The Rich Boy

The Rich Boy is a short story by American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald. It was included in his 1926 collection All the Sad Young Men. It originally appeared in two parts, in the January and February 1926 issues of Redbook.

Fitzgerald wrote "The Rich Boy" in 1924, in Capri, while awaiting publication of The Great Gatsby. He revised it in his apartment at 14 Rue de Tilsitt in Paris the following spring, at what he described as a period of "1000 parties and no work." By May 28, 1925, he wrote his literary agent, Harold Ober, that the story was "at the typist." Five weeks later, he sent his editor Max Perkins a proposed list of stories for his third collection, describing "The Rich Boy": "Just finishedserious story and very good."

The Fitzgerald scholar Matthew Bruccoli describes the story as "an extension of The Great Gatsby, enlarging the examination of the effects of wealth on character." The story of Anson Hunter and his love for the "dark, serious beauty" Paula Legendre, Fitzgerald modeled the "Rich Boy" of his title on Princeton classmate Ludlow Fowler, who'd stood as best man at Fitzgerald's wedding. Fitzgerald sent Fowler the story before publication, explaining, "I have written a 15,000 word story about you called The Rich Boyit is so disguised that no one except you and me and maybe two of the girls concerned would recognize, unless you give it away, but it is in large measure the story of your life, toned down here and there and simplified. Also many gaps had to come out of my imagination. It is frank, unsparing but sympathetic and I think you will like itit is one of the best things I have ever done." Fowler requested excisions that Fitzgerald made before the story was collected in All the Sad Young Men the following year.

Fitzgerald's friend the writer Ring Lardnerdedicee of All the Sad Young Menwas such an admirer he told Fitzgerald he wished he could have expanded the story to novel length. Fitzgerald wrote Max Perkins this "would have been absolutely impossible."

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