“I’d like to get a thrill like that again,” wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald to his publisher in 1925. He was describing how he felt the day he learned he’d sold his first story to The Saturday Evening Post. At the time, having your story appear in the Post meant it had met the magazine’s high standard for fiction, and that your work was placed before an audience of 3 million people. Having written that,
he added wistfully, “but I suppose it’s only once in a lifetime.”
In 1920, Fitzgerald recounted his writing career, how he’d moved to New York and written movie scripts, song lyrics, advertising slogans, poems, sketches, and jokes — that nobody wanted:
On the Fourth of July, utterly disgusted with myself and all the editors, I went home to St. Paul and informed family and friends that I had given up my position and had come home to write a novel. They nodded politely, changed the subject, and spoke of me very gently. But this time I knew what I was doing. I had a novel to write at last, and all through two hot months I wrote and revised and compiled and boiled down. On September 15th, This Side of Paradise was accepted by special delivery.
In the next two months, I wrote eight stories and sold nine. The ninth was accepted by the same magazine that had rejected it four months before. Then, in November, I sold my first story to the editors of The Saturday Evening Post. By February I had sold them half a dozen. Then my novel came out. Then I got married. Now I spend my time wondering how it all happened.
—Who’s Who and Why, September 18, 1920
The Swimmers
by F. Scott Fitzgerald
In “The Swimmers,” one of Fitzgerald’s 65 stories for the Post, a man regains his health by learning to swim. It helps him retain custody of his boys when his unfaithful wife leaves him. As the story ends, he sails for Europe and muses on the opportunities and chances for rebirth that America gives.
In October, Henry left his sons in school and embarked on the Majestic for Europe. He had come [back to America] as to a generous mother and had been profusely given more than he asked — money, release from an intolerable situation, and the fresh strength to fight for his own. Watching the fading city, the fading shore, from the deck of the Majestic, he had a sense of overwhelming gratitude and of gladness that America was there, that under the ugly debris of industry the rich land still pushed up, incorrigibly lavish and fertile, and that in the heart of the leaderless people the old generosities and devotions fought on, breaking out sometimes in fanaticism and excess, but indomitable and undefeated. There was a lost generation in the saddle at the moment, but it seemed to him that the men coming on, the men of the war, were better; and all his old feeling that America was a bizarre accident, a sort of historical sport, had gone forever. The best of America was the best of the world.
France was a land, England was a people, but America, having about it still that quality of the idea, was harder to utter — it was the graves at Shiloh and the tired, drawn, nervous faces of its great men, and the country boys dying in the Argonne for a phrase that was empty before their bodies withered. It was a willingness of the heart.
—Originally published October 19, 1929
This article is featured in the March/April 2026 issue of The Saturday Evening Post. Subscribe to the magazine for more art, inspiring stories, fiction, humor, and features from our archives.
Become a Saturday Evening Post member and enjoy unlimited access. Subscribe now
