'Lost' F. Scott Fitzgerald Story Published

'New Yorker' un-rejects smoking story
By Kevin Spak,  Newser Staff
Posted Jul 30, 2012 1:50 PM CDT
'Lost' F. Scott Fitzgerald Story Published
A sketch of F. Scott Fitzgerald by Gordon Bryant, published in 1921.   (Wikimedia)

This week, the New Yorker is publishing a never-before-seen F. Scott Fitzgerald short story—that it initially rejected back in 1936. It's a charming, brief piece about a saleswoman desperate for a cigarette in a disapproving town. In an internal memo at the time, the magazine wrote that the story was "altogether out of the question. It seems to us so curious and so unlike the kind of thing we associate with him and really too fantastic," the Huffington Post reports.

At the time, of course, Fitzgerald wasn't the household name he is today. Fitzgerald's grandchildren rediscovered the story while preparing some of the writer's papers for a Sotheby's auction, and resubmitted it to the New Yorker, which gratefully accepted. You can read it here. (More F. Scott Fitzgerald stories.)

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