On February 21, 1920, F. Scott Fitzgerald entered the commercial magazine marketplace when The Saturday Evening Post published “Head and Shoulders,” a bittersweet comedy of young love. With a circulation of more than 2,750,000 weekly readers and a cost of one nickel, the Post offered writers the highest prices and the widest outlet for popular fiction in America. By the end of May 1920, the Post published five more stories by Fitzgerald, placing them prominently and listing his name on the magazine's cover. That spring his first novel, This Side of Paradise, appeared to critical praise, and he married Zelda Sayre after a tumultuous courtship. All before he was twenty-four years old.

Within the space of a few months the young author had experienced financial, romantic, artistic, and popular success; he had achieved the happy ending. Thirteen years after this early triumph, Fitzgerald maintained in “One Hundred False Starts” that all authors repeat themselves: “We have two or three great and moving experiences in our lives … and we tell our two or three stories—each time in a new disguise—maybe ten times, maybe a hundred, as long as people will listen” (Afternoon of an Author, p. 132).

Fitzgerald's experience of youthful success permeates his best commercial fiction, ranging from the exuberance of his early romantic comedies to the regretful recollections and wasted opportunities of his later stories. Whereas much of this period's commercial fiction reads as mawkish and overly sentimental, Fitzgerald's happy endings and bittersweet romances transcend the genre because they spring from his personal experience. Despite unlikely plots and contrived situations, Fitzgerald's stories combine well-written prose with sincere emotional content.

Fitzgerald placed more than 130 of his 160-odd published stories in glossy, mass-circulation magazines, commonly known as “slicks.” For seventeen years these stories, Fitzgerald's chief source of income, generated much more revenue than he received from his novels. He earned ＄400 for his first Post appearance, but in less than ten years his commercial price rose to ＄4,000 per story.

The large popular-fiction marketplace enjoyed by the reading public of the 1920s and 1930s has essentially vanished today. Before the age of television, magazine fiction represented a major source of popular entertainment on a national scale. Heavily illustrated, the slicks offered humor, melodrama, information, and escape to millions of readers. In accordance with popular tastes they also appealed to social and political conservatism.

Yet Fitzgerald, a social realist, enjoyed much success in this constraining forum. Despite the bathtub-gin-and-flapper image associated with him, Fitzgerald's short fiction often presented the traditional American theme of an individual's succeeding through intelligence, imagination, determination, and luck. His heroes did not challenge the traditional social structure but rather worked imaginatively within it. They genuinely believed in the American dream of success. In his later stories Fitzgerald examined the tragic aspects of success in which his heroes fail due to dissipation and irresponsible behavior.

For all their craftsmanship and entertainment value, or perhaps because of it, Fitzgerald's commercial stories are still regarded by many critics as mere diversions for the masses: frothy, insubstantial, and unworthy of any close literary attention. Fitzgerald himself fostered this image by deprecating his own commercial achievement to other writers. He wrote Ernest Hemingway in 1929, “the Post now pay the old whore ＄4000. a screw. But now it's because she's mastered the 40 positions—in her youth one was enough” (Life in Letters, p. 169).

But in a 1935 letter to his literary agent Harold Ober, he described the effort and talent that he had to generate to produce commercial fiction: “All my stories are conceived like novels, require a special emotion, a special experience—so that my readers, if such there be, know that each time it will be something new, not in form but in substance (it'd be far better for me if I could do pattern stories but the pencil just goes dead on me)” (Life in Letters, p. 284). Although the sale of short stories financed the writing of his novels, Fitzgerald believed that writing commercial fiction depleted his creative reserve.

After his initial exposure in the Post, coupled with the success of his first novel, Fitzgerald rapidly became a valuable commodity in the magazine marketplace. Periodicals competed to lure the author away from the Post. Metropolitan Magazine optioned his stories for ＄900 each, a ＄400 raise from his 1920 Post price. When Metropolitan went into receivership, the Hearst Corporation optioned his output, paying him ＄1,500 as a signing bonus.

Because Fitzgerald's stories emphasized youthful concerns and characters, many readers regarded him as the spokesman for his generation. His fiction changed the conventional depiction of young people as naive or innocent, featuring them instead as witty, romantic heroes. He also challenged traditional standards by celebrating beautiful, intelligent, independent, and determined young women in their quest to secure successful marriages.

Following the financial disappointment of The Great Gatsby and the end of his Hearst contract, Fitzgerald returned to the Post as the steady market for his stories. Between 1926 and 1937, his most productive period as a magazine writer, the Post published fifty-two stories by Fitzgerald.

As he experienced many delays in the completion of his fourth novel, Fitzgerald became one of the magazine's most popular and highly paid authors. The author nostalgically recalled his own adolescence in two successful series featuring the recurring characters Basil Duke Lee and Josephine Perry. In accordance with magazine conventions, most of Fitzgerald's Post stories end happily, and nearly all contain some representation of romantic love.

Yet personal crises of the early 1930s, coinciding with the economic crash, introduced a somber tone into Fitzgerald's magazine fiction. In such major stories as “One Trip Abroad” (October 11, 1930) and “Babylon Revisited” (February 21, 1931), Fitzgerald explored both the tragic aspects of his own experiences and the reckless behavior of his generation.

In 1932 Fitzgerald's Post price dropped from ＄4,000 to ＄2,500. Although the decrease may have resulted from falling revenues caused by the Depression, Post editors also complained to Ober that Fitzgerald's most recent stories had not been up to his standard. With his magazine fortunes waning, Fitzgerald placed great financial hope in the success of his long-delayed novel, Tender Is the Night, finally published in 1934. The novel proved a financial failure, compelling Fitzgerald to return immediately to commercial writing without a respite to renew his creative powers. He made several unsuccessful attempts to generate another magazine series that could provide financial stability through the promised sale of future stories. These efforts failed because Fitzgerald could no longer draw on his own experiences for material, turning instead to artificial sources. In the mid-1930s Fitzgerald's life contained little that would appeal to a commercial market.

On March 6, 1937, Fitzgerald essentially ended his career as a popular fiction writer when the Post published “Trouble,” his last story to appear in the weekly magazine. The story featured a nurse named “Trouble” and represented Fitzgerald's final attempt to create a popular series character. The Post paid ＄2,000 for the story, placing it third out of the four stories in the issue.

Although Fitzgerald's commercial stories proceed from the same genius that created his novels, they share characteristics that set them apart from his “serious” fiction. The stories display an expansive use of wit and romantic love, and an unashamed celebration of youthful success. After more than fifty years they retain their power to charm, amuse, and move readers.

Two months before his death, Fitzgerald reflected on the end of his career as a commercial magazinist in a letter to his wife, Zelda:

It's odd that my old talent for the short story vanished. It was partly that times changed, editors changed, but part of it was tied up somehow with you and me—the happy ending. Of course every third story had some other ending but essentially I got my public with stories of young love. I must have had a powerful imagination to project it so far and so often into the past.

(Life in Letters, pp. 467, 469)