F. Scott Fitzgerald's St. Paul is a city of winter dreams and ice palaces, lakeside parties and neighborhood hijinks. These are stories of ambition and young love, insecurity and awkwardness, where a poor boy with energy and intelligence can break into the upper classes and become a glittering success. This selection brings together the best of Fitzgerald's St. Paul stories—some virtually unknown, others classics of short fiction. Patricia Hampl's incisive introduction traces the trajectory of Fitzgerald's blazing celebrity and its connections to his life in the city that gave him his best material. Headnotes by Dave Page provide specific ties between the stories and Fitzgerald's life in St. Paul. "Fitzgerald is a presence in St. Paul, a ghost who patrols his old neighborhood and keeps talking to us. He sits on Mrs. Porterfield?s porch on Summit Avenue, smoking and talking about writing, and it is always that gorgeous summer just before he finished the book, hit it big, went to New York, married the girl. This lovely book sets out our claim on him. We have no Fitzgerald museum in St. Paul, no boyhood home restored--the family lived in apartments--but this book is the only monument he needs, his own stories, with historical notes, and Patricia Hampl's graceful shining essay for absolution, and Zelda?s benediction." -- Garrison Keillor Patricia Hampl is Regents’ Professor of English at the University of Minnesota and author of several books, including A Romantic Education. She has won NEA, Bush, Guggenheim, Bellagio, McKnight, Fulbright, and MacArthur fellowships. Dave Page is co-author of F. Scott Fitzgerald in Minnesota: Toward the Summit. THE ST. PAUL STORIES OF F. SCOTT FITZGERALD BOREALIS BOOKS Copyright © 2004 Patricia Hampl All right reserved. ISBN: 978-0-87351-512-2 Contents Introduction PATRICIA HAMPL.......................viiBabes in the Woods.................................3The Camel's Back...................................15Bernice Bobs Her Hair..............................47The Ice Palace.....................................77Winter Dreams......................................107A Short Trip Home..................................135The Scandal Detectives.............................161A Night at the Fair................................185He Thinks He's Wonderful...........................205The Captured Shadow................................231Forging Ahead......................................255At Your Age........................................277A Freeze-Out.......................................295A Letter from Zelda Fitzgerald.....................321Acknowledgments....................................325Bibliography.......................................327 Chapter One SHE PAUSED AT THE TOP OF THE STAIRCASE. The emotions of divers on springboards, leading ladies on opening nights, and lumpy, be-striped young men on the day of the Big Game, crowded through her. She felt as if she should have descended to a burst of drums or to a discordant blend of gems from Thas and Carmen . She had never been so worried about her appearance, she had never been so satisfied with it. She had been sixteen years old for six months. "Isabelle!" called Elaine, her cousin, from the doorway of the dressing-room. "I'm ready." She caught a slight lump of nervousness in her throat. "I've had to send back to the house for another pair of slippers-it'll be just a minute." Isabelle started toward the dressing-room for a last peek at a mirror, but something decided her to stand there and gaze down the stairs. They curved tantalizingly and she could just catch a glimpse of two pairs of masculine feet in the hall below. Pump-shod in uniform black, they gave no hint of identity, but eagerly she wondered if one pair were attached to Stephen Palms. This young man, as yet unmet, had taken up a considerable part of her day-the first day of her arrival. Going up in a machine from the station Elaine had volunteered, amid a rain of questions and comment, revelation and exaggeration- "You remember Stephen Palms; well, he is simply mad to see you again. He's stayed over a day from college and he's coming tonight. He's heard so much about you-" It had pleased her to know this. It put them on more equal terms, although she was accustomed to stage her own romances with or without a send-off. But following her delighted tremble of anticipation came a sinking sensation which made her ask: "How do you mean he's heard about me? What sort of things?" Elaine smiled-she felt more or less in the capacity of a show-woman with her more exotic cousin. "He knows you're good-looking and all that." She paused-"I guess he knows you've been kissed." Isabelle had shuddered a bit under the fur robe. She was accustomed to be followed by this, but it never failed to arouse in her the same feeling of resentment; yet-in a strange town it was an advantage. She was a "speed," was she? Well, l