Bernice Bobs Her Hair and Other Stories (Signet Classics) - Softcover

"It was an age of miracles," declared F. Scott Fitzgerald of the 1920s, "it was an age of art, it was an age of excess, and it was an age of satire." No author is more closely associated with the decade than Fitzgerald, who christened it the Jazz Age and chronicled its manners and morals. His lyrical, witty fables of society life reveal the disillusionment and cynicism behind the Roaring Twenties' glamorous façade.Six of Fitzgerald's best-loved stories appear here, starting with the title tale, in which a hostess regrets her success at transforming a visiting cousin from wallflower to coquette. Other selections include "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz," a glittering fantasy about the corrupting power of wealth; "The Ice Palace," a quasibiographical story of a restless Southern belle; "The Offshore Pirate"; "The Jelly Bean"; and "May Day." Each of these colorful portraits from a bygone era considers timeless themes—love, money, power, the search for happiness—that keep them enduringly popular and ever relevant.Dover (2009) original selection from Flappers and Philosophers and Tales of the Jazz Age, Charles Scribner's Sons, New York, 1920 and 1922.

F. Scott Fitzgerald was born in 1896 in St Paul, Minnesota, and went to Princeton University which he left in 1917 to join the army. Fitzgerald was said to have epitomised the Jazz Age, an age inhabited by a generation he defined as ‘grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken’. In 1920 he married Zelda Sayre. Their destructive relationship and her subsequent mental breakdowns became a major influence on his writing. Among his publications were five novels, This Side of Paradise, The Great Gatsby, The Beautiful and the Damned, Tender is the Night and The Love of the Last Tycoon (his last and unfinished work): six volumes of short stories and The Crack-Up, a selection of autobiographical pieces. Fitzgerald died suddenly in 1940. After his death The New York Times said of him that ‘He was better than he knew, for in fact and in the literary sense he invented a “generation” ... he might have interpreted them and even guided them, as in their middle years they saw a different and nobler freedom threatened with destruction.’