Tales of the Jazz Age by F. Scott Fitzgerald: Summary in 30 Seconds : Free Summarizer

Tales of the Jazz Age

F. Scott Fitzgerald · short story collection, 1922·7 hrs in the original·original at Project Gutenberg

The 30‑second version7 hrs → 50 sec

The opening story defines its hero by pure idleness. Jim Powell is "a bred-in-the-bone, dyed-in-the-wool, ninety-nine three-quarters per cent Jelly-bean," a man who spends his life "conjugating the verb to idle in the first person singular." Call him that in the wrong Georgia town, Fitzgerald notes, and a man might pull a rope from his hip pocket and hang you to a telegraph pole.
A lawyer forces a wedding deadline with a marriage license. In "The Camel's Back," Perry Parkhurst buys the license and, on a friend's advice, gives his fiancee Betty Medill an ultimatum: marry him at once or call it off forever. The Christmas season around them has already produced, by Fitzgerald's count, "forty-one dinner parties, sixteen dances, six luncheons... and thirteen bridge parties."
One boy's hometown is literally named Hades. John T. Unger leaves for boarding school with his father's send-off, "Don't forget who you are and where you come from... You are an Unger, from Hades," and a pocketbook stuffed with cash. Hades is the actual name of his Mississippi hometown, and he is headed toward a friend whose family owns a mountain made of a single diamond.
The diamond's owner tries to bribe God directly. Cornered by attacking aeroplanes, Braddock Washington offers the Almighty the greatest diamond ever cut, set in a gold dome with a radium altar, in trade for restoring things exactly "as they were yesterday at this hour." Fitzgerald notes drily that Washington "doubted only whether he had made his bribe big enough."
One story's newborn arrives looking seventy years old. In "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," the newborn sits in his crib with sparse hair "almost white" and a "long smoke-coloured beard," then asks his horrified father, "Are you my father?... I wish you'd get me out of this place." The story runs his life backward from there, old age first.
The collection closes by torching its own genre. The final piece, "Jemina, the Mountain Girl," burlesques hillbilly romance until its lovers catch fire and die in each other's arms: "she was a human alcohol lamp." The family fishes the bodies out and throws them into the stream together, since "the two splashes they made were as one."

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•Why it earns a slot

Why it earns a slot: it shows Fitzgerald before Gatsby locked him into one register, swinging from a dice-game morality tale to a man bribing God to a self-parodying hillbilly farce, all in one book.

Eleven stories where Fitzgerald tries on every register he owns: a lazy Georgia gambler, a diamond mountain owner who bribes God, a baby born old, and a farce that ends in double spontaneous combustion.

This distillation is written from the freely available original, which is always the better read when you have the time: Project Gutenberg.

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Tales of the Jazz Age

•Why it earns a slot

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