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    Head And Shoulders: Short Story
    Head And Shoulders: Short Story
    Head And Shoulders: Short Story
    Ebook40 pages36 minutes

    Head And Shoulders: Short Story

    By F. Scott Fitzgerald

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    About this ebook

    “Head and Shoulders” is the story of what happens when Yale philosopher Horace Tarbox—the “head”—answers the door to Vaudeville star Marcia—the “shoulders.” Marcia’s performance is but the first step in an astonishing role reversal that will prove, “…when you [open] the door at the rap of life, you let in many things.”

    “Head and Shoulders” was collected in Flappers and Philosophers (1920), and is resonant with many of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s most popular themes including mismatched lovers, the sacrifices made for love, and romantic disappointment.

    HarperPerennial Classics brings great works of literature to life in digital format, upholding the highest standards in ebook production and celebrating reading in all its forms. Look for more titles in the HarperPerennial Classics collection to build your digital library.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateMay 13, 2014
    ISBN9781443435185
    Head And Shoulders: Short Story
    Author

    F. Scott Fitzgerald

    F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) is regarded as one of the greatest American authors of the 20th century. His short stories and novels are set in the American ‘Jazz Age’ of the Roaring Twenties and include This Side of Paradise, The Beautiful and Damned, Tender Is the Night, The Great Gatsby, The Last Tycoon, and Tales of the Jazz Age.

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      Book preview

      Head And Shoulders - F. Scott Fitzgerald

      Head and Shoulders

      I

      In 1915 Horace Tarbox was thirteen years old. In that year he took the examinations for entrance to Princeton University and received the Grade A—excellent—in Caesar, Cicero, Vergil, Xenophon, Homer, Algebra, Plane Geometry, Solid Geometry, and Chemistry.

      Two years later, while George M. Cohan was composing Over There, Horace was leading the sophomore class by several lengths and digging out theses on The Syllogism as an Obsolete Scholastic Form, and during the battle of Château-Thierry he was sitting at his desk deciding whether or not to wait until his seventeenth birthday before beginning his series of essays on The Pragmatic Bias of the New Realists.

      After a while some newsboy told him that the war was over, and he was glad, because it meant that Peat Brothers, publishers, would get out their new edition of Spinoza’s Improvement of the Understanding. Wars were all very well in their way, made young men self-reliant or something, but Horace felt that he could never forgive the President for allowing a brass band to play under his window on the night of the false armistice, causing him to leave three important sentences out of his thesis on German Idealism.

      The next year he went up to Yale to take his degree as Master of Arts.

      He was seventeen then, tall and slender, with nearsighted gray eyes and an air of keeping himself utterly detached from the mere words he let drop.

      I never feel as though I’m talking to him, expostulated Professor Dillinger to a sympathetic colleague. He makes me feel as though I were talking to his representative. I always expect him to say: ‘Well, I’ll ask myself and find out.’

      And then, just as nonchalantly as though Horace Tarbox had been Mr. Beef the butcher or Mr. Hat the haberdasher, life reached in, seized him, handled him, stretched him, and unrolled him like a piece of Irish lace on a Saturday-afternoon bargain-counter.

      To move in the literary fashion I should say that this was all because when way back in colonial days the hardy pioneers had come to a bald place in Connecticut and asked of each other, Now, what shall we build here? the hardiest one among ’em had answered: Let’s build a town where theatrical managers can try out musical comedies! How afterward they founded Yale College there, to try the musical comedies on, is a story everyone knows. At any rate one December, Home James opened at the Shubert, and all the students encored Marcia Meadow,

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