Fitzgerald’s 1935 collection Taps at Reveille contains 18 short stories.
Published by Charles Scribner’s Sons on March 10, 1935, the book was Fitzgerald’s fourth and final collection of previously uncollected stories published during his lifetime. It appeared about a year after his novel Tender Is the Night and gathered fiction written during a changing phase of his career.
The collection includes stories connected to Fitzgerald’s youth, especially the Basil Duke Lee and Josephine Perry stories. These pieces draw on adolescent experience and social ambition, themes that also run through his novels. The volume’s final story is “Babylon Revisited,” one of his most admired works.
Readers sometimes confuse the number of stories with the collection’s 407-page length or with the contents of other Fitzgerald volumes. Taps at Reveille is specifically a collection of 18 stories, not 18 novels or a later posthumous selection. Its publication marked the end of Fitzgerald’s lifetime series of Scribner story collections.