Happy May Day! On this day I like to break out F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1920 story entitled “May Day.”
It’s a solid story that includes two of my favorite characters, Mr. In and Mr. Out (whom I paid tribute to by giving them a cameo in my story Bender.)
However, since I am traveling and without my books full of delicious margin notes, underlining and dogears, I had to go in search of the full text online and in doing so I stumbled on something even more interesting.
This article from yesterday’s Guardian reveals that, for the first time ever, his fourth short story collection, Taps at Reveille, will be released in a new uncensored edition that will be the stories as Fitzgerald envisioned them, complete with, according to the article, “sexual innuendo, drug references and antisemitic slurs.” (To that end I do want to point out that James West, the general editor of the new edition, said “the antisemitic slurs in these stories are spoken by reprehensible characters. These slurs are not spoken in Fitzgerald’s authorial voice. It’s the characters who are antisemitic, not Fitzgerald.”)
Being a huge Fitzgerald nerd, I am extremely excited by this news and can’t wait to read his words as he wanted them to be, not how the industry changed them in order to keep from offending people.
What great news to start the day.
Words will keep us together 