by Kelly Lawler)
F. Scott Fitzgerald's final short story collection is finally being published the way he intended, warts and all.
The 18 stories from Fitzgerald's Taps at Reveille were all originally published in The Sunday Evening Post in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Editors cut out everything from sexual innuendo to racial slurs to simple slang to make the stories acceptable for the paper's broad, middle-class audience. Penn State Professor James L.W. West discovered the edits while comparing Fitzgerald's original typescripts to the published versions.
West notes how the censorship could drastically change Fitzgerald's intent. The story Two Wrongs "now makes much more sense," West tellsThe Guardian. The character Bill is "punished more justly for his wrongdoings – his antisemitism and his reprehensible treatment of his wife," he says.
The restored stories are being published this week in the U.K. by the Cambridge University Press as part of The Cambridge Edition of the Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald, and will be available in the U.S. in June.
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