The Four Fists

Master the 40: The Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald

As spring turned to summer in 1920 and This Side of Paradise was making a celebrity of F. Scott Fitzgerald, the periodical published by his very own publisher, Scribner's Magazine, featured an atypical story by him: "The Four Fists," whose premise is---no, seriously---that we would all be better off if in moments of moral impurity we took a knuckle sandwich to the chiclets. Four times in this odd tale the hero, Samuel Meredith, gets punched in the face, and four times he becomes a better person for it. Although it sounds like it might make for a better title for a 1973 Bruce Lee movie, "The Four Fists" is one of Fitzgerald's most infamous stories: it's universally derided as moralistic and didactic, as proof that when the author aimed for the creakiest, stuffiest magazine audiences of the era---and Scribner's was actually more conservative in taste in 1920 than even the Saturday Evening Post---he ended up betraying all the beautiful nuances and poignancies for which we value his writing. Does that mean somebody should have socked him in the jaw for publishing this story (which only made him $150, anyway)? As we suggest, two explanations suggest why "The Four Fists" has gone down in literary history as one of Fitzgerald's worst : 1) for reasons that remain unclear, he chose to include it as the final story in Flappers and Philosophers, his first story collection, giving it a spotlight it might not otherwise have had had he just let in sink in the pages of Scribner's June 1920 issue; and 2) the then president of Princeton, John Grier Hibben, wrote Fitzgerald a notorious letter praising this tale and wishing Fitzgerald would follow this preachy path rather than revel in the jazz debauchery of This Side of Paradise---a condescending bit of career advice that sparked a feisty reply from the twenty-three-year-old voice of "the rising generation."