SOURCE: Prigozy, Ruth. “An Unsentimental Education: ‘The Rubber Check’.” In New Essays on F. Scott Fitzgerald's Neglected Stories, edited by Jackson R. Bryer, pp. 206-18. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1996.

In the following essay, Prigozy asserts that “The Rubber Check” is one of Fitzgerald's most complex and important stories.

Five years have rolled away from me and I can't decide exactly who I am, if anyone.

—Letter from F. Scott Fitzgerald to Maxwell Perkins, May 1932

Sometimes he was able to forget that he really wasn't anybody at all.

—Fitzgerald, “The Rubber Check”

Fitzgerald wrote “The Rubber Check” in May 1932, probably at the Hotel Rennert in Baltimore, Maryland, during one of the bleakest periods of his life.¹ After the Fitzgeralds' return to the United States in September 1931, following Zelda Fitzgerald's release from Prangins Clinic in Switzerland, they took a six-month lease on a house in Montgomery, Alabama, where Fitzgerald...