May Day

May Day is a novella written by F. Scott Fitzgerald and first published in 1920.

Set in the years following World War I, during the May Day riots of 1919, the story follows the lives of various characters from different social classes in New York City.

The main story focuses on a Yale graduate named Gordon Sterrett, who lives a life of constant disillusionment, hardship, and poverty.
After getting into trouble, Gordon asks his friend Philip Dean, who has no trouble living and is very wealthy, for help. The problem explodes when Gordon realizes that his friend is very selfish and lives in an environment completely opposite to his own, leading to a series of tragic events.

The novella shows us in parallel the wonderful and luxurious life of the rich, in contrast to the chaos and situations of poverty and misery that reign in the streets of the workers and veterans protesting for a better deal.

In this way, Fitzgerald paints a bleak picture of American society at the time, highlighting the divisions between social classes and the disillusionment that reigned in the post-war period and affected many lives. With May Day, Fitzgerald underscores his social criticism and inequality and explores the darker side of the Jazz Age, themes he would continue to explore in his later works.

"At nine o'clock on the morning of the first of May, 1919, a young man spoke to the room clerk at the Biltmore Hotel, asking if Mr. Philip Dean were registered there, and if so, could he be connected with Mr. Dean's rooms. The inquirer was dressed in a well-cut, shabby suit. He was small, slender, and darkly handsome; his eyes were framed above with unusually long eyelashes and below with the blue semicircle of ill health, this latter effect heightened by an unnatural glow which colored his face like a low, incessant fever."