The Lees of Happiness by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Author: F. Scott Fitzgerald | Published: December 12, 1920

May Day Synopsis

"The Lees of Happiness" is a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald. It was first published in Chicago Sunday Tribune on December 12th, 1920, and later in book form in Tales of the Jazz Age in 1922. The Lees of Happiness has unfortunately received little attention from critics and readers alike.

Roxanne, a young bride, and her husband, Jeffery, a short story writer, were starting their married life. They are looking forward to their happiness and success for many years. But suddenly, Jeffery develops blindness and paralysis due to a blood clot in his brain.

Excerpt from The Lees of Happiness Online Book

If you should look through the files of old magazines for the first years of the present century you would find, sandwiched in between the stories of Richard Harding Davis and Frank Norris and others long since dead, the work of one Jeffrey Curtain: a novel or two, and perhaps three or four dozen short stories. You could, if you were interested, follow them along until, say, 1908, when they suddenly disappeared.

When you had read them all you would have been quite sure that here were no masterpieces—here were passably amusing stories, a bit out of date now, but doubtless the sort that would then have whiled away a dreary half hour in a dental office. The man who did them was of good intelligence, talented, glib, probably young.

About F. Scott Fitzgerald

Francis Scott Fitzgerald was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, on September 24th, 1896, to a middle-class Catholic family. Fitzgerald is a renowned novelist and short story writer, best known for his works The Great Gatsby and Tender Is the Night. Fitzgerald has been praised for his vivid depiction of 1920s America during the Jazz Age with its glittering parties and the materialistic culture accompanying it. Themes such as youthfulness and idealism are prominent throughout much of Fitzgerald's work. Find out more about F. Scott Fitzgerald at sevenov.com.