"F. Scott Fitzgerald’s stories to be reissued with sex, drugs, and dirty words put back in"

Raw Story: “Before these stories were bowdlerised, they contained antisemitic slurs, sexual innuendo, instances of drug use and drunkenness. They also contained profanity and mild blasphemy. The texts were scrubbed clean at the Post,” West told The Guardian.

In “The Hotel Child,” for example, a reference to a character “surreptitiously feeding a hasheesh tablet to the Pekingese” was excised from the Post version, and profanity like “Get the Hell out of here!” and the antisemitic slur “Sheeny” were scrubbed from the text. The effect, West said, is that “the decadence of several of the characters is revealed more clearly because of their alcoholism, drug use, and prejudice.”

“More generally, in all of the stories, the characters use the profanity, mild blasphemies, and slang words that Fitzgerald wanted them to use. They speak like real people,” West continued. “One of the commonplaces of Fitzgerald criticism, for decades, has been that he avoided unpleasant topics and realistic language in his magazine fiction. We can see now that this was not altogether his choice.”