F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) is the author of The Great Gatsby, hailed as the Great American Novel. His debut, This Side of Paradise, was a cultural sensation that shined a spotlight on the Jazz Age. The novel changed his life: magazines accepted previously rejected work, and Zelda Sayre agreed to marry him. His next work, The Beautiful and the Damned, solidified his place in the cultural elite. After Zelda’s hospitalization for schizophrenia, Fitzgerald completed Tender Is the Night. Finally sober, Fitzgerald died of a heart attack at age forty-four. His friend the critic and writer Edmund Wilson completed Fitzgerald’s unfinished novel The Last Tycoon.

The Four Fists

A Story

by F. Scott Fitzgerald

At the present time no one I know has the slightest desire to hit Samuel Meredith; possibly this is because a man over fifty is liable to be rather severely cracked at the impact of a hostile fist, but, for my part, I am inclined to think that all his hitable qualities have quite vanished. But it is certain that at various times in his life hitable qualities were in his face, as surely as kissable qualities have ever lurked in a girl’s lips.

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