Should we care if yet another F Scott Fitzgerald story is ‘discovered’?

Writers of this stature often leave a sizable amount of unpublished work – usually for a good reason

Last week, the Washington Post announced that a new fragment of a novel by F Scott Fitzgerald had been discovered. This followed hard on the heels of a report that a long-lost Fitzgerald short story called “Temperature” had also been unearthed and was about to be published. Surely a Fitzgerald scholar like me must be delighted by this sudden bonanza of Fitzgerald finds?

Both items were found by the same person: Andrew Gulli, an editor at Strand magazine, who discovered them in the amazing location of the F Scott Fitzgerald archives at Princeton, where they have been for years, “but apparently overlooked”. Fellow Fitzgerald scholar Anne Margaret Daniel read “Temperature”, and blogged about its provenance: it’s been there for years, along with a dozen other equally neglected tales. Last week, Gulli informed the Washington Post that he was certain “Ballet School – Chicago” was the fragment of an unfinished novel. The Princeton archive, contrarily, catalogues it as an “unfinished story”.

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