On Booze

Scott Fitzgerald’s On Booze is a collection of short stories about alcohol, an integral part of life for the New York’s “lost generation” of the 1920s.

The works making up F. Scott Fitzgerald’s On Booze collection of short stories are all in one way or another connected with the theme of alcohol. The collection was put together in 2011 by the New Directions publishing house, making use of the author’s published works and items from his personal archives; the same publishers having previously brought the writer back to the attention of the reading public in 1945, with the re-release of his novel The Great Gatsby, five years after his death. Fitzgerald writes of the heyday of the speakeasy, as seen from the point of view of a lyrical hero broken under the weight of the claggy senselessness of existence (a characteristic type of the ‘lost generation’), dealing with the life of his contemporaries, filled only with frivolous travel and flitting from one brief hotel room to another, and, of course, he describes the New York of the “roaring twenties” – an American city in the Age of Jazz. “…The tempo of the city had changed sharply. … - the catering to dissipation set an example to Paris; the shows were broader, the buildings were higher, the morals were looser and the liquor was cheaper…”