The Vegetable.: Or from President to Postman.

New York: Charles Scribner's Sons,, 1923. Fitzgerald's theatrical aspirations First edition, first printing, of the author's only play, a lovely copy in the rare jacket. Theatre was Fitzgerald's first love and he thought he would make his fortune with The Vegetable, which he considered the funniest play ever written. The adolescent Fitzgerald was a fledgling actor and impresario. He was active in the Princeton Triangle Club as a student, where he enjoyed the admiration and encouragement of his peers. The Louisville Post proclaimed that he "could take his place right now with the brightest writers of witty lyrics in America" (cited in Irwin) for his musical comedy Fie! Fi! Fi-Fi! (1914-15), so with a novel and a short story collection under his belt, Fitzgerald confidently turned his eye to Broadway. The Vegetable was published on 27 April 1923 and premiered in a single preview on 20 November at Nixon's Apollo Theatre in Atlantic City, New Jersey. The first act went well, but the dream sequence lost the audience and Fitzgerald himself wrote that "I wanted to stop the show and say it was all a mistake but the actors struggled heroically on" (Turnbull, p. 140). During the second intermission, Fitzgerald and his friend Ring Lardner asked the lead actor if he was even going to bother with the final act. When he replied that he was, the pair decided their evening would be better spent in a bar down the street. Octavo. Original green cloth, spine lettered in gilt, front cover lettered in blind, fore and bottom edges untrimmed. With dust jacket. Spine ends gently bumped, a few spots to top edge, bright and fresh; jacket lightly soiled, 11 cm closed tear from head of rear panel expertly repaired, a few chips and short closed tears at edges, vertical crease to front flap, bright and unclipped: a near-fine copy in very good jacket. Bruccoli A10.1a; Andrew Turnbull, Scott Fitzgerald, 1962; John T. Urwin, F. Scott Fitzgerald's Fiction: An Almost Theatrical Innocence, 2014.