Cruel Crown. Two Red Queen Short Stories

Scott Fitzgerald, one of the most popular and financially successful of the American novelists of the modernist period, gazed over these churning classes and masses populating the American landscape, much as his own character Daisy Buchanan is described, as enjoying "the mystery that wealth imprisons and preserves, of the freshness of many clothes…gleaming like silver, safe and proud above the hot struggles of the poor." Fitzgerald captures less the reality than the fantasy of another America that occupied the cultural horizon during the twenties: the "Jazz Age" (he called two collections of short stories Flappers and Philosophers [1921] and Tales of the Jazz Age [1922]), the era of Prohibition and wild financial speculation, the jostling of Jamesian "old money" with vulgar American arrivistes, the aesthetics of glamour produced by material and social extravagance — simulated and stimulated by the celluloid images of the burgeoning movie industry for which Fitzgerald intermittently wrote. Some would say he prostituted his talent writing for the screen, but he would also have demystified the film industry had he lived to complete his final novel, The Last Tycoon, a book edited by his friend Edmund Wilson and published in 1941 ...»