F. Scott Fitzgerald's early short stories, even more than his first two novels - This Side of Paradise and The Beautiful and Damned - reveal both a growing mastery of his craft and an evolution of the themes and techniques that distinguish The Great Gatsby and his major later works. Indeed, features of Gatsby that Fitzgerald supposedly absorbed from Joseph Conrad, Willa Cather, William Makepeace Thackeray, Oswald Spengler, and T. S.

Eliot sometimes appear in stories Fitzgerald wrote before reading such putative sources. Scholars Robert and Helen H. Roulston examine Fitzgerald's fiction up to the completion of The Great Gatsby and briefly survey his later career in The Winding Road to West Egg.