This book discusses the American short story composite, or short story cycle, a neglected form of writing consisting of autonomous stories interlocking into a whole. The critical work done on this genre has so far focused on the closural strategies of the composites, on how unity is accomplished in these texts. This study takes into consideration, to a greater degree than earlier criticism, the short story composite as an open work, emphasizing the tension between the independent stories and the unified work, between the discontinuity and fragmentation, on the one hand, and the totalizing strategies, on the other. The discussion of the genre is illustrated with references to numerous American short story composites.

Francis Scott Fitzgerald’s contribution to American fiction has to be judged keeping in mind that the naturalistic mimesis of the fiction of the earlier period is important as a critique of bourgeois society, but it ultimately fails in representing the problematic nature of bourgeois reality. The use of romance by Fitzgerald within mimetic realism is a logical culmination of the rise of the novel as it is. Through this use of romance he is able to adequately explore the bourgeois myth of man