche. He also made many contributions to American literature in the form of short stories, plays, poetry, music, and letters. Ernest Hemingway, who was greatly influenced by Fitzgerald's short stories, wrote that Fitzgerald's talent was "as fine as the dust on a butterfly's wing." Yet during his lifetime Fitzgerald never had a bestselling novel and, toward the end of his life, he worked sporadically as a screenwriter at motion picture studios in Los Angeles. There he contributed to scripts for such popular films as Winter Carnival and Gone with the Wind. Fitzgerald's work is inseparable from the Roaring 20s. Berenice Bobs Her Hair and A Diamond As Big As The Ritz, are two short stories included in his collections, Tales of the Jazz Age and Flappers and Philosophers. His first novel The Beautiful and Damned was flawed but set up Fitzgerald's major themes of the fleeting nature of youthfulness and innocence, unattainable love, and middle-class aspiration for wealth and respectability, derived from his own courtship of Zelda. This Side of Paradise (1920) was Fitzgerald's first unqualified success. Tender Is the Night, a mature look at the excesses of the exuberant 20s, was published in 1934. Much of Fitzgerald's work has been adapted for film, including Tender is the Night , The Great Gatsby, and Babylon Revisited which was adapted as The Last Time I Saw Paris by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in 1954. The Last Tycoon, adapted by Paramount in 1976, was a work in progress when Fitzgerald died of a heart attack on December 21, 1940, in Hollywood, California. Fitzgerald is buried in the historic St. Mary's Cemetery in Rockville, Maryland. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
Series
Belongs to Publisher Series
Work Relationships
Is contained in
Novels and Stories 1920-1922: This Side of Paradise / Flappers and Philosophers / The Beautiful and the Damned / Tales of the Jazz Age by F. Scott Fitzgerald (indirect)
Common Knowledge
- Canonical title
- May Day [short story]
- Original title
- May Day
- Original publication date
- 1920-07
- Important events
- May Day
Classifications
Statistics
- Members
- 109
- Popularity
- 297,071
- Reviews
- 1
- Rating
- (3.75)
- Languages
- 5 — Chinese, Czech, Dutch, English, Turkish
- Media
- Paper, Audiobook, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 32
- ASINs
- 3
