The Rich Boy: Special Nov 15 Bonus Episode

Master the 40: The Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald

For reasons you have to tune in to discover, November 15 is an important day for at least three Fitzgerald diehards. So to celebrate we're offering a special bonus episode featuring our first ever special guest: James L. W. West III, the mastermind behind the Cambridge Edition of the Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald. From 1995 to 2019, Jim singlehandedly produced sixteen of the eighteen volumes that establish FSF's standard texts employing those alchemical arts known as textual editing. For our conversation, we dissect another of Fitzgerald's all-time greatest short stories, "The Rich Boy," which appeared in Red Book in January and February 1926 and went on to kick off All the Sad Young Men that same year. The story dissects the sense of superiority that at once drives Anson Hunter and yet leaves him leading a lonely life when he cannot commit to either the doomed Paula Legendre or Dolly Karger. We ask whether this story is an indictment of the rich in general or an anatomy of one aloof man. We also explore how the story's most famous line ("Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me") stereotyped its author, most notably when Ernest Hemingway appropriated it to insult Fitzgerald by name in "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" (1936). We also test Jim's patience by forcing him to play a game of "Flapper or Not a Flapper?", quizzing his name recognition of Fitzgerald heroines. Finally, we learn that like Ludlow Fowler, the friend who inspired "The Rich Boy," Jim once found his life fodder for a novel. When he declines to name it for us, we make hunting it down our new mission.