John Steinbeck in 1939 Born

New York and the Jazz Age[edit]

Further information: Jazz Age

It was an age of miracles, it was an age of art, it was an age of excess, and it was an age of satire.

—F. Scott Fitzgerald in Tales of the Jazz Age

After the birth of Scottie, Fitzgerald returned to writing The Beautiful and Damned,^[51] but in early 1922, Zelda became pregnant for a second time. Although some writers have claimed that his diaries include an entry referring to "Zelda and her abortionist", there is, in fact, no such entry. Zelda's thoughts on the second pregnancy are unknown, but in the first draft of The Beautiful and Damned, he wrote a scene in which the main female character Gloria believes she is pregnant and Anthony suggests she "talk to some woman and find out what's best to be done. Most of them fix it some way." Anthony's suggestion was removed from the final version, a change which shifted focus from the abortion choice to Gloria's concern that a baby would ruin her figure.^[52][53] Chapters of the book were serialized in Metropolitan Magazine in late 1921, and in March 1922, the book was published. Scribner's prepared an initial print run of 20,000 copies, and mounted an advertising campaign. It sold well enough to warrant additional print runs reaching 50,000 copies.^[54] That year, Fitzgerald also released Tales of the Jazz Age, which was composed of 11 short stories, all but two written before 1920.^[55] This collection's title would lend itself to the eponymous time period.^[56]

A 1921 magazine study of Fitzgerald

In New York City, the Fitzgeralds quickly became celebrities, as much for their wild behavior as for the success of This Side of Paradise. They were ordered to leave both the Biltmore Hotel and the Commodore Hotel for their drunkenness.^[57] Zelda once jumped into the fountain at Union Square. When Dorothy Parker first met them, they were sitting atop a taxi. Parker said, "They did both look as though they had just stepped out of the sun; their youth was striking. Everyone wanted to meet him."^[58] Their social life was fueled with alcohol. Publicly, this meant little more than napping when they arrived at parties, but privately it increasingly led to bitter fights.^[59] The couple would later be seen as the epitome of the period, with Ring Lardner Jr. labelling them "the prince and princess of their generation."^{[60][61][62][63]}

Following Fitzgerald's adaptation of his short story "The Vegetable" into a play, he and Zelda moved to Great Neck, Long Island to be near Broadway. Although he hoped that this was the beginning of a lucrative career in theater, the play's November 1923 premiere was a critical and commercial disaster.^[64] In a letter, Zelda claimed that the audience were “so obviously bored” and that some even walked out during the second act. Fitzgerald himself wrote that "I wanted to stop the show and say it was all a mistake but the actors struggled heroically on." During the second intermission, Fitzgerald and Lardner asked the lead actor, Ernest Truex, "Are you going to stay and do the last act?" The actor replied that he was, at which the pair of writers declared that they were leaving for the nearest bar.^[65] Fitzgerald turned to short stories to pay the debt he had incurred in developing his play.^[64] He despised his short stories, saying they were "all trash and it nearly broke my heart."^[66]