F Scott Fitzgerald's 'last unpublished stories' set for release next year

I'd Die For You from The Great Gatsby author is due out next spring

F Scott Fitzgerald at his writing desk in 1933 (Getty Images)

F Scott Fitzgerald’s “last remaining unpublished and uncollected short stories” are finally being published in a book due out next spring.

Unreleased material by The Great Gatsby author has been shared with fans in newspapers such as The New Yorker over the years with new collection I’d Die For You (and Other Lost Stories) set to reach readers on 11 April.

Edited by the New School’s Fitzgerald professor Anne Margaret Daniel, I’d Die For You includes stories that the much-loved writer struggled to sell because of their controversial subject matter or unconventional style, as well as those accepted by magazines but never published.

Fitzgerald “preferred to let his work remain unpublished, even at a time when he was in great need of money and review attention” than allow editors to “sanitise” his stories. “You will experience Fitzgerald depicting young men and women who actually spoke and thought more as young men and women did, without censorship,” a statement from publisher Scribner read.

Title story “I’d Die For You” draws on Fitzgerald’s stays in the North Carolina mountains when his health, along with that of his wife Zelda, was deteriorating. The majority of these stories originate from this time period, during the middle and late 1930s, and all are written in the author’s “characteristically beautiful, sharp and surprising language, exploring themes both familiar and fresh”.

Fitzgerald died in 1940 aged 44 having published four novels in his lifetime and started work on a fifth, The Love of the Last Tycoon, which was released posthumously in 1941.