This morning two children froze to death in a car parked in the lot at a casino in Detroit. It is not clear how this happened. It seems they were possibly living in the car because the mother could not get anyone to help them. Things are only going to get worse, I'm afraid.
FSF wrote this story when he was 24, and it was published in the Saturday Evening Post and later in the collection FLAPPERS AND PHILOSOPHERS.
A Southern Belle is choosing amongst beaus, much like Scarlett O'Hara in GWTW. She decides on a northerner despite her deep hatred of the cold. He takes her home to meet his family. (Probably in Minnesota where FSF was from and where there are natural Ice Palaces). It doesn't go well, the stark differences between north and south are emphasized. He takes her out one night to a party in the ice palaces where she gets lost and almost freezes. Needless to say, she goes back to Georgia and begins her search again. Sounds a lot like a Zelda story, doesn't it?
Amazing story for a 24 year old. And a strange choice for Valentine's Day as well. Have a happy one.
2 comments:
I downloaded Fitzgerald's Complete Short Stories and worked my way through all of them, from the early ones like this to the Pat Hobby stories and to the late, LAST TYCOON era stuff. A lot of them were pretty good.
I found Dorothy M. Johnson's THE HANGING TREE surprising - don't know what I was expecting - and very enjoyable reading for the most part. I guess reading that she was the author of "The Man WHo SHot Liverty Vallance" and "A Man Called Horse," I was expecting it to be much darker than most of it was. Still have the title novella to go, but the rest of the shorter stories were good.
I have a Bill Pronzini collection of his western stories, which George reviewed recently and which I have probably read most of already, to read, and I downloaded a big collection of Nadine Gordimer stories from the library.
You're right: this is a off-beat story for Valentine's Day!
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