Fitzgerald and the Writing of Short Stories Although Fitzgerald is today generally considered a novelist, during his lifetime he was best known for his short stories. He was a prolific writer of short stories and published around 160 of them (Bruccoli xiii). Many literary critics often separate “Fitzgerald the novelist” from “Fitzgerald the short story writer.” In his own life, Fitzgerald felt something of a disconnect between his “literary” career as a novelist and his more professional career as a short story writer. However, Fitzgerald's short stories are very important for the study of his work. We can observe his development as a writer and see parallels between his stories and his novels. Writing short stories was much more lucrative for Fitzgerald than writing novels, which brought him very little income. For example, in 1929, 8 short stories earned him $30,000, while all the profits from his novels that year earned him only $31.77 (Bruccoli, xiv). Fitzgerald depended on the money he earned from his stories to give him time to work on his novels, and this greatly irritated him. As Hemingway wrote in A Moveable Feast, Fitzgerald told him in 1925 that writing short stories for popular magazines was "a whore but he had to do it because he made his money from the magazines to have money in advance to write decent books” (qtd. in Mangum 57). Fitzgerald felt that writing for popular magazines discredited him as a true literary writer. He also felt that his short stories took away time and energy from his novels. Many literary critics of his time did not think his short stories were quality writing. They criticized them for being too light in their subject and for being in the middle of the paper. It is a useful resource for locating publication dates of stories, as well as a resource for which stories are included in the many compilations that have been published. Mangum, B. “F. Scott Fitzgerald” A Critical Survey of Short Fiction. Ed. Frank Magill. Salem: SalemPress, Inc., 1982. Available online: This article provides brief summaries of Fitzgerald's major short stories, other literary forms, his influence, and characteristics of his short stories. Additionally, there is an in-depth analysis of Fitzgerald's short story writing career.---. “The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald.” The Cambridge Companion to F. Scott Fitzgerald. Ed. Ruth Prigozy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. 57-78.