The other day I was writing about one of Fitzgerald’s early stories, “The Offshore Pirate,” and I came across a wonderful line that I just had to share:
Five o’clock rolled down from the sun and plumped soundlessly into the sea.
Beautiful!
Fitzgerald had originally ended the story with the explanation that it had all been a dream, but he, or possibly someone at The Saturday Evening Post, realized that was rather lame, and he replaced it with one of the best magazine-story endings ever written:
…reaching up on her tiptoes she kissed him softly in the illustration.
It wasn’t a dream…it was all an invention of Fitzgerald’s fertile imagination. “Look at what I can do!” he proclaims in the ebullience of his early success.
If you want to read this or Fitzgerald’s other stories, the best collection is The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald
Mary Jo