F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Last Unpublished Stories to be Released in 2017

F. Scott Fitzgerald was a prolific writer eighty years ago. Now, readers will finally get to read the last of his unpublished works. A new collection, titled I’d Die for You, contains stories the author was unable to get published during the 1930s. According to The Guardian, the collection is set to be released in April of 2017.

The stories contained in the collection were unpublished for a variety of reasons. Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster and publisher of the collection, explained that some of the stories went unsold because of their controversial subject matter. The style “departed from what editors expected of [the author] in the 1930s,” said Scribner. Some of the other unpublished pieces in the collection were sold to magazines at the time but were never put in print.

According to Scribner, the collection features:

… Fitzgerald writing about controversial topics, depicting young men and women who actually spoke and thought more as young men and women did, without censorship. Rather than permit changes and sanitising by his contemporary editors, Fitzgerald preferred to let his work remain unpublished, even at a time when he was in great need of money and review attention.

The collection’s title story “I’d Die for You” draws from Fitzgerald’s own experiences in the mountains of North Carolina in 1936. While he was mired in alcoholism, Fitzgerald’s wife Zelda was at a sanatorium nearby. The story, Scribner explains, adds “a Hollywood star and film crew to the Smoky Mountain lakes and pines,” incorporating “the cinematic world in which [Fitzgerald] would soon be living.”

Fitzgerald moved to Hollywood in 1937, dying only three years later. He left behind several books which still endure to this day, including classics The Great Gatsby and Tender is the Night.

I’d Die for You is edited by Anne Margaret Daniel, and may provide additional insight into the arc of Fitzgerald’s career. As Scribner explains, the collection was written “in his characteristically beautiful, sharp, and surprising language,” language that book readers have fawned over for eight decades.