Anyone who has ever had a stab at a story will survey the American fiction market of the ‘20s and ‘30s with nostalgia and a certain twinge of relief. Nowadays, with only the London Magazine left as a publisher of the briefest of fictions, and a mere dribble of transatlantic reviews, the quasi-insatiable demand seems vaguely astounding, almost incomprehensible. There, however, they all were, Collier’s, Liberty, Metropolitan, International, Scribner’s, Smart Set, American Cavalcade, Woman’s Home Journal, Ladies’ Home Companion, ready to snap you up and send you out with an adornment of fervid illustrations. Fitzgerald’s present editor, indeed, reproduces a selection of such drawings, including a self-consciously arty front cover for Woman’s Home Journal, featuring the story ‘Your Way and Mine’, for which the paper had paid $17 50 and which its author considered one of the lowsiest (sic) stories I’ve ever written, just terrible!’.

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