The Apprentice Fiction

John Kuehl has collected here some of the prep-school and college stories discovered during the 1950s in a Fitzgerald scrapbook. Fitzgerald’s subjects range from football to war, from entering the priesthood to flunking out of college. Foreshadowings of many of his major themes can be found in these early pieces of fiction, and he was even then exploring the writing techniques that were later to appear in his full-length fiction, particularly in his use of the narrator-observer. These stories illuminate the entire body of Fitzgerald’s fiction, and show an astonishing process over a mere eight years from talented boy to incipient artist.