The Captured Shadow

By F. Scott Fitzgerald

Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald (September 24, 1896 – December 21, 1940) was an American author of novels and short stories, whose works are the paradigmatic writings of the Jazz Age. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century. Fitzgerald is considered a member of the "Lost Generation" of the 1920s. He finished four novels: "This Side of Paradise", "The Beautiful and Damned", "The Great Gatsby" (his most famous), and "Tender Is the Night". A fifth, unfinished novel, "The Love of the Last Tycoon", was published posthumously. Fitzgerald also wrote many short stories that treat themes of youth and promise along with age and despair.

Fitzgerald's work has been adapted into films many times. His short story, "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button", was the basis for a 2008 film. "Tender Is the Night" was filmed in 1962, and made into a television miniseries in 1985. "The Beautiful and Damned" was filmed in 1922 and 2010. "The Great Gatsby" has been the basis for numerous films of the same name, spanning nearly 90 years: 1926, 1949, 1974, 2000, and 2013 adaptations. In addition, Fitzgerald's own life from 1937 to 1940 was dramatized in 1958 in "Beloved Infidel".

• Language: English
• Publisher: BoD E-Short
• Release date: Mar 11, 2015
• ISBN: 9783734774584

F. Scott Fitzgerald

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) was an American novelist and short story writer. He is best known for his 1925 novel The Great Gatsby, the quintessential tale of the decadence and overindulgence of the Jazz Age. Born into an upper middle-class family in St. Paul, Minnesota, Fitzgerald was raised in New York. After dropping out of Princeton University in 1917 to join the Army, he was stationed in Alabama, where he met wealthy socialite Zelda Sayre. It was only after he achieved moderate success with his debut novel This Side of Paradise that Zelda agreed to marry him. His second novel, The Beautiful and the Damned, propelled him to literary stardom, the volatile nature of which inspired his best-known work The Great Gatsby. Though it met with mixed reviews in Fitzgerald’s lifetime, The Great Gatsby is now considered by some literary scholars to be the “Great American Novel.” Haunted by alcoholism, declining popularity, and financial difficulties well into the 1930s, Fitzgerald died in 1940. An unfinished novel, The Last Tycoon, was published posthumously in 1941. 

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Table Of Contents

I

II

III

Copyright

I

Basil Duke Lee shut the front door behind him and turned on the dining-room light. His mother's voice drifted sleepily downstairs:

Basil, is that you?

No, mother, it's a burglar.

It seems to me twelve o'clock is pretty late for a fifteen-year-old boy.

We went to Smith's and had a soda.

Whenever a new responsibility devolved upon Basil he was a boy almost sixteen, but when a privilege was in question, he was a fifteen-year-old boy.

There were footsteps above, and Mrs. Lee, in kimono, descended to the first landing.

Did you and Riply enjoy the play?

Yes, very much.

What was it about?

Oh, it was just about this man. Just an ordinary play.

Didn't it have a name?

'Are You a Mason?'

Oh. She hesitated, covetously watching his alert and eager face, holding him there. Aren't you coming to bed?

I'm going to get something to eat.

Something more?

For a moment he didn't answer. He stood in front of a glassed-in bookcase in the living room, examining its contents with an equally glazed eye.

We're going to get up a play, he said suddenly. I'm going to write it.

Well--that'll be very nice. Please come to bed soon. You were up late last night, too, and you've got dark circles under your eyes.

From the bookcase Basil presently extracted Van Bibber and Others, from which he read while he ate a large plate of straw softened with half a pint of cream. Back in the living room he sat for a few minutes at the piano, digesting, and meanwhile staring at the colored cover of a song from The Midnight Sons. It showed three men in evening clothes and opera hats sauntering jovially along Broadway against the blazing background of Times Square.

Basil would have denied incredulously the suggestion that that was currently his favorite work