Winter Dreams

For the song by Accept, see Balls to the Wall. For the song by Kelly Clarkson, see Winter Dreams (Brandon's Song).
"Winter Dreams"
Author F. Scott Fitzgerald
Country United States
Language English
Genre(s) Short story
Published in Metropolitan Magazine
collected in All The Sad Young Men
Publication type Magazine
Short Story Collection
Publisher Scribner (book)
Media type Print
Publication date December 1922

"Winter Dreams" is a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald that first appeared in Metropolitan Magazine in December 1922, and was collected in All the Sad Young Men in 1926. It is considered one of Fitzgerald's finest stories and is frequently anthologized. In the Fitzgerald canon, it is considered to be in the "Gatsby-cluster," as many of its themes were later expanded upon in his famous novel The Great Gatsby in 1925.

Writing his editor Max Perkins in June 1925, Fitzgerald described "Winter Dreams" as "A sort of first draft of the Gatsby idea."[1]

Critical response

Fitzgerald scholar Matthew Bruccoli described "Winter Dreams" as "the strongest of the Gatsby-cluster stories."[2] He continues,

"Like the novel, it examines a boy whose ambitions become identified with a selfish rich girl. Indeed, Fitzgerald removed Dexter Green's response to Judy Jones' home from the magazine text and wrote it into the novel as Jay Gatsby's response to Daisy Fay's home."

Tim Randell suggests that “Winter Dreams” should be regarded as “one of modernism’s crowning achievements” because in it Fitzgerald “achieves a dialectical metafiction that grasps the production of capitalist ideology within class relations and print culture, including the forms of literary modernism.” He argues that the story's form demonstrates that modernism's concern with a "‘lack of communal meaning’ and ‘inescapable subjectivity’ are false epistemological problems” because "[Fitzgerald's] metafiction identifies ruling class interests as the collective origin of meaning and ‘reality’ for the entire social body” and "conveys the possibility of counter, collective meanings within the dialectic of class antagonism.”[3]

References

  1. ↑ F. Scott Fitzgerald and Matthew J. Bruccoli, ed., A Life in Letters: A New Collection Edited and Annotated by Matthew J. Bruccoli. New York: Scribner's, 1995. p. 121.
  2. ↑ F. Scott Fitzgerald and Matthew J. Bruccoli, ed., The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald, "Winter Dreams," New York: Scribner's, 1989. p. 217.
  3. ↑ Tim Randell. "Metafiction and the Ideology of Modernism in Fitzgerald's 'Winter Dreams.'" The F. Scott Fitzgerald Review. 10.1 (2012): 108-121.
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