![FITZGERALD, F. Scott (1896-1940). Typescript of the short story "At Your Age," [Paris, June 1929]. 30 pages, folio., triple-spaced on rectos of 30 sheets of paper watermarked "Typewriter-Argentine," a working draft with VERY EXTENSIVE AUTOGRAPH REVISIONS BY FITZGERALD in pencil throughout, some of the pages (particularly dialogue) nearly rewritten interlinearly (many of the erasures readable because of the soft paper), with an initialed instruction by Fitzgerald on p. 16, with the author's name typed at head of first page and with the title "At Your Age" in his pencilled holograph; two marginal paper-clip rust marks on first page, a single mark on second, a few slight marginal chips to last page, but in very good condition.](https://www.christies.com/img/LotImages/1999/NYR/1999_NYR_09178_0104_000(115054).jpg?w=1)
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FITZGERALD, F. Scott (1896-1940). Typescript of the short story "At Your Age," [Paris, June 1929]. 30 pages, folio., triple-spaced on rectos of 30 sheets of paper watermarked "Typewriter-Argentine," a working draft with VERY EXTENSIVE AUTOGRAPH REVISIONS BY FITZGERALD in pencil throughout, some of the pages (particularly dialogue) nearly rewritten interlinearly (many of the erasures readable because of the soft paper), with an initialed instruction by Fitzgerald on p. 16, with the author's name typed at head of first page and with the title "At Your Age" in his pencilled holograph; two marginal paper-clip rust marks on first page, a single mark on second, a few slight marginal chips to last page, but in very good condition.
Fitzgerald's story, set in Minneapolis, is about a man of fifty attempting to recapture his lost youth in a romance (and a planned marriage) with a young woman. (The original title, "The Old Beau," is visible beneath the newer "At Your Age.") At the beginning of the story Tom Squires, after an encounter with another pretty young woman in a store, is driving away and "the shop windows, glowing into the cold, the tinkling bells of a delivery sleigh, the white gloss left by shovels on the sidewalks, the enormous distance of the stars, brought back the feel of other nights thirty years ago. For an instant the girls he had known then slipped like phantoms out of their dull matronly selves of today and fluttered past him with frosty, seductive laughter... 'Youth ... I want it near me, all around me, just once more before I'm too old to care.'" At the end, as the girl returns home late with a young man, "Tom realized with a shock that he and her mother were people of the same age looking at a person of another...With the courteous bow of another generation, he walked down the steps and off into the obliterating moonlight. In a moment he was just a shadow passing the street lamps and then a faint footfall up the street." In the story's coda, heavily reworked in the transcript, the Fitzgeraldian touch is again evident: "All through that summer he often walked abroad in the evenings. He liked to stand for a minute in front of the house where he was born, and then in front of another house where he had been a little boy ... He had lost the battle against youth and spring, and with his grief paid the penalty for age's unforgivable sin -- refusing to die. But he could not have walked down wasted into the darkness without being used up a little; what he had wanted, after all, was only to break his strong old heart. Conflict itself has a value beyond victory and defeat, and those three months -- he had them forever."
"At Your Age" appeared in the Saturday Evening Post for 17 August 1929, commanding the highest price Fitzgerald ever received for a story -- $4000. His agent Harold Ober was especially enthusiastic, calling it "the finest story you have every written -- and the finest I have ever read." Except for an appearance in Great Modern Short Stories (New York: The Modern Library, 1930), it was not reprinted during the author's lifetime. "At Your Age" is collected in The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald, edited...by Matthew J. Bruccoli (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), pp. 481-494.
Fitzgerald's story, set in Minneapolis, is about a man of fifty attempting to recapture his lost youth in a romance (and a planned marriage) with a young woman. (The original title, "The Old Beau," is visible beneath the newer "At Your Age.") At the beginning of the story Tom Squires, after an encounter with another pretty young woman in a store, is driving away and "the shop windows, glowing into the cold, the tinkling bells of a delivery sleigh, the white gloss left by shovels on the sidewalks, the enormous distance of the stars, brought back the feel of other nights thirty years ago. For an instant the girls he had known then slipped like phantoms out of their dull matronly selves of today and fluttered past him with frosty, seductive laughter... 'Youth ... I want it near me, all around me, just once more before I'm too old to care.'" At the end, as the girl returns home late with a young man, "Tom realized with a shock that he and her mother were people of the same age looking at a person of another...With the courteous bow of another generation, he walked down the steps and off into the obliterating moonlight. In a moment he was just a shadow passing the street lamps and then a faint footfall up the street." In the story's coda, heavily reworked in the transcript, the Fitzgeraldian touch is again evident: "All through that summer he often walked abroad in the evenings. He liked to stand for a minute in front of the house where he was born, and then in front of another house where he had been a little boy ... He had lost the battle against youth and spring, and with his grief paid the penalty for age's unforgivable sin -- refusing to die. But he could not have walked down wasted into the darkness without being used up a little; what he had wanted, after all, was only to break his strong old heart. Conflict itself has a value beyond victory and defeat, and those three months -- he had them forever."
"At Your Age" appeared in the Saturday Evening Post for 17 August 1929, commanding the highest price Fitzgerald ever received for a story -- $4000. His agent Harold Ober was especially enthusiastic, calling it "the finest story you have every written -- and the finest I have ever read." Except for an appearance in Great Modern Short Stories (New York: The Modern Library, 1930), it was not reprinted during the author's lifetime. "At Your Age" is collected in The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald, edited...by Matthew J. Bruccoli (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), pp. 481-494.