The Bridal Party

By F. Scott Fitzgerald

"The Bridal Party" is a short story written by F. Scott Fitzgerald featured in the Saturday Evening Post on August 9, 1930. The story is based on Ludlow Fowler’s brother’s, Powell Fowler, May 1930 Paris wedding. It is Fitzgerald’s first story dealing with the stock market crash, and celebrates the end of the period when wealthy Americans colonized Paris.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BoD E-Short
• Release date: Mar 10, 2015
• ISBN: 9783734773532

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Among the “Lost Generation” of writers that came of age during the Roaring Twenties, the work of F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) epitomized “The Jazz Age”: a period of declining traditional values, prohibition and speakeasies, and great artistic leaps. Fitzgerald’s first novel, This Side of Paradise, was a financial success, but subsequent ones, including his masterpiece, The Great Gatsby, sold poorly. In need of money, he turned to writing commercial short stories and Hollywood scripts, while his lifelong alcoholism destroyed his health and led to an early death. The 1945 reissue of The Great Gatsby spurred a wide resurgence of interest, and Fitzgerald is now considered one of the greatest American writers of the twentieth century.

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Table Of Contents

I

II

III

Copyright

I

There was the usual insincere little note saying: I wanted you to be the first to know. It was a double shock to Michael, announcing, as it did, both the engagement and the imminent marriage; which, moreover, was to be held, not in New York, decently and far away, but here in Paris under his very nose, if that could be said to extend over the Protestant Episcopal Church of the Holy Trinity, Avenue George-Cinq. The date was two weeks off, early in June.

At first Michael was afraid and his stomach felt hollow. When he left the hotel that morning, the femme de chambre, who was in love with his fine, sharp profile and his pleasant buoyancy, scented the hard abstraction that had settled over him. He walked in a daze to his bank, he bought a detective story at Smith's on the Rue de Rivoli, he sympathetically stared for a while at a faded panorama of the battlefields in a tourist-office window and cursed a Greek tout who followed him with a half-displayed packet of innocuous post cards warranted to be very dirty indeed.

But the fear stayed with him, and after a while he recognized it as the fear that now he would never be happy. He had met Caroline Dandy when she was seventeen, possessed her young heart all through her first season in New York, and then lost her, slowly, tragically, uselessly, because he had no money and could make no money; because, with all the energy and good will in the world, he could not find himself; because, loving him still, Caroline had lost faith and begun to see him as something pathetic, futile and shabby, outside the great, shining stream of life toward which she was inevitably drawn.

Since his only support was that she loved him, he leaned weakly on that; the support broke, but still he held on to it