"Babylon Revisited"

Master the 40: The Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald

In late 1930 as Zelda Fitzgerald remained hospitalized in a sanitarium trying to regain her sanity her husband cranked out a frenzied series of stories to pay for her treatment. Out of this whirlwind of effort came "Babylon Revisited," which appeared originally in the February 21, 1931, issue of the Saturday Evening Post and later anchored the fourth and final story collection of his life, Taps at Reveille (1935). "Babylon" is the mack daddy of all Fitzgerald stories, widely hailed as the best of his short fiction and his most widely anthologized. This episode asks why the story enjoys that exalted status. While celebrating its virtuoso craftsmanship and complex characterization, we also note that the story appeals in part because it offers such a capsule portrait of the Fitzgeralds' own biographical tragedy, a hymn to their own self-destruction against the sudden shift from the Boom to the Great Depression. The story also captures the romance of expatriate Paris, which many of its central sites---the Right Bank's Ritz Bar, most famously---still attracting Fitzgerald fans galore each year. This story is hard to top, but we also recognize that it's important not to let its reputation overshadow his other stories.