The Ants at Princeton

Master the 40: The Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald

Appearing in the June 1936 issue of Esquire, "The Ants at Princeton" is by any measure a singularly kooky entry in F. Scott Fitzgerald's short-story corpus. A fantasy about a human-sized ant who steps onto the field to save the game between heated rivals Princeton and Harvard (you can probably guess who FSF roots for), the text has always baffled scholars: is it a short story or is it, as Fitzgerald wrote in his ledger, a mere "satire"? And does that even matter? Behind the peculiar and not particularly effective conceit, though, lies a lot of very interesting collegiate football history, not the least of which begs the question of whether Scott---whose dreams of gridiron stardom were famously dashed---had an influence on the game as latter-day fans have come to know it. Listen as two non-sports fans whose collective knowledge of football couldn't fill the few number of pages this story does make a mountain out of an anthill by exploring this possibility.