The collection I’d Die for You contains works The Great Gatsby author was unable to sell in the 1930s because of its unexpected subject matter and style

Eighty years after they were written, the last complete unpublished stories by The Great Gatsby author F Scott Fitzgerald will be released next spring.

The collection, due to be published in April 2017 by Simon & Schuster imprint Scribner, is mainly drawn from stories written in the mid and late 1930s. It ranges from work that Fitzgerald was unable to sell because its “subject matter or style departed from what editors expected of [the author] in the 1930s”, Scribner said, to writing that he submitted to magazines, and which was accepted for publication but never printed.

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Scribner promised the collection featured “Fitzgerald writing about controversial topics, depicting young men and women who actually spoke and thought more as young men and women did, without censorship”.

The US publisher added: “Rather than permit changes and sanitising by his contemporary editors, Fitzgerald preferred to let his work remain unpublished, even at a time when he was in great need of money and review attention.”

The title story of the collection, I’d Die for You, draws from the time Fitzgerald spent in the mountains of North Carolina, mired in alcoholism, his wife Zelda in a sanatorium nearby. Novelist Thomas Wolfe would write to his brother Fred in 1936: “There is a poor, desperate, unhappy man staying at the Grove Park Inn. He is a man of great talent but he is throwing it away on drink and worry over his misfortunes … His name, I forgot to say, is Scott Fitzgerald, and a New York paper has just published a miserable interview with him – it was a lousy trick, a rotten … piece of journalism, going to see a man in that condition, gaining his confidence, and then betraying him. I myself have suffered at the hands of these rats, and I know what they can do.”

Fitzgerald’s story, said Scribner, adds “a Hollywood star and film crew to the Smoky Mountain lakes and pines”, bringing in “the cinematic world in which [Fitzgerald] would soon be living”. In 1937, Fitzgerald moved to Hollywood with an MGM contract. He would die in 1940, at the age of 44, leaving behind him works including The Great Gatsby and Tender Is the Night.

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Scribner said that the collection, which is edited by Anne Margaret Daniel, would “provide new insight into the bold and uncompromising arc of Fitzgerald’s career” and was written “in his characteristically beautiful, sharp, and surprising language”.

Last year, The Strand magazine published a short story by Fitzgerald, which its editor Andrew Gulli found in the archives of Princeton University. Temperature told of a writer and heavy drinker named Emmet Monsen, who suffers from cardiac disease.

“When we think of Fitzgerald, we tend to think of tragic novels he wrote, such as Gatsby and Tender Is the Night, but Temperature shows that he was equally adept and highly skilled as a short-story writer who was able to pen tales of high comedy,” Gulli said at the time. “Fitzgerald … couldn’t help using his satirical abilities to mock everyone, from doctors, Hollywood idols and the norms of society.”