Discussion of F. Scott Fitzgerald's “Winter Dreams”

For this single-session "taster" on F. Scott Fitzgerald's Winter Dreams, Dr. Nancy Goldstein will discuss Winter Dreams (1922), one of F. Scott Fitzgerald's most admired short stories — and, as he himself acknowledged, a first sketch for the novel that would become The Great Gatsby. Dexter Green, a caddie at a Minnesota golf club, falls for Judy Jones, a rich, careless, luminously beautiful girl who will occupy his imagination for the next decade. He will go on to build a small fortune of his own. What follows is a story about desire so precisely observed it is almost clinical: the way a certain kind of longing attaches not to a person but to everything that person appears to represent. Or rather, everything she once represented.

Winter Dreams, which you can download and read here,  turns on a moment of loss so quiet you could miss it — and then can't stop thinking…