All of the Belles

During his Roaring Twenties heyday, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote three stories about the belles of Tarleton, Georgia, a setting readers recognized as a thinly veiled version of his wife Zelda Sayre's hometown of Montgomery, Alabama. In different ways, the heroines of these tales-Sally Carol Happer in "The Ice Palace," Nancy Lamar in "The Jelly-Bean," and Allie Calhoun in "The Last of the Belles"-rebel against Southern expectations of women, revel in the newfound freedoms young people enjoyed at the outset of the modern age, and ultimately discover that home is far harder to run away from than they ever expected. Remarkably, although these minor masterpieces have long been regarded as among the very best of the 160-plus short stories Fitzgerald published during his short life, the stories have never (until now) been published as a trio. Gathered here to commemorate the centennial of both Scott and Zelda's 1920 marriage and the beginning of the Jazz Age they symbolize, All of the Belles captures all the winsome qualities readers love about F. Scott Fitzgerald's writing: the keen observation of manners, the comic insights, the lyricism, and the poignant, powerful sense of loss.