F. Scott Fitzgerald is best known for his novels and short stories, but playwriting was a recurring interest of his. When he was a teenager, Fitzgerald wrote four plays over four summers from 1911-1914, from the ages of 14 to 17. At Princeton, Fitzgerald wrote the material for several shows performed by the Triangle Club. (He was always on academic probation, so he wasn't able to perform in any of the Triangle Club shows.) His project just before writing The Great Gatsby was a play called The Vegetable, which was a disaster. When he was at the end of his rope in 1937, Hollywood offered a reprieve—he got a job working as a screenwriter for MGM. Fitzgerald worked for MGM for 18 months and then freelanced as a screenwriter until his death in December 1940.
His early plays were collected in 1978 and published as F. Scott Fitzgerald's St. Paul Plays, 1911-1914. Fitzgerald would surely blush at the thought of readers perusing his juvenilia, but it's a sign of the long fascination with all things Fitzgerald that these plays were published. As a Fitzgerald scholar who gives tours of the neighborhood in Saint Paul where he grew up and went to school, it was a gap in my knowledge that I had not read these plays until now. I always mention Fitzgerald's plays on my tours, since one of the stops is the former site of Mrs. Backus' School for Girls, where his play The Captured Shadow was performed in 1912.
The four plays that Fitzgerald wrote over those four summers are The Girl from Lazy J, hardly more than a sketch at just 5 pages long, The Captured Shadow, a sophisticated tale of a gentleman burglar, Coward, set in the South during the Civil War, and Assorted Spirits, Fitzgerald's attempt at a farce. The plays were performed at the end of the summer, with the proceeds being donated to local charities.
What does one make of these four plays? They are definitely juvenilia, and these plays would never have seen the light of day save for the fact that their author went on to write some of the greatest fiction of the 20th century. There's nothing in these plays that clearly points to Fitzgerald's later brilliance. But that being said, these plays are also fun and easy to read, with the occasional really good line appearing. They are solid work considering the young age of the author. I certainly wasn't turning out hour-long plays that I could convince people to perform in public when I was 16 years old.
In addition to writing these plays, Fitzgerald also acted in them. It's interesting to see which parts he gave himself. In The Captured Shadow he is the title character, a refined gentleman burglar. I can understand why Fitzgerald wanted to play this role: who wouldn't want to be Cary Grant in To Catch a Thief, David Niven in The Pink Panther, or George Clooney in the Ocean's 11 movies? In Coward Fitzgerald is not the leading role, but he gets to play a dashing Confederate raider. In Assorted Spirits, Fitzgerald gave himself more of a character role, as he plays the father of two of the main characters. He's not dashing, but he does get to deliver some witty lines.
The Captured Shadow is my favorite of the four plays. It's noteworthy because Fitzgerald wrote a short story in 1928, also called "The Captured Shadow," that fictionalized the writing and performing of the play. The short story was one of a series of nine short stories that Fitzgerald wrote about a character named Basil Duke Lee. The stories follow Basil during his adolescence, and if you want to know what teenage F. Scott Fitzgerald was like, read the Basil stories. The stories are humorous, insightful, and full of the navel-gazing solipsism that often typifies the teenage years.
Coward is fine, but the lines about the Confederate "lost cause" are super cringy now. But it's a reminder of how effective and prevalent the "lost cause" mythology was at the time that a Northern boy growing up in Saint Paul would include it in a play.
Assorted Spirits felt like a step backwards from the suave sophistication of The Captured Shadow. The play is slightly overstuffed with too many character and too many crazy coincidences. Fitzgerald was obviously reading Oscar Wilde, thanks to witty epigrams like this one:
"What is your idea of a brilliant woman? Every widow between thirty-five and forty-five who has no children and doesn't wear glasses." (p.93)
Assorted Spirits was very successful; it raised $500 over two performances in 1914. That would be $16,900 in 2026 dollars. The amount of money Assorted Spirits raised gives you an idea of what a feather in the cap these plays were for Fitzgerald. Imagine a teenager writing a play today and raising almost $17,000 for charity from just two performances. That's impressive.
These plays survived because the scripts were kept by Elizabeth Magoffin, a teacher who helped organize and guide the plays for all four summers. Her family donated her copies of the scripts to Princeton University, where they joined Fitzgerald's papers. Magoffin was twenty years old in 1911, just five years older than Scott, and that year she inscribed a photo: "To Scott—'He had that spark-magnetic mark' with the best love of the one who thinks so." That's an interesting inscription to write to a fifteen-year-old boy. Did Elizabeth have feelings for Scott? There's no evidence I'm aware of except for this warm inscription to suggest there was anything romantic between Magoffin and Fitzgerald. But she may have fallen under the magic spell that Fitzgerald seemed to weave wherever he went. Or she may have recognized his talent and realized that he was someone special. Clearly, she thought highly of Fitzgerald to preserve these scripts for so many years.
Fitzgerald's Saint Paul plays are more for the dedicated scholar than the casual Fitzgerald fan. But they do offer us a fascinating glimpse into this talented writer during his youth, before fame and fortune came calling.
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