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www.allauthors.info deplores the day when:
"The publication of this volume of short stories might easily have been an anti-climax after the perfection and success of The Great Gatsby of last Spring. A novel so widely praised — by people whose recognition counts — is stiff competition. It is even something of a problem for a reviewer to find new and different words to properly grace the occasion. It must be said that the collection as a whole is not sustained to the high excellence of The Great Gatsby, but it has stories of fine insight and finished craft."
Ironically, in a letter nine months earlier, Fitzgerald had advised his editor Max Perkins against publicizing the book through the newspaper. "Rather not use advertising appropriation in Times—people who read Times Book Review won't be interested in me."
In a letter to Scribner's editor-in-chief Maxwell Perkins, Fitzgerald explained that "seven of the stories deal with young men of my generation in rather unhappy moods" to justify his choice for the collections' title. Biographer John Kuehl notes that the volume's title reflects with precision the final years of Fitzgerald's youth in the late 1920s: "All the Sad Young Men captures in a phrase the feeling he had in losing the most vibrant experiences of his life before age took them away."
Fitzgerald wrote the stories at a time of disillusionment. He was in financial difficulty, he believed his wife Zelda to be romantically involved with another man, she had suffered a series of physical illnesses, and his play The Vegetable had been a failure.
All the Sad Young Men is a collection of short fiction that originally appeared independently in popular literary journals and were first collected in February 1926 by Charles Scribner's Sons.
“So he tasted the deep pain that is reserved only for the strong, just as he had tasted for a little while the deep happiness.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, All the Sad Young Men
“He wanted to care, and he could not care. For he had gone away and he could never go back anymore. The gates were closed, the sun was down, and there was no beauty left but the gray beauty of steel that withstands all time. Even the grief he could have borne was left behind in the country of youth, of illusion, of the richness of life, where his winter dreams had flourished.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, All the Sad Young Men
Pro captu lectoris habent sua fata libelli.
"Books receive their dooms according to the reader's capacity" or more commonly, "Books have their own destinies according to the reader's capacity".
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