John Jackson's Arcady

Boston: Walter H. Baker, 1928. First edition. Fine. First separate edition and first edition in book form, following its publication in The Saturday Evening Post on July 26, 1924. An excellent, Fine copy of a Fitzgerald rarity. 192 x 126 mm. 8 pp. Publisher's orange wrappers printed in bluish-gray and black. Bookplate (Charles John Muto, 1962) to inside of front cover. Fresh and unmarked throughout. This scarce publication has only appeared at auction five times, and only once in the twenty-first century. Similarly, OCLC records copies at just twenty-six institutions - remarkably few holdings for a work by one of the most important authors in American literary history.

"John Jackson's Arcady" was the last short story Fitzgerald published before departing for the French Riviera to write The Great Gatsby. The story, which follows a disillusioned businessman who flees his office life for his hometown, was "written in a period when Fitzgerald was clearly preoccupied with the composition of Gatsby," and foreshadows several crucial themes later found in Fitzgerald's masterpiece (Mangum, p. 56). Fitzgerald's "can't repeat the past" theme, which echoes in one of the most famous scenes in The Great Gatsby, is prototyped in "John Jackson's Arcady," as well as themes of nostalgia, longing, and regret that would later reappear in the novel. Interestingly, "John Jackson's Arcady" may also have served as inspiration for the 1938 short story "The Greatest Gift" by Philip Van Doren Stern, which was then adapted into the classic 1946 film It's a Wonderful Life (see Mangum).

This edition is the only book publication of "John Jackson's Arcady" until its collection in The Price Was High: The Last Uncollected Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald (1979). It was issued here for use as a monologue by students practicing elocution.

Mangum, Bryant. "Echoes of Arcady." The F. Scott Fitzgerald Review, Vol. 5 (2006), pp. 54-64. Fine.