Fitzgerald prefaces each story in Tales of the Jazz Age with a brief, often wry account of its composition. These headnotes are as revealing as the fiction itself: he admits that “The Camel’s Back” was written in a single day to buy a diamond wristwatch, that his wife collaborated on the crap-shooting episode in “The Jelly-Bean,” and that “May Day” tries—unsuccessfully, he fears—to weave three unrelated events into a pattern capturing the “general hysteria” of spring 1919. The collection thus offers a dual reading experience: the stories themselves, and the author’s candid, sometimes self-deprecating commentary on their making.

Collaboration and Craft in the Headnotes

Fitzgerald’s prefaces turn the volume into a kind of meta-narrative. In “The Jelly-Bean,” he notes that he could not manage the crap-shooting scene and handed it to his wife, “who, as a Southern girl, was presumably an expert.” This admission not only reveals a specific compositional division but also hints at the gendered expectations of regional authenticity. For “The Camel’s Back,” he claims the camel costume episode is “literally true” and that he has a standing engagement to play the hindquarters at a future party—a joke that blurs the line between life and fiction. These headnotes invite readers to consider how much of each story is invented and how much is repurposed autobiography.

Regional Voices and the Southern Setting

The opening story, “The Jelly-Bean,” is set in Tarleton, Georgia, a place Fitzgerald says he has “a profound affection for” but that draws angry letters from Southern readers. The excerpt does not include the story itself, but the headnote establishes a tension between affectionate portrayal and regional criticism. The author’s wife, as a Southern girl, was called in to supply authentic crap-shooting terminology, suggesting that the story’s local color was carefully researched. This concern for linguistic and cultural accuracy—even in a pastime—marks Fitzgerald’s effort to render a specific Southern milieu, even as he anticipates pushback from its natives.

Patterns of Hysteria and Confinement

In the excerpt from “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz,” a captive aviators’ pit becomes a grotesque microcosm of American greed and power. Braddock Washington, the captor, dismisses the prisoners’ pleas with cold logic: “Cruelty doesn’t exist where self-preservation is involved.” The scene is structured as a dialogue of unequal power, with Washington seated in a garden chair above the grating while the men shout up curses and desperate jokes. The setting—a polished glass bowl in the earth—echoes the “general hysteria” Fitzgerald names in the “May Day” headnote, but here the hysteria is contained, literally underground, and met with the unruffled composure of the ultra-wealthy.

Readers approaching Tales of the Jazz Age will find that Fitzgerald’s own introductions provide a valuable key to the stories’ tones and origins. Pay attention to the gaps between his self-deprecating claims and the finished fiction—the admitted failures, the borrowed expertise, the real-life anecdotes. These headnotes do not simply introduce; they frame the stories as experiments in voice, region, and structure, inviting the reader to judge how well the patterns hold together.