Taps at Reveille, first published in 1935, was F. Scott Fitzgerald's fourth collection of short stories and the last published in his lifetime. The Cambridge Edition, edited by James L. West III, excludes the Basil and Josephine stories, as these were published in a separate Cambridge Edition. It does include nine short stories written in the same time period which weren't included in the original collection (as well as a short story only relatively recently published for the first time in The New Yorker magazine). Nearly all of these short stories were originally published in The Saturday Evening Post magazine, but heavily edited (one could say practically censored). This edition publishes the unexpurgated versions.
Although Fitzgerald's previous short story collection, All the Sad Young Men, is probably his strongest, Taps at Reveille is never boring and, in many ways, seems his most autobiographical. The range of the tales runs from a ghost story to a parable, but the basic thrust of the book is the theme of squandered opportunities and middle-aged spousal infidelity. Exemplified by "Babylon Revisited", one his most famous shorts, Reveille has many tales of bored, confused, drunk or down and out Americans set, or trapped, in Europe. The amazing number of short stories Fitzgerald wrote at the time, most of which he hoped to sell to the Post, were necessary to pay Zelda Fitzgerald's medical bills; F. Scott, himself, was struggling with health issues and his books were, unfortunately, not selling well.
The stories in Taps at Reveille, though largely written for a wide audience, are filled with beautiful prose; only occasionally does it step over the line into floridity (and, sadly, casual racism in spots). I'm very much looking forward to reading the Basil and Josephine Cambridge edition.
