The Best Early Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald

 The Best Early Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald contains ten stories that he wrote in his 20's. Many of the stories involve young people gathering at dances feeling insecure and comparing themselves to others. Some of the young women are flappers with bobbed hair. Most of the stories involved a less wealthy young person visiting the home of a wealthier classmate for a weekend or a summer. Some of the stories involved people from the south visiting the north. In one a young woman from rural Georgia comes to Saint Paul and tours an ice palace right at closing. She is in the basement of the ice palace with her fiancée and others when the lights are turned off for the night. She slips on the ice and falls. No one comes to her aid. She tries to find her way for about 5 minutes but gives up and lies flat on her belly on the icy floor of the ice palace for two hours until a friend of her fiancée finds her. She gets really angry when he rubs snow on her face to help treat her frost bite. As expected, she dumps her fiancée and dumps the whole idea of moving to the north.  Could this story really be about his wife Zelda? My favorite story is about a young college man who agrees to spend the summer with the family of a college friend in Montana. They travel by train to their destination and then board a horse and buggy.  A few miles out of town they leave the horse and buggy and get into a most magnificent car. On the journey the friend says his family is the richest family on earth. At this point of the story things become magical. The young man is fascinated with his friend's family and their remote estate in the mountains. Things here seem too good to be true which is what he finds out in the fall when the time comes to return to college. This is the story that stayed the longest in my mind after I finished this book. This was a great book to go back in time 100 years ago and what it was like to be a college aged person in that era.