Gretchen’s Forty Winks

＂’Forty days, ’ she sighed. ’It seems such a long time-when everybody else is always having fun. If I could only sleep for forty days.’＂

- Gretchen, Gretchen’s Forty Winks, by F. Scott Fitzgerald, (1924)

Gretchen’s Forty Winks (1924) is a short story that was originally published in The Saturday Evening Post. The story is regarded as one of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s many works loosely based on his marriage to Zelda, a union which moved quickly from infatuation to dysfunction. Protagonist Roger must keep his wife, Gretchen, from being bored while working to establish an advertising agency. Gretchen’s restlessness, akin to Zelda’s in her marriage to Fitzgerald, is the conflict which Roger must resolve. This classic is for those intrigued by the early works of Fitzgerald and fiction of the early twentieth century.